January 4, 2026
Every startup goes through that exciting moment: the MVP is live, the first customers arrive, validation finally happens. The idea works. The product solves a real problem. It's tempting to accelerate at this point, add features, acquire more customers and grow fast. But this is where the danger lies.
The mistake is simple: startups validate the idea, acquire customers, and start adding features on top of that shaky foundation. A year or two later, the result is predictable: software full of technical problems, recurring bugs, and a codebase where any change breaks three different things.
At the start of your project, your idea hasn't been validated. In your head it makes perfect sense, but until real customers use and pay for the product, it's just a hypothesis.
The MVP concept exists to test this with minimal investment. At this stage it doesn't make sense to spend time on scalable architecture, performance optimization, or design patterns. The goal is to build the simplest version that works.
There's nothing wrong with taking technical shortcuts. Technical quality is deliberately sacrificed for validation speed. And that's correct — as long as you understand this structure has an expiration date.
The problem starts when you validate the idea and immediately start adding features on top of that MVP. Customers request improvements, competition arrives, there's pressure to grow. Each new feature seems to make sense.
But you can't build quality software on top of a hastily built structure. You don't put up a 20-story building on a single-family home foundation. At some point it collapses — constant bugs, slow system, inability to implement new things, or worse, incidents that affect all customers.
The solution is counterintuitive but necessary: define your MVP's lifecycle and death criteria from the start. Establish clear validation metrics — for example: six months to acquire one hundred paying customers or reach $10k in monthly recurring revenue.
When that deadline hits (or those metrics are reached), stop everything. Review. Did you validate? Hit the metrics? Customers satisfied and paying? If yes, you have a viable product. Now it's time to rebuild it properly.
Rewrite with proper architecture, automated tests, clean code, and scalability in mind. Rewriting software that's six months old is relatively simple — the team remembers the decisions, the scope is limited, you can manage existing customers during the transition.
If you keep piling features onto the original MVP, in two or three years you'll have an enormous and complex system. Refactoring or rewriting will take months, with bugs appearing at every change and customers being impacted the whole time.
The sooner you fix the foundations, the lower the cost and risk. Kill your MVP as soon as it fulfills its mission. Celebrate what you learned, thank your first customers, and replace it with something built to last.
Successful startups aren't the ones that never make technical mistakes — they're the ones that recognize mistakes in time to fix them before they become irreversible problems. Your MVP was built to die. Let it happen.
#work