Yeah I don't know what extremely talented reliable developer only charged 3k for a good finished MVP product. That sort of guy is kind of a moron or a fluke, and extremely difficult to find.

It's called outsourcing to Russia! You can get amazing devs for 15$ / hour...

Ah. That makes a lot of sense.

In the article there is a link to this:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/16mWB0J91JQJw0uhQZ1Kq...

Ah, so $0 income.

So a MVP that doesn't get a paying customer is not a success to me. Getting 1 or 2 paying customers, even $20, to me validates that people will pay for it. So far, he is 13.5k in the hole for no confirmed paying customers... so still seems an expensive experiment.

Yes, there are no paying customer yet. So what?

You've just blown my bubble.

What actions can one take to increase the chance of success?

What exactly do you want to do and why?

Let others build an MVP without technical skills. How do I break up plans and requirements in bits, so that the chances of success of the contractors rises? How to select contractors? Should I define a stack, or let contractors decoder? Etc. These are obv. the questions OP answers, but as GP points out you need a lot more information to assess the risks in such steps. I wouldn't want to have the next post "How I blew 10K and got nothing in return".

So it's hard. I see people say things like "advertise the product and get a mailing list of people interested, 100k signups mean it's a go", but that has never impressed me that much.

If 1/20 MVPs prove to gain traction, and MVPs cost 10k to outsource, you are looking at spending 200k to find something that sticks.

I think the top thing is to get the scope down. Make it a mVP not a MVP.

Not sure there is a single universal answer. I usually suggest you learn to code so you can do MVP level work for free, but not all people like that answer.

We already got lots of in return, even if there is no revenue yet.

I hope you liked my post!