100% agree with that, but the common thing to see online is: just ship it fast, do not wait on small details like design / ux / branding which is in my opinion wrong.

Selling a product is like everything: storytelling, centered on the user. Except this user maybe lived this story X times, making them more difficult to convince.

Love your analogy with the coffee shop, I agree with you, my point really is: the bar is so much higher than before now for “MVPs”

It should LOOK but also FEEL great, there is nothing worst than a broken experience :)

The onboarding must be nailed straight of the bat

This is exactly how I see creating new product, you said it perfectly!

Building solid base and system that allows to ship simple features with a future proof UX

True, what about starting a product in a niche with existing players? How would an MVP makes sense while others offer most likely way more features?

The only way is to have something better, this comes from a really well though UX / features

100% agreed, from my saas https://breeew.com I coded everything using NextJS/Tailwind and based on shadcn.

I was able to go super super fast with a really good UX / UI

That’s a very good exemple and thanks for pointing out OpenAI’s exemple.

Let’s say you would like now to create something like openAI (which is a massive undertaking of course).

The level in this field of UX and user expectation is so high, that people would dismiss your offering until your reach a given level.

This is kind of my point, if you’re trying to do a SaaS, there is an expectation from the users, even if not told directly.

Totally agree! MVP should be about one thing, but one feature can be a massive undertaking itself.

Minimum viable product, but to me an MVP must be a product that solve a problem well enough to validate a first hypothesis.

But not all problems are made equal, let’s take Uber: what was their MVP like then?

Now, create a competitor of Uber now: What needs to be done to be called a MVP?

Efforts aren’t the same than before, this is my point and something that I’m feeling when building my SaaS, users are expecting a lot even in the early days.

MVP are often associated with something that just work “enough” to validate your idea, the thing is, most people in their subconscious are used to a given polished experience and you can quickly lose a lot of people if done wrong

It like a wrong note in a song, you can feel it