Pay for quality now or for bugs later?

When you start a new MVP software project, you have to make an important tradeoff. Do you want to create something cheap and riddled with bugs, or do you want to create a quality product?

The short answer is: avoid bugs as much as you can.

Bad quality yields bugs, frustration, missed deadlines, waste of time, and consumer dissatisfaction.

An MVP doesn’t mean bad quality is OK. The main purpose of an MVP is to test your idea with the least investment possible, you are in fact playing on two parameters:

• The number of features you build.
• How complex each feature is.

When you are clear on how a feature should look like, then build it right, don’t compromise on quality. Also, don’t over engineer it.

Think about your end user, do you want him to miss an opportunity to test and try a feature just because you built it cheaply, and introduced bugs in it.

Your users don’t have time to deal with bugs, and might even think that this particular feature is either broken or not yet implemented.

Imagine your MVP as a restaurant with a very small menu, when a customer tastes one meal he is amazed, and will want to eat more and more, he will even invite friends to join this great experience. This is exactly what a quality MVP does to your startup, it drives success, and good feedback.

Now imagine another restaurant with a lengthy menu, and when the customer tastes a meal he is disgusted with how bad it tastes. He will surely run for his life and warn others not to go to that bad restaurant. That’s how a bad quality and cheap MVP is detrimental to your startup. It brings disappointment for you and more importantly for your target user base.

Key take aways for building a great MVP:

• Don’t compromise on quality, aim for it.
• Play on the number of features, and on what each feature should deliver.
• Don’t over engineer features, keep things as simple as possible.
• Think about your end users, don’t treat them badly by making them suffer from a bad user experience.