When should you call an MVP done?

So I recently was published on the Go Code Colorado blog. If you don’t know what Go Code Colorado is, it is an annual contest to see what teams can build with Colorado government data. More here, including this year’s kickoff announcement.

Last year I was lucky enough to be a mentor. Based on that experience, and my own, I recently wrote a post discussing how an MVP is almost always embarrassing. I’ve encountered that a few times, but it’s a lesson worth repeating. Here’s an excerpt from the post:

But wait, aren’t customers expecting a polished application? Some may. Early adopters who are looking to have a problem solved often can look past the rough edges and see the potential. It also depends on the domain and the competition. For instance, if you are starting an Instagram competitor aimed at consumers, the quality bar will be pretty high. If you are building a scheduling tool for tattoo parlors and your main competition is a spreadsheet, a web application built with any modern framework will likely wow your potential customers. It’s also important to show your customers that the application is continuing to improve–that will make them more forgiving of the inevitable issues.

If you are interested in working on a team to build an application to help expose Colorado’s data, there’s still time to register.

And if you want to read more of my thoughts on MVPs, here’s a link to the full post.