If It Takes More than a Month to Build it's not MVP | Y Combinator Partner Michael Seibel

one of the things that YC says all the time is talk to your users and like I've got to say every time my company hasn't done well I stopped talking to my users and I stopped being a user and every time my company did do well I talked to my users and I was a user so um you know when we decided to do social Cam and Justin TV um I'm sorry social Cam and twitch the twitch idea happened because there was a small community of people playing video games on Justin TV and EMT my

co-founder really liked that content and thought that The Gaming Community wasn't being served by good video and kind of thought that YouTube while it had great video content didn't have great Community back and forth conversation so on so forth so we kind of took that idea and ran with it um on the other side we had a live streaming um we had a live streaming app for Justin TV and as we met measured how people were using it we realized that they were only taking like 30 second Clips which it would be impossible for anyone

to watch those live and so we started digging into those stats and realizing okay well if everyone's using this to take video clips why do we have a live product got like eight things in my pocket now um and so yeah so both of those new ideas came from directly from user feedback now turn terms of user testing and so on so forth like I like to split up product into like two basic ideas like one is like MVP and the second is iteration I think for MVP everything is kind of gut um and I

think people spend far too long getting their product comfortable to release um and it's weird because it's a problem that I see a why combinator constantly where basically what will happen is that like we can't do anything like anyone here is trying to give you advice can't really help you if you haven't launched the best advice they can give you is launch because whatever you launch is going to suck there's nothing that has ever been launched that didn't suck day one now sometimes it's used right I'm not saying that there's nothing that's ever been launched

that has been used from day one but universally if you were to ask the person who built it is this the like expression of my mind's eye they would say no like absolutely not and even like if you think of products that people universally um like Acclaim like do you remember the V1 iPhone like it was great in a lot of ways but no 3G no app store kind of janky looking cover kind of heavy like I don't think Steve Jobs would have said this is the realization of my vision for iPhone I think he

would have said this is step one this is what we can get out there and it's better than everything else but it's not what I want it to be so far too often basically people spend all this time lead up to launch afraid to launch afraid to launch afraid to launch and when they're in programs like this or in y combinator the result is they can't be getting the advice that you need post launch how do you iterate your product how do you listen to your users how do you talk to your users because pre-launch

you don't have any users so you know I'm kind of going through my checklist of what is important for a startup you know my first set of items is always legal like if you don't set up your startup legally correctly you're just asking for pain like serious pain so that's like Delaware C Corp simple um is everyone Incorporated yeah be and and everyone incorporated as a C Corp and everyone in Delaware okay you should fix that like it's so much easier to fix right now every minute you wait it becomes harder to fix um I've

raised money from probably let's say a 100 investors if I wasn't to Delaware SE Cup none of them would have given me any money so and I'm sure you wanted some of my investors maybe not all of them but like a couple Ashton Kutcher invested you might want Ashton Kutcher as an investor you're not delare C carb is not going to invest so um just change that um you can use clerky have you guys ever heard of clerky cler is like super easy in corporation so so forth okay so I won't I won't BL that

point more first step is legal second step is team like if you're building your product based on outsourc development you also will not be able to raise money from good investors period so if you can't if you are either not an engineer won't do the work to become an engineer or can't recruit an engineer like I would would say stop walking the path because if 99% of startups are going to fail you're putting another 99% failure in front by having a bad team so now for you to succeed it's 99 time 99 that's a lot

harder so and also I think it's a good test like one of the things my dad always said was like the original founder of Justin TV Justin KH like there were many things he was good at but the number one thing he was good at was a he was a good recruiter somehow he convinced four people who were pretty smart to quit whatever they were doing and help make a reality TV show right which is a dumb idea right so it's like if you can't operate on that level right if you can't recruit your friends

to do whatever your dumb idea is Right can't be dumber than online reality TV show then like how serious are you about it like how likelihood How likely is it to be successful and I think that's something that like people don't talk about enough like for me failure always motivated me like fear of failure always motivated me and so I liked to know how hard this was it also made me feel like if I did it I really accomplished something it wasn't just like oh you graduated from high school great everyone does that like it

was a real accomplishment so that second piece is team first piece legal second piece team third piece is MVP and like the way I like to think about MVP is that if it takes more than a month to build if it requires a significant Business Development deal if it requires if if it takes more than a month to do it's probably not MVP