Other folks have already made the correct point that the author has just come up with a new initialism for what MVP actually means, but I'd like to add that describing your product as "lovable" is gross manipulative arrogant marketing speak. With _very_ rare (and probably unhealthy) exceptions (Apple springs to mind), customers don't love products - they just use them, or at best appreciate them.
"Lovable" derives from the hipster-developer trend that started around 2010, where endless web, CSS, or app frameworks were tagged "Made with love in <cityname>", or "Made with love by <author>".
So silly. Like, was the gcc toolchain made with cold indifference? Were linux and git made with Scandinavian longing? Was emacs made with a certain sense of ennui?
> Were Linux and git made with Scandinavian longing?
He’ll never tell you. He’ll just stare sullenly at you on a crisp November evening through the frost-coated glass of your remote log cabin until slowly he’ll raise one hand bearing his middle finger, without breaking eye contact or changing his expression.
“Pass that along to Jensen Huang” he’ll whisper. Then with a surge of the creeping blizzard outside your window, he’ll be gone forever.
Lots of folks build software for the heck of it and I'm in full support of any poetic license any author wants to take with their work product. We could all do with a little more silliness. If you were involved with the Ruby community back cica 2005 - 2012, you may remember how beloved _why was and their attitudes around programming and creativity.
I think I'll need to start saying I write code with American cynicism or Californian gusto.
“Made with love” is just cringe though, and after having become pervasive also can’t be taken at face value anymore. That aside, if a product is made with love, it will show by itself. No need to declare it in case someone wouldn’t notice.
You can be silly and original. Being another team of young engineers that really love coffee and call themselves code artisans is anything but original.
It's like the widespread humanistic art style that 99% companies have adopted in the 2010s to show they are not another faceless corporation, but instead are a friendly business where you matter.
I've been thinking about this a lot while building my MVP. Initially I wanted to make a product people can love, then I remembered someone saying that people use software as if it were a toilet: you use it and forget about it, it's not there to be admired. No one cares that "it's made by a passionate team of dreamers."
So my goal is to create an efficient tool that gets out of one's way, rather than a hipstery "software that you want to cuddle with" or other nonsense. I am designing a toilet. I couldn't even tell you what my actual toilet looks like, but it gets the job done.
Depends on the weight of the word love. My sense that love can be expressed to products because they are delightful in use. I’ve said it many times that I love Figma, or I love using Google sheet. Is that the same love that I have for my daughter — hell no. But the word does convey well in the regular vernacular what it means for me to use those products. I’m not opposed to using love in this way the author means which is they like it enough to return, probably be advocates for the service, refer people, and probably put down some money to use it.
My experience is that the expectation of "lovable" tends make the development process far more toxic. Whatever your definition, "love" is a relationship that takes investment from both sides. Customers will interact with dozens of different applications on a daily/weekly/monthly basis. Having a relationship with any or all of them is a significant burden to the customer. Think about the appliances in your home. Do you love them? Do you even want to?
"Lovable" is also toxic to product developers. Any usage that doesn't build a relationship starts to look like a failure. If you're making tax software, people aren't going to love it no matter what you do. Even if you manage to build that "loving" relationship with the customer, do you really want to invest that deeply maintaining it with every customer (including the demanding ones)? Remember that if they love your software, they're now invested in you not changing it and they'll expect the norms of that relationship in all interactions with you. If you fail to meet those expectations, some of them will go out of their way to talk about it. If you do meet those expectations, their "love" may actually scare others away from using it to avoid being associated with them. Think of the stereotypes about people who like Vim, Rust, or Excel. Maybe that's what you want, but it shouldn't be a universal development goal.
If the people building the product view building and using it as a chore, it’s going to show.
So I took “love” as their brand of Amazonian “customer obsession”.
There needs to be someone (often a founder, head of product, etc) who is the visionary for how the product can be awesome for customers. And hopefully that leader is able to infuse the entire product development experience with that energy.
MVP: My demo ended up in production and now were trying to scale SQLight to 1000s of concurrent users help!
If you want to build an MVP im all for it. It is 100% throw away. Don't try to "add a feature" don't try to "expand" ... You cut corners in design and spec Im gonna cut them in engineering. Let's all take the lessons we learned and build something good after.
MVP lauches and the PM is at my desk. Hey we need these 5 features that you told me I would want but I swore would never be in the product.
MVP launches and the PM is at my desk. Hey this thing that I would have found if I took a paper prototype out on the street and showed it to random people would have been apparent ... well now we need that.
Hell I have told PM's that their print on demand product needed a dirty words filter. They told me I was wrong. Guess what the first feature was post launch in a panic. It's not like I haven't said "If you're launching in Germany you need to take checks" and then had someone come back when the sales numbers were dismal till they started taking checks. (And dear god someone tell me that Germany is past this).
Candidly most MVP's miss the minimum and viable because the people who are defining those things are making guesses with out doing a lot of research. Ethnography, Usability, all these things are much cheaper than development, and yet we dont do them...
I do think you can build products and services that people will capital-L Love, even forgiving some warts too, but the bar for that is very high. I’m very skeptical of tech businesses not led by engineers for exactly this reason (the incentives don’t align with a level of quality people will care deeply about).
I just finished an MVP for a free tool to help delegated tasks get done. I was wondering if I did it all wrong, but like you say, I would have a very hard time describing a management tool like Upfollow.app as “lovable”—I’d be happy with appreciation.
I read it the other way. It's not that customers "love" it, it's that they don't hate it.
In other words it's "love able" as distinct from "loved".
But yo pick on the L is to miss the point. M implies "not there yet" whereas C indicates "its all you need.".
I have a small product which does 1 job really well. Every 5 years or so I give it a visual overhaul. Every couple years someone suggests a feature which would make it better, but equally lead it into a much more complex space.
Its Simple, Complete, and has been used by some folks for over 20 years. To make it "better" would destroy what makes it "Lovable".
Every day here on HN we get announcements of new things. Most are starting out and of course there are lots of suggestions, which the author usually agrees with. Clearly they're showing M. Usually iys not really V for one or more reasons.
So to me at least MVP and SLC are very different concepts. Kudos to developers who strive for simplicity, completeness and elegance.
“Delight our users” (or customers) - similar bullshit. The only time I was “delighted” with software was when I played a new, very engaging video game. That is, something entirely for entertainment. Nothing else.
