I get pitched a lot of good ideas, daily. Before an entrepreneur sits across the table from me they’ve done a ton of planning, a bunch of research and have undoubtedly spent hours dreaming about how their soon-to-be-application is going to look and feel. And without fail, every entrepreneur has an incredible list of features that they want to build and incorporate in the product from Day 1.

As a result, I often find that the core of the product I’m being asked to build is hidden many layers underneath user acquisition features, gamification features, and “features investors will like.” This is the biggest mistake we see with an entrepreneur’s idea of an MVP - they try to conquer the world right away.

Over-featuring an MVP is definitely something to avoid, and here are a few reasons why:

1. Features detract from users attention. An application has precious few seconds of user stay-time to convince them to get engaged. Having too many things going on simply shows users that your application is complicated… And who wants to use a complicated app?!
2. With so many features, it’s very difficult to tell what works, and to what degree it’s working. The worst case scenario for a feature-full MVP is that users like each feature a little bit and you’re left without a clear direction to take your product.
3. Users are opinionated and their opinions are valuable. Having a barrage of features limits your ability to crowd-source what users actually want - you’ll never get a feature 100% right for every user in the planning phase.

In an MVP, you want to focus on doing one thing really well. Then see if that one thing is valuable or interesting to your target audience. Then iterate and move on.

A good MVP is the direct line between a problem and it’s most simple solution.