If I could get across only one thing to most folks building brand new products, it’d be this: Start small.

It’s not a simple thing to do. To start building something small means deeply understanding the problem you’re trying to solve. You have to know what’s important to end users and what isn’t. What you need in your product that will make a difference in their lives, vs. what is nice to have. You can’t get caught up in your own ego, and your desire to make something you’re proud of, happy with, or is a full realization of whatever dream it is you have.

You have to be ruthless. You have to cut away everything that it’s vital to the core of what you’re trying to build. This is where a lot of people trying to do “MVP” make mistakes. You cannot cut away what people need. You can’t deliver a shitty version of the whole product. You need to deliver the *smallest possible thing* that *does what a user needs*. It doesn’t have to be pretty, or easy to use (unless those are rare parts of the core concept). It doesn’t have to scale or be reliable. It doesn’t have to have social invites or animated buttons.

It doesn’t have to be the whole idea. Especially for games.

But it has to have that kernel of the thing you’re trying to pitch to folks. And it has to be good enough that you can understand when you see someone use it if it’s working. So while it can be busted, it can’t be *too* busted. While it can be ugly, it can’t be too ugly. And all of that is context-dependent on what you’re building and who your users are.

But the smaller you start, the more understandable your problem is. The more understandable the user’s response will be. The more you can shrink the number of variables involved, the more you can understand the variables you kept. Every system explodes exponentially with each new variable. Too many, and even if you’re getting data, that data will be incomprehensibly complex. If you can get your thing down to *one* new thing, you’ll be able to understand the impact of that one thing. Two, maybe. Three, forget about it.

Small. Build small. Pare down your idea until it’s almost nothing. Then you’re in the right ballpark.