User ResearchvsMinimum Viable Product (MVP)

User Research is the systematic investigation of your target audience's behaviors, needs, and motivations. It exists to invalidate your assumptions before you spend expensive engineering hours building a product nobody actually wants. True research focuses on what users *do*, not what they *say* they will do.

An MVP is the smallest version of your product that delivers real value to early users and generates validated learning. The goal isn't a 'crappy first version' — it's the fastest path to proving whether customers will pay for your solution. 74% of startups fail because they build something nobody wants.

The most dangerous trap is asking leading, hypothetical questions like 'Would you pay $10/month for this feature?' Humans are terrible at predicting their future behavior and want to please the interviewer. They will say 'yes' to your face and then never open their wallets when the product launches.

The trap is building too much. Founders spend 6-12 months building a 'complete' product before showing it to a single customer. By then, they've burned through runway and assumptions. Dropbox's MVP was a 3-minute demo video — it validated demand before writing a single line of code.

Conduct 'Jobs-to-be-Done' interviews focused entirely on the past. Instead of asking what they want you to build, ask: 'Walk me step-by-step through the last time you tried to solve this problem. What exactly did you do? What tool did you use? How much time did it take?' Pain lives in the past, not the future.

Define the ONE core problem you solve. Build only the features needed to test if users will pay for that solution. Launch within 4-6 weeks. Your MVP should be embarrassingly simple — if you're not embarrassed by v1, you launched too late.