as minimum viable product, is a very common concept within the startup world. A minimum viable product is essentially the simplest version of a product representing an idea. Typically it’s used whenever you have a startup idea and want to prove your idea and how it works without spending too much time building a full-fledged product.
With the release of coding agents, building effective MVPs has become a lot simpler since you can write code a lot faster than you could previously. However, there are still a lot of things to think about when building an MVP, such as which providers you should use, what the actual requirements of your product are, and so on. In this article, I’ll discuss how to build an effective MVP and the mistakes you should avoid when building it.
Why build an MVP
The main reason you want to build an MVP is that building a fully specced out product takes too much time. In the beginning phases of an idea, you don’t have time to produce entire products. Instead, you want to build a minimum product to verify if there is demand. And once you verify demand, you can spend more time building up your product.
This allows you to test several ideas without spending too much time on a single idea. Furthermore, it helps you avoid spending too much time on a single idea before you verify any demand for it. A common mistake a lot of startups make is to work a lot on what they think is a good idea. And after a long while, after talking to potential customers, they learned that there isn’t really that much demand for the product. They’ve then spent a lot of time working on this product, which doesn’t really have a demand, which is something you really want to avoid.
How to build an MVP
Now it’s time to start building the MVP. The first thing you should do is to build out the full spec of every feature that you need. It’s very important that you keep this to the minimum amount of features needed. Try to avoid features that are typically nice to have or essentially only create features that are must-have features to show off your product.
My high-level overview, plan for building an MVP is as follows:
- Create a spec for every feature and requirement that you have.
- Given the initial spec, make Claude Code or another coding agent build out the spec, which will be your MVP.
- Iterate. The iteration process consists of testing it yourself, of course, making sure everything works as expected, but also testing with potential customers to ensure that this is actually an MVP.
I simply start MVP building by writing out the spec. I write out everything I need to do, typically generated by discussing with Claude Code, researching online, discussing with potential customers or colleagues, and so on.
I think in this step of the process, it’s incredibly important to talk with others. You don’t want to hide your idea; your idea should be discussed with others, and you should try to get as much feedback on it as possible.
Secondly, you simply provide the spec to Claude Code and have it build an initial version. This is probably the simplest step of the process, as the coding agents have become so powerful in the last few months that they are, in many cases, able to perform one-shot implementations. If you want to learn more about how to implement one-shot solutions with Claude Code, you can read my article on the topic.
The last step of my MVP building process is iteration, which is, in many cases, the most time-consuming step. In this step, you both test your product that Claude Code built, and you then discuss it with others, preferably potential customers, to see if this MVP is actually creating value.
I think in a lot of cases, the definition of an MVP is undervalued. Many regard an MVP as simply a version of our product, but it’s very important to remember that the MVP needs to actually provide value to potential customers. It’s not enough that it represents the idea of value; it needs to actually create value in itself.
Mistakes to avoid when building an MVP
In this section, I’ll discuss some common mistakes you should avoid when building an MVP. These are mistakes that I’ve discussed with others who have made them and that I’ve also made myself. In general, they are very common mistakes to make, and even though you are aware of them, you will likely make the same mistakes yourself. I thus urge you to read the bottom, understand why they happen, and remind yourself of these mistakes to prevent them from happening in the future.
Scope creep
A very common mistake here is scope creep. You realize you want more and more features that are in the middle ground between nice to have and must have. You then end up building more and more features, making your app more and more complex.
Building the features the first time isn’t really an issue. Coding agents like Claude Code can do this quite quickly for you. However, the added complexity can cause different challenges in the future, such as:
- It will be more time-consuming to add additional features because of the added complexity in the codebase.
- More code to maintain and ensure that it works. You now need to test a lot more code. Testing typically is a very time-consuming process because you have to do it yourself and it’s not always that easy to have a coding agent test it for you.
Thus, the cost of building a feature is not only the initial cost of building out the feature. It’s also the cost of complexity the feature adds, and the maintenance cost of the feature. Note that this knowledge is simply general software engineering knowledge and doesn’t only apply to building minimum viable products. However, I think it’s incredibly important to keep in mind whenever you build minimum viable products.
Not getting feedback
I think another very common mistake a lot of people make when building MVPs is not getting enough feedback. Claude Code is incredibly good at creating products given a very explicit prompt or spec document. This is an area where coding agents thrive because they’re given a specific task, are incredibly good coders, and know how to take an idea and turn it into code.
However, what coding engines are not that good at is gathering feedback, understanding exactly what it needs to build, or, in general, tasks that aren’t very specific. Very open-ended tasks that have a lot of different solutions often require a human touch to get good results.
Thus, I urge you, once you build an MVP with Claude Code, to try to get as much feedback as possible and iterate on it. The incredible part of Coding Agents is that iterating on your product is very easy, right? You simply take the feedback, feed it into the coding model, and have it generate new code, updating the product based on the feedback.
The iteration speed you can achieve with coding agents nowadays is one of the reasons it’s so simple to build MVPs and why you can achieve building really good and valuable MVPs without too much work, at least compared to 5-10 years ago.
Conclusion
In this article, I discussed how to effectively build a minimum viable product with Claude Code. I discussed my approach to building MVPs with coding agents such as Claude Code, and I then moved on to discussing common mistakes that are made when building MVPs, such as scope creep and not getting enough feedback. These are critical mistakes that you can avoid when building your next MVP simply by reminding yourself not to make these mistakes and seeing how a lot of other engineers have made those same mistakes. I believe that building MVPs has become a lot simpler with the release of clothing agents, which opens up the door for a lot of very valuable products being built, as you can more easily present the potential value of a product idea.
👉 My free eBook and Webinar:
🚀 10x Your Engineering with LLMs (Free 3-Day Email Course)
📚 Get my free Vision Language Models ebook
💻 My webinar on Vision Language Models
👉 Find me on socials:
💌 Substack
