There’s this moment every first-time founder hits, usually late at night, with too many tabs open and a half-written Notion doc: What exactly am I supposed to do next?
You’ve got an idea that makes sense in your head. Maybe even a few sketches or a name. But moving from vague concept to something real, like a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), can feel like stepping into fog.

Here’s what that journey looks like when you're building your first MVP from scratch.
/1. Stop obsessing over the product

The biggest trap new founders fall into is building too soon. Everyone I spoke to said they started with the wrong thing: features, branding, even UI mockups, before they even understood the actual problem.

Instead of starting with the product, most experienced founders now start with something much simpler: conversations. Specifically, talking to the people they’re trying to build for. That doesn’t mean launching a survey to your friends. It means talking to real potential users—asking how they currently solve the problem, what frustrates them, and what they’ve already tried.

/2. What’s the smallest version of your idea that’s still useful?

Once you’ve grounded your idea in a real, painful problem, the next step is figuring out the minimum you need to build to test it.

This is your MVP, not a buggy prototype, but the simplest version of your product that delivers value.

In India, one solo founder building a peer-to-peer tutoring app skipped development altogether. Instead, she launched with a landing page, a Google Form for bookings, and WhatsApp to manually match students and tutors. It wasn’t scalable. It wasn’t sleek. But it worked. And within two weeks, she knew exactly what her users cared about and what they didn’t.

/3. Tools don’t matter as much as learning fast

A lot of first-time founders feel stuck because they think they need a developer, or a big budget, or a “technical cofounder.” But what they often need is momentum, and that usually starts with no-code or low-effort tools.

/4. Launch early. Like, earlier than you think.

Here’s the truth: most first MVPs don’t flop because the product is bad; they flop because they never launch.

Founders overthink. They polish. They wait until it’s perfect. But every founder I spoke to who made progress launched early, often within a few weeks of shaping the idea. The launch wasn’t always public. Sometimes it was a quiet rollout to 10 users or even five. The point was to get feedback fast.

/5. Use feedback to decide what not to build next

Most MVPs aren’t magical. They break. They confuse users. That’s the point.

The difference between founders who make it past this phase and those who don’t? The ones who iterate based on feedback instead of defending the product they spent weeks building.

After the first launch, smart founders treat feedback like data; not criticism. You’re not trying to please everyone. You’re trying to find patterns: where users drop off, what features they’re asking for, and what you assumed that turned out to be wrong.

What success looks like at the MVP stage

It’s easy to get distracted by what success looks like on tech Twitter. But none of the founders I spoke to measured MVP success by virality, downloads, or press. Their benchmarks were simpler and way more practical.

For some, it was 10 people using the product more than once. For others, it was someone willing to pay. One founder’s success metric? “When someone I didn’t know messaged me asking if they could invite a friend.”

That’s traction. Not in the flashy, venture-backed sense, but in the real, messy, you’re onto something kind of way.

_{The original content of the note was published on Techloy.com. To read the full note visit here}

Product Lead Growth (PLG) is usually considered the most powerful go-to-market model for SaaS businesses. Driven by the strength of the product and word-of-mouth recommendations, customers come inbound and sign up for your product by either self-serve on the website or after a light sales touch from the “Inbound” team. So far so good. But what do you do once you have a successful PLG model?

From my experience, it is obvious that even with the strongest PLG momentum you need to invest early in building a marketing engine, long before you even think about moving to Outbound sales. Here’s why:

Hitting the adoption curve
To understand why it’s important to build a high-performing marketing function early, it helps to take a look at who adopts your product and when — the so-called Adoption Curve.

The first users will be Innovators. Trying new things is important to them. They are the driving force behind your initial growth. They are risk-takers, inspired to try new things by technology communities, by what they read in blogs and social media, etc. The more momentum you create in this early phase, the better. Following on are the Early Adopters.

The third group is the Early Majority. While it is not quite so critical to them, they still do have an interest in staying at the forefront of innovation but are concerned about the risk of failure. They are typically unwilling to do a lot of research, so relevant information needs to be easily found. The final two groups are Late Majority and Laggards, but they are less relevant for you now.

Each of these groups needs to be spoken to through marketing. However, each audience requires different channels and ways to connect. If you fail to adapt your marketing as you progress through the adoption curve, or you don’t do any marketing in the early phases, your PLG will slow down prematurely.

Think about website offerings
Your website is your shop window and you only have a few seconds to catch a visitor’s interest (estimated to be 10-20 seconds). It’s vital, therefore, to invest the time to craft clear compelling messaging that will capture their attention and there are a few things to consider as you think about how that website will support the next growth stage.

Bringing more traffic is the obvious next step, but making sure you are attracting the right traffic is key.

Content fuel
“Content is the fuel your new marketing engine runs on” says Liz Smyth, VP of Marketing at Slack. “First and foremost capture and tell your best customer stories.”

They are not just the proof points that your prospective new customers need to hear, but also critical in helping the market understand new product offerings, their use cases and the value that can be derived. Also, take the time to create a few key pieces of thought leadership content.

Optimise the engine

Once the engine is running, it will be time to find ways to optimise it, often by looking at conversion rates and finding ways to improve them. Look at your website analytics to understand where your website visitors are engaging or dropping off. At this stage paid lead generation, webinars and content for specific personas and buying stages become increasingly important.

This content, often called ‘full-funnel’, is designed to meet the buyers where they are on the attract-engage-convert journey.

My advice to teams is to start by creating a few content assets for each stage, then build out your library and optimize it over time.

Laying a strong foundation
If you have a strong PLG business, delaying building a strong marketing function or, as we’ve seen in extreme cases, almost leapfrog marketing and jump directly to building an outbound sales motion, is a mistake.

If you don’t invest in a marketing team, you are likely to face significant difficulties building an Outbound motion, and eventually even experience premature slow-downs of your PLG. Instead, companies that use the initial time of strong PLG to build out a proper marketing function experience a longer period of healthy PLG and Inbound growth and are eventually more successful in their efforts to go Outbound.

_{The original content of the note was published on Eu-startups.com. To read the full note visit here}