Ask HN: On a scale from 1-10, how ugly was your MVP?

Judge for yourself:

http://web.archive.org/web/20071115235344/http://www.s3stat....

I'd call that a solid 1.

- 99designs logo

- $10 template

- Handmade graphics (from screenshots of Webalizer, no less)

The product itself was literally Webalizer reports, along with some quick and dirty forms to input enough information so that we could generate those reports (running directly on the webserver, of course), and a list view to link back to them.

Note the $1/month pricing, and no mechanism to actually charge credit cards to collect said dollar.

But a lot of people signed up, and some of them are still around 13 years later.

I saved the screenshots https://histre.com/blog/history/ ;)

I'm about to release something I've been working on as an MVP.

Backend currently is a 6 and frontend is a 2. A lot of what it does revolves around automated analysis and various optimization problems, so the backend is minimal but it has plenty of validation and testing (integration testing and fuzz testing)

Frontend is very basic at this stage since I don't want to bother with CSS at this time (I'm the only person who mechanically knows how things work at this stage, do I'm trying to leave styling and polishing to somebody else on the team).

Will probably take a landing page approach and have a sign up for some sort of private beta

Arguably a MVP for a new product or service could just be a sign up / payment page for a non existent offering. If not enough people try to sign up there's no point building anything.

Would this be 0 or -5 on the scale?

0 - We didn't have one. Just a landing page. Signed our first 50 clients with just a fancy powerpoint and door to door sales. It was a double sided marketplace so then had to bring those 50 clients to persuade our first "supplier" on the other side to integrate.

We lost a most of these initial clients before we could actually build what we wanted to. But then once complete a lot of them came back. In this phase id rate our MVP as a 7. We already had enough feedback to build something quite useful.

Just a landing page, made in ~30 minutes - https://codelines.dev

I'd call it 0 because it isn't even available yet.

It's hella simple but it works. It actually works great. People understand what we're building right away and are signing up, giving us feedback.

One really doesn't need fancy stuff. Just launch fast.

2.

Crashed three times a day per user. Images were cropped off blogs (with permission), inconsistent branding. It was in the food vertical but the logo was poop brown. But it got 1200 users on the first day, organically.

3 months and about 10k users before we fixed most of the crashes. It was about 5 months before a professional logo and color scheme (though the free logo my friend built for us was much appreciated).

I'd say about a 5. We cared about getting it out there and getting as much feedback as possible from customers. We decided we didn't want to focus on perfecting the UI/UX or even features if it wasn't going to be valuable to our customers. So we'd rather get something janky out there and iterate than spend extra few weeks/months in a bubble.

MVP was like a 2 when it started making real money but even 5 years into it, I would say we are at like a 7 in my opinion. Not sure if we ever will hit a 10 or even a 9 in terms of shine and polish:)

2-3, but I really think the voiceover was worth it! https://commutestudy.com

It was about a 4.5 for me. We had a product that was very barebones but it did what it promised

easily a 4 - Co-Founder felt embarrassed trying to show it to clients but it worked and people could give us money. knocked it out in like 2 months. - now we're 2 years in, still here.

3.5