There is a specific delusion that hits every first-time founder. You have an idea in the shower.
It feels brilliant.
You rush to your laptop and start building. You spend six months writing code and designing the perfect logo. You launch on Product Hunt with high hopes.
And then nothing happens.
Silence is the loudest sound in the startup world.
The problem is usually that you thought you were building a Minimum Viable Product, or MVP. But you were actually building a product no one wants.
The line between these two things is terrifyingly thin. Understanding the difference is the only way to save your company from becoming a zombie - walking and talking but dead on the inside.
The MVP Myth
Most people get the definition of an MVP completely wrong. They think it means building a cheaper, crappier version of their final vision. They build a car with three wheels and no engine and try to sell it.
That is not an MVP. That is just a bad product.
A true MVP is not about the product at all. It is about the learning. It is the smallest thing you can build to prove that people actually have the problem you are trying to solve.
Sometimes an MVP is not even code. It might be a spreadsheet. It might be a WhatsApp group. It might be a landing page with a "Buy Now" button that leads to an error message just to see if anyone clicks it.
If you are building features because you think "the user might need this eventually," you are not building an MVP. You are procrastinating.
The Trap of the Zombie Product
The "Product No One Wants" usually looks much better than an MVP. It is polished. It has a beautiful interface. It has dark mode. It has five different login options.
The founder feels great because the product works perfectly. There are no bugs.
But there is a fatal flaw. It solves a problem that nobody cares about.
We call this the Field of Dreams fallacy. You believe that if you build it, they will come. You focus entirely on engineering and zero percent on User Acquisition.
You assume that once the product is live, users will magically appear. When they don't, you assume it is because the product lacks features. So you build more features. You dig the hole deeper.
The Silence Test
So how do you tell the difference? You have to look at how people react during Beta Testing.
If you launch an MVP and people complain, that is actually good news.
If they say "this is ugly" or "why is this button broken" or "I wish it did X," they are giving you a gift. It means they care enough about the problem to get annoyed by your solution. They are engaged.
If you launch a product and you get zero complaints, you are in trouble.
Silence means apathy. It means they logged in, looked around, shrugged, and left. They didn't encounter a bug because they didn't try to use it.
A buggy MVP that people use is infinitely valuable. A perfect product that people ignore is worthless.
Validation Over Creation
The goal of the early stage is not to build a scalable platform. It is to find Product-Market Fit (PMF).
PMF does not mean you have a lot of users. It means you have users who are screaming for your product. It means the market is pulling the product out of you faster than you can build it.
To get there, you need to stop acting like an architect and start acting like a scientist.
An architect falls in love with the blueprint. A scientist creates a hypothesis and tries to disprove it.
Your hypothesis is "People will pay for X." Your MVP is the experiment to test that.
If the experiment fails, you don't build more. You change the hypothesis.
How to Stop Building the Wrong Thing
If you are currently six months into a build and haven't shown it to a customer, stop.
Cut 50 percent of the features. Then cut another 50 percent.
Identify the one specific pain point you are solving. Build the button that solves that pain. Nothing else.
Then go out and try to get ten people to use it. Do not use ads. Do User Acquisition by hand. Email people. DM them. Call them.
If you can't convince ten people to try your solution for free, writing more code will not solve the problem.
The difference between an MVP and a product no one wants is simple. An MVP is a tool for asking a question. A product no one wants is the answer to a question nobody asked.
