Common Mistakes When Building an MVP

Most MVPs don't fail because the idea was bad. They fail because the process around building them went wrong before the first user ever saw the product. The mistakes tend to repeat across founders, industries, and years, which means they're worth naming directly.

Treating the MVP as a small version of the final product

This is the mistake that causes most of the others. Founders start with "minimum viable product" in mind and end up building a first release with a proper onboarding flow, a settings page, notification preferences, and a design system. None of that is wrong for a real product. It's wrong for a version whose only job is to test whether people want the thing at all.

An MVP should feel a little uncomfortable in how bare it is. If it doesn't, scope probably crept.

Skipping validation before writing code

It's tempting to jump straight to building because building feels like progress. Talking to potential users, running a landing page test, or posting in a relevant community feels slow by comparison. But writing code to test an assumption you could have tested with a conversation or a simple ad campaign is the most expensive way to find out you were wrong.

Validate cheaply first. Build only once you have some signal that the assumption is worth testing with a real product.

Building for scale you don't have yet

Founders sometimes architect their MVP for ten thousand users when they don't have ten yet. That means choosing complex infrastructure, adding caching layers, and worrying about edge cases that only matter at scale. All of that is time and money spent on a problem you don't have, at the cost of solving the one you do: does anyone want this?

Build for the users you're about to test with, not the users you hope to have in a year.

Picking the wrong platform for the job

A surprising number of MVPs choose a native mobile app when a simpler platform would have answered the same question faster. App store review alone can add days or weeks before a single user sees the product, and getting someone to download and install a new app is a real barrier compared to sending them a link.

For products involving any kind of interaction, messaging, bookings, notifications, a Telegram bot or Mini App often gets a working version in front of real users much faster than a native app would, without sacrificing what the test actually needs to prove.

Ignoring early user behavior in favor of opinions

Once the MVP is live, some founders keep asking people what they think instead of watching what they do. Opinions are cheap and often kind. Behavior doesn't lie the same way. If people say they love it but don't come back, that's the real signal, and it usually points to a different problem than the one you were expecting.

Losing the original idea in translation

This one is less talked about but shows up constantly on larger teams: the founder explains the idea, a project manager writes a spec, a designer interprets the spec, and a developer builds from the designer's file. By the time the MVP ships, small decisions made at each handoff have quietly shifted what actually got built.

Working directly with the person building the product removes that chain entirely. At SolaLab, there's no handoff between a designer and a developer and no project manager translating in between, because it's one person doing the work end to end. When something in the idea needs to change mid-build, it changes immediately, instead of going through three people and a revised spec first.

Not setting a deadline

MVPs expand to fill however much time they're given. Without a firm deadline, "just one more feature" turns into weeks of delay, and the whole point of testing quickly gets lost. Set a date that feels a bit too tight, and protect it.

Building alone in a vacuum

The final mistake is disappearing to build for weeks or months without showing anyone the work in progress. Sharing an early, unfinished version with a handful of real potential users, even something rough, tells you far more than any internal review ever will.

If you're about to start building and want a second opinion on whether your scope is actually minimal, send over what you're planning to build and get a straight read on what to cut before you spend a dollar on it.

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