MVP to scale: what to build first in a SaaS product

An MVP is not a small version of the full product. It is the smallest thing that proves someone will pay.

Pick one job to be done

Choose the single workflow your first customers struggle with most, and make that excellent. Leave everything else for later.

Decide what not to build

• Admin dashboards you could do by hand for the first ten customers.
• Integrations nobody has asked for yet.
• Custom billing, when a payment link will do.

Architect for the rewrite you want to avoid

Multi-tenant data, clean authentication and a simple event log are cheap on day one and painful to add later.