While this is a good article, I feel like email first is just a specific example of building an MVP.
I did a similar thing when launching BugMuncher - I bought a template from Themeforest, built a very minimal PHP backend, and put a paypal subscription button on to the website.
When ever anyone signed up, I'd get a notification from PayPal, at which point I'd manually add the user's details into my database, and manually send them a welcome email. There was no where for users to log in an amend their account, instead they had to email me with the required changes, and I'd action it.
This meant I could build the first version of BugMuncher very fast, and once I had my first 10 paying customers I felt it was validated enough for me to build the full, automated system.
I did a similar thing when launching BugMuncher - I bought a template from Themeforest, built a very minimal PHP backend, and put a paypal subscription button on to the website.
When ever anyone signed up, I'd get a notification from PayPal, at which point I'd manually add the user's details into my database, and manually send them a welcome email. There was no where for users to log in an amend their account, instead they had to email me with the required changes, and I'd action it.
This meant I could build the first version of BugMuncher very fast, and once I had my first 10 paying customers I felt it was validated enough for me to build the full, automated system.
So in short, MVP's rock