“I built Product Hunt's first MVP in 20 minutes using Linkydink, an email list, and a tweet. The goal wasn't a product, it was to learn whether people wanted to share and discover products together. Start with the smallest experiment that tests your riskiest assumption, even if it's just a Typeform, a landing page, or a manually-run email.”

“Build the version that lets a single user run one sample in a browser IDE and see the result in five seconds. At Browserbase, that try-on moment mattered more than any landing page feature list.”

“The smallest useful version of CloudAEye was our MVP trial: one agent that read Jenkins test failures and told a developer which commit likely broke the build. It had no pretty UI, no multi-tenant scale, just a Python pipeline hooked to a few open-source repos. That taught us the real problem was not generating explanations, it was getting engineers to trust the explanation enough to stop rerunning the test manually.”

“Build the version that lets one real person create one short thing and show it to someone else. With Camino, I thought the full course builder was the product, but watching people use Quick Bites taught me where the actual pull was.”

“Build the messiest thing that gets one real user to do one real thing, because my fourth startup taught me that seven days of feedback from a broken product taught me more than seven months of polishing ever did.”

“For The Aspire Project, the smallest useful version was a single AI investment simulator with £100k paper capital and one lesson. We learned within days whether students actually cared about risk, not just returns, because they had to write an investment thesis before every trade.”

“Build the smallest thing that proves one risk you are actually scared of wrong. For Pulse, that meant a six-week AI product with paying customers, not a polished platform.”

“Build the smallest version around one customer change you can observe directly, not a metric you can only read at scale. At Slack, early products taught us most when we watched a single team adopt, struggle, or light up; the rest was noise until we had enough usage to matter.”

“Build the version that tests the riskiest assumption, not the one that demos best. At Glean, our admin copilot only proved itself once we scoped the smallest RAG flow that could resolve one real permissions ticket end to end; everything before that was noise.”