How small should the first version of your product be?

Every product idea grows in the telling. A conversation with a possible customer adds a feature, a competitor's website adds three more, and before long the first version is a year away. Meanwhile, nobody has used it.

The first version's job isn't to be complete. It's to get real people using the product as early as possible, so their behaviour, not guesswork, decides what comes next.

Start with one painful problem

Write down the single problem your product solves, in the words a customer would use. If you need a paragraph to explain it, it's probably two or three problems. Pick the one people complain about most, and build for that.

Do the job end to end, even if it's basic

A small product that takes a customer all the way from start to finish beats a large one with gaps in the middle. Someone should be able to sign up, do the one thing that matters, and get the result they came for, even if the screens are plain.

What can usually wait

• Detailed reports and dashboards. Early on, you can pull figures for the few customers you have by hand.
• Lots of settings. Make sensible choices for people and add options when they ask.
• Integrations with every tool. Start with the one or two your first customers already use.
• A mobile app, if a well-built website works on phones.

What shouldn't wait

Some things are cheap to get right early and expensive to fix later: keeping each customer's data separate and secure, a clean way for people to pay, and enough monitoring to know when something breaks. These are the foundations the rest of the product sits on.

Let early customers shape the roadmap

Once people are using it, watch what they do, not just what they say. The features they keep asking for, and the places they get stuck, will tell you what version two should be.

If you have an idea and want help deciding what the smallest worthwhile version looks like, that's exactly the conversation we like to have at the start.