Ask HN: How many startups fail because their MVP is too minimal?

None.

They fail because they didn't talk to customers, didn't do sales, didn't do marketing, or failed to find a viable service model after all that.

MVP is shorthand for "do the least work customers will pay you for." Customers are shorthand for "people you can find who will pay you."

MVP is quite often abused to mean "here's a thing I made." If you don't have customers, and you can't find customers ... then it's not viable yet, is it?

Here's a thing you can do:

You have a hypothesis that [service you can provide] will be valuable to [people you can find]. Okay, so go check that you can actually find those people. Then talk to them about what they do.

You are not allowed to sell, or ask "would you buy this." Facebook surveys are also right out. You need targeted customers, not a bunch of random people with few common characteristics besides being bored enough to respond to Facebook surveys.

Your objective is to learn about these people. How do you find them? How do they talk about the problem? How do you tell them apart from people who really don't give a shit about the problem?

Once you've got a target customer validated at the talking-to-people level, then you can try building stuff. Start with the least work that you think will get people to pay you. It's probably much smaller than you think, and may involve no code.

You don't need to solve everything that anyone told you about the problem, you just need to do enough to make their corner of the world a little better.

Then, go back and try to do sales. Face-to-face sales is the highest conversion rate condition you're ever going to have access to. It doesn't have to scale to infinity million dollars of revenue. It's validation. (Although it's also quite possible to get to stability on boot sales alone, if you charge enough. Which is the only time I ever want to hear that "with no marketing" meme.)

If you can't sell when the deck is stacked in your favor, you don't understand your customers, or you're working on something they don't actually care about.

Treat stuff as a hypothesis. Then test it. Don't just throw code at the wall either. Code without a customer is not a product, it's just some thing you made. Figure out who the customers are and aren't. Then try to find them & talk to them. Learn about them. Then build.

Nobody failed because their MVP was too minimal. They failed because they didn't have customers & didn't do the work to fix their understanding of the world.

A bigger risk is failing because you've built the wrong features. It's harder to change or remove features than it is to build them, and you also don't get the time back for misplaced features. Hence the bias toward starting small.