I can tell you absolutely, without question, that when it comes to security and people's funds, there is nothing courageous about a hacked MVP in production. There's a difference between someone's to-do app one weekend, and this case. If you are handling people's money directly or indirectly, you need to care about that and take it seriously. Or don't ship.

Well I would argue that the "M" in MVP would necessitate never losing anyone's money. If I were going to create a trading platform, I'd probably start with one that only accepted Play Money.

Putting on my Lean Startup hat for a sec, I would even say that the M could allow for losing money. If it's early on and your customers are all in the 2 1/2% of innovators, they will put up with a little of that. Certainly if you make them whole, but probably even without.

That said, "flawless accounting" would be very high up on my feature list. I think the failure here isn't launching without perfection; it's operating at scale without perfection.

I've been wondering whether the "M" in "MVP" is for minimum quality, or minimum feature scope.

I think minimum feature scope doesn't necessitate poor-quality software, just solutions that don't do everything for everybody. It's much better to ship a small feature set with very high quality, IMO, than a big feature set with low quality.

Great thing to wonder about!

In the Lean Startup sense, the M is about minimum effort, and the V is about viability with customers. You're basically playing Battleship trying to discover where those two Venn circles overlap.

Different aspects of quality map to both those circles. There's build quality, which relates to the sustainability of the code base. There, you have to consider both short- and long-term quality. [1]

There's also quality as users perceive it. That varies widely by domain by market, and by how far you are along the adopter curve.

My general answer is the same as yours: minimal features with highly sustainable code. But for experiments, I think you can get away with terrible code as long as you a) throw it away quickly, and b) you are on it so even if you have a bad MTBF, your MTTR is really good.

I also think that you can tactically discard certain kinds of user-side quality. E.g., if I'm making a product for early-adopter financial traders, I'm not going to worry about quality of visual design, and I might inflict hard-to-learn interfaces on them. But I'd be rigorous about accounting and about UI issues that might lead to mistaken trades.

[1] I wrote some about that here: http://agilefocus.com/2009/06/22/the-3-kinds-of-code/

Minimum viability?

Well when mtgox started off btc was play money, it was always play money until perhaps 12 months ago when it became serious money. And I base play and serious on the value, at $10 a coin it was still fun, at $100 a coin I had to seriously consider how much I should keep on my phone or any other single place.

He did. It was called Bitcoin

Cute, but they also traded and held USD.

Oh, that's easy. The best thing is to use the off-the-shelf SSH server, one that has been written by experts and carefully reviewed by a lot of people.

Or do you mean this as a metaphor for MtGox? In that case, I would say that I would rather miss the window than be the famous asshole who -- oopsie! -- lost $500 million of other people's money.

The problem is less with a minimum viable product, and more with a far-from-viable product, in ways that aren't immediately obvious. The security FFVP is especially dangerous.

Depends on what the product itself is and from which perspective you're asking the question. At any rate, those are almost never the only two choices...

what if the hacks you used to build your MVP result in unrecoverable real world damage to your self, your investors, and your customers?

One way to look at ordering features in early products is as risk reduction.

One of the biggest risks is, "nobody gives a fuck", which is why MVPs are so valuable. It lets you test market hypotheses.

But if you're building something handling real money, then a pretty obvious risk is, "The system will lose money beyond our capacity to absorb losses." Their failure to address that risk here is at best negligence.

But given the size of the loss, I don't think we should rule out fraud. The interesting question is, "When did they know they had a problem?" Sometimes shitty accounting systems are just naiveté. But when they persist over a long period of time in a way that just happens to cover up loss, embezzlement, or theft, then it's worth asking: did they keep the shitty accounting because better accounting would have forced them to admit something they were hoping to cover up?

Would you want to fly in a hacked together MVP plane released to production? A similarly made bike in a park? Maybe.

I wouldn't today, but the wright brothers did, because if they hadn't, someone else would've done it instead. If you wanted to be trail blazers like the wright brothers were, you might have to put up with a hacked together MVP. I m just saying that anyone who lost their money did so knowing the risks (or should have known the risks).