re-engineer-it

I still remember the first MVP I shipped. It was crude. Not “early Facebook” crude, but more like “did a designer even touch this?” kinda crude. I had no animations, no brand kit, no slick onboarding sequence. Just a working prototype duct-taped together with late-night energy drinks and unchecked ambition.

The crazy part? It worked.

A guy I barely knew opened it, clicked through, and went, “So this shows me which leads to pitch today?”

I nodded.

“Can I start using this now?”

And just like that — no applause, no wow factor, just a simple yes.

That moment taught me something that books, blogs, and bootcamps never did.

You don’t need to impress. You need to convert.

We get caught in this perfection trap. As builders, especially solo founders, we want our product to dazzle — smooth gradients, clever copy, micro-interactions that make angels sing. But that stuff? It’s dessert. It’s the icing. The real cake is utility. Solving a painful, real-world problem for a specific human being. Everything else is sugar.

Your MVP is not a portfolio piece. It’s a handshake.

It’s a quiet pitch to a stranger that says,

“Hey, I get what sucks in your day. Here’s something that might help.”

Look at Calendly. Before it was a scheduling empire, it was just a link and a calendar. That was enough. The job was to kill email back-and-forth, not to win a Webby. That’s the difference between a project and a product: One gets built. The other gets used.

Here’s what too many founders forget:

People don’t care how pretty your tool is. They care if it moves the needle in their life.

They want fewer clicks.

Less chaos.

More clarity.

If your MVP does that — even in an ugly shell — they’ll forgive every pixel out of place. Hell, some won’t even notice.

Now, am I saying never polish? Of course not.

But polish is earned. It comes after proof, not before.

That first “yes” from a real user? That’s gold. That’s validation. That’s momentum. Everything else — animations, design systems, onboarding funnels — can follow. You don’t need a standing ovation. You just need someone to nod and say, “Damn, that’s useful.”

Let me leave you with this:

“The market you choose matters more than the product you build.”

— Marc Andreessen

And I’d add to that:

The pain you solve matters more than the pixels you polish.

So go ahead. Ship that weird, half-broken, scrappy MVP. Let it breathe. Let it be real. Let people react to it. You’ll learn more from their silence or excitement than you ever will in Figma.

This is your reminder from a fellow wanderer in the builder’s maze:

Launch ugly.

Launch scared.

But launch.

The world doesn’t need more perfect.

It needs more useful.

– Mike Ratnam