Just over a year ago I had first heard of lean startup and about the idea of starting new projects with the ‘minimal viable product’ a term that on it’s face value seems so clear and concise I, and many others I was working with, assumed we understood what it meant.

Obviously, MVP just means the minimum amount of functionality that we can sell to customers, hence creating a “minimal viable product” right? Wrong.

Unfortunately I’ve discovered even Eric sometimes slips up and uses a definition of MVP that sounds a lot like this. In this interview he says

The minimum viable product is that product which has just those features and no more that allows you to ship a product that early adopters see and, at least some of whom resonate with, pay you money for, and start to gave you feedback on. — Eric Ries

Except that isn’t exactly it, is it Eric?

You are, probably, not Steve Jobs. A fairly safe bet if there ever was one and one that’s easy to confirm too assuming you have a mirror handy. Unfortunately, it’s seems to be more and more commonplace to see designers, CEO’s and budding entrepreneurs aspiring to what is a folk hero ideal of Mr. Jobs. He is their role model, perhaps the sum of their professional aspirations, and a symbol of the quintessential entrepreneur, designer and creative mind. I call it the cargo cult of Jobs.

Well almost one day, and almost the top. I submitted the Startup Rush article to Hacker News yesterday and made it to #7, and spent the better part of the day on the front page. This is the first time I’ve been anything close to ’slashdotted’ so it was just a little exciting and interesting to see the effect. I know it’s cliché to blog about your blog post being front page on a social media site but I don’t have anything better to write about and I’m waaaaaaay behind on my #NaNoWriMo blogging spree (tomorrow I literally have to write 10 blog posts).

So here is a little graphic of the site traffic spike I saw.

The one very hard to miss elephant in the room amidst all of today’s startup hype is the inevitable question: “are we in a bubble?” I certainly don’t claim to be able to predict the future of the software market, and like most people, I’ve had at least a twinge of skepticism towards all the current software startup hype. However, after some careful consideration I think the obvious conclusion is that this really isn’t a bubble.

Just recently on Hacker News a whole bunch of posts either deriding or defending Mongo (or in some cases noSQL as a whole) appeared. It all started with this. The problems with this little tirade against Mongo are multiple but the foremost is that it was posted entirely anonymously, and I can’t really think of a reason why someone would feel the need to post something like that anonymously other than to hide from ridicule.

The CTO of 10gen responded in the comments and pointed out that this scenario seems highly unlikely at worst and at best is seriously hyperbolised.