Redefining MVPs: Why Most Startups Build Too Much, Too Soon

Building products in a venture studio environment is a different beast compared to traditional product development. The speed, the resource constraints, and the extreme focus on validation force us to rethink what "product" truly means. Over time, my perspective on product-building has fundamentally shifted. What I once considered "MVP" is often too polished. What I once thought was necessary often isn't.

In the traditional world of agencies and SaaS, product teams build based on the assumption that they need to have a functional, usable, and sometimes even beautiful MVP before testing the market. But working in a venture studio, I’ve learned that this approach is backward. Most of us build too much, too soon.

Here’s what I’ve learned from working in a venture studio, and why most of us need to rethink our approach to early-stage product development.

The Reality of MVPs in Venture Studios

When people talk about MVPs, they usually mean a functional but lightweight version of a product. But even the "lightweight" versions we see in agencies and SaaS are often overbuilt. At a venture studio, where early-stage startups are racing against time and limited funds, that’s a luxury we can’t afford.

Instead of building an MVP, we often start with a proof of concept (PoC). It’s messy, it’s manual, and it’s not always pretty, but it helps us get to testing these concepts with early customers as quickly as possible.

One approach is to deliver the PoC as a "Service-as-SaaS" model, where the founder manually delivers the product as a service while using simple tech, which is the foundational product, to deliver that service. This allows the founders to test what users will pay for, refine the service offering, and use the early product behind the scenes without worrying about a polished interface that’s client-facing. During this process, it also allows the founder and studio to refine the baseline product based on the experience of the founder executing that service, which will eventually become a fully automated solution.

Take, for example, a climate grant-writing startup we helped launch. Writing grants is a painful, slow process, and hiring a grant writer can cost upwards of $20K. Instead of immediately building a full AI-driven grant-writing platform, the Founder acted as the "software" themselves.

• They pitched businesses on a faster, cheaper way to get grants written.
• Instead of client-facing software doing the work, they completed the grants using their grant writing tool and manually edited the output when necessary.
• They refined the tool over time based on real-world feedback, improving outputs by feeding the final edited grant back into the model and making incremental improvements.

What happened?

• They signed early contracts. These contracts were the traction they needed to raise funding.
• They validated the problem and execution of the solution before diving fully into a polished customer-facing UI.
• They refined the product iteratively, using real use cases and product outputs instead of assumptions.

Instead of spending months and tens of thousands of dollars building something they weren’t sure would work, they quickly validated the market need and secured funding to build the right thing.

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Expectation Management: The Key to Product Success

One of the biggest challenges in product-building (especially in early-stage startups) is expectation management. Many founders come in envisioning a highly functional, polished product in four to six months. But the reality is, they don’t need a full product at all, they need validation and traction.

In our venture studio, we’ve found that knowing when to separate tech development from future-state or "roadmapped design" is an important step. In the beginning stages, all of the teams run together and then, at a certain point, they split. This is not to say that these teams are not still highly collaborative and informed by each other, but it's important to define future-state levels of design fidelity from a working PoC.

• The initial tech focus is on core functionality. No branding, no unnecessary UI elements, just a rudimentary system that gets the core job done.
• Design runs in parallel, working on a future-state roadmap. This way, when funding comes in, startups already have a clear vision of their next steps.

This approach forces us to keep things simple. Instead of trying to create an experience that looks and feels like a final product, we focus on one single thing: validating the market opportunity and proving the solution works.

Too often, startups spend months trying to perfect a product before they’ve even proven demand. This leads to wasted time, blown-out development timelines, and unnecessary complexity. The reality is, most products should be ugly, unpolished, and even partially manual in the beginning. The only goal at this stage is to prove there’s a problem worth solving and that someone is willing to pay for a solution.

The Role of Design: More Than Just Making Things Pretty

Too often, design is seen as the final step - the polish that makes a product "look good." But real product designers understand that design starts long before Figma. Design isn’t about making something look beautiful; it’s about defining workflows, simplifying processes, and aligning product strategy with business goals.

I encourage designers to think like product strategists first and visual designers second. The real magic happens when you focus on uncovering the core user problem and validating solutions before a single pixel is pushed.

Here’s what design actually looks like in a venture studio:

1. Mapping workflows: Instead of jumping straight into design, we work on system flows - understanding how the product should function before anything else.
2. Product Strategy: Working with tech to guide what that core functionality should be to solve user pain points.
3. Building prototypes to test workflows, not aesthetics: The goal isn’t a sleek prototype, it’s to validate whether people understand and engage with the core functionality.
4. Creating a future-state design roadmap: Instead of making the first iteration look polished, we focus on where the product needs to go once funding is secured and then the product team can work with development to brainstorm how to scale back for the base-application from there.

In this process, the first version of the product is often internal-facing only. It’s a barebones system that only the founder and early customers interact with, while the "customer experience" is facilitated by human interaction rather than software.

This means that by the time funding arrives, we already have a well-defined product strategy, allowing startups to build efficiently and correctly, rather than guessing what they need.

Final Thoughts: Build Less, Validate More

If there’s one takeaway from my venture studio experience, it’s this: startups don’t need perfect products, they need proof that their idea works.

By focusing on problem validation, expectation management, and lean product development, we help founders build successful companies without wasting time on unnecessary features.

So the next time you're building an MVP, ask yourself: Am I doing too much? Because in most cases, the answer is yes.

A New Framework for MVPs in Venture Studios

1. Start with problem validation: Interview real users. Validate demand before building anything.
2. Test with your “Baseline” Tech: Find a way to deliver the service with baseline rudimentary tech that’s internal-facing, including some manual processes to refine and learn quickly.
3. Build a proof of concept, not an MVP: Create a functional but internal-facing version that allows for manual service delivery.
4. Separate tech from design: Build basic tech to enable service delivery first. Design for the future in parallel.
5. Launch when you have traction: Once you have contracts, LOIs, or early revenue, then fundraise and build a full product.

I understand that this example may not work in every single case, but finding ways to balance automation with manual processes in the early days is important in order to be able learn quickly. If you can do these five things, you’ll save time, avoid wasted resources, and, most importantly, build something people actually want.

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