Most MVP advice comes from a specific context: you’re a non-technical founder, you’re going to hire developers, and every feature costs real money. In that world, scope discipline is paramount. Every additional feature is another week of paid development, another drain on limited runway. But that’s not the only world.
If you’re building the thing yourself—whether you’re a technical founder, a founder who’s learned to code, or someone using no-code tools—the calculus is completely different. Your constraint isn’t money. It’s time. And that changes everything.
The Resource Constraint Shift
When you hire developers, the cost of a feature is measured in dollars. Add a feature, spend more money. Cut a feature, save money. The math is straightforward, and the pressure to minimize is intense because every dollar spent on building is a dollar not spent on marketing, hiring, or survival.
When you build yourself, the cost of a feature is measured in hours. Your hours. Hours you were going to spend on this project anyway.
Key Takeaway
The standard MVP advice exists specifically because hiring development is expensive and founders tend to overbuild. But if cash isn’t the constraint, the antidote doesn’t fit the disease.
What Time Costs vs. What Money Costs
Time and money aren’t interchangeable, even though we often treat them that way.
When you pay for development, you’re buying a specific deliverable. The developer builds what you specify, and you get that thing. If you specify more, you pay more. If you specify less, you pay less. The relationship is linear and predictable.
When you invest your own time, the dynamics are different:
How DIY time investment works
- Learning compounds: Hours spent building produce knowledge that carries forward, even if you pivot.
- Marginal cost decreases: The first feature takes forever; the tenth takes a fraction of the time.
- Opportunity cost varies: Building nights and weekends has different cost than building full-time.
- Speed to iterate: You can modify and experiment faster without waiting on anyone else.
When Building More Makes Sense
Given these dynamics, there are situations where building more than a minimal MVP is actually the right call:
When completeness drives signal quality. I recently wrote about when your MVP is too small—when a minimal product generates noise instead of signal. If you’re in that situation and you’re building yourself, you can invest the extra time to reach the threshold where you’re learning something meaningful.
When you’re learning the domain. If part of your goal is developing deep expertise in the problem space, building more gives you more surface area for learning. Every feature is another opportunity to understand how users think, what workflows look like, where the complexity hides.
When iteration speed matters. If you can build and modify features quickly, you can iterate faster than someone managing a development team. This speed advantage might be worth more than the scope discipline you’d get from building less.
When you’re building competitive advantage. If your edge comes from being further along than anyone else—more features, more polish, more completeness—then the DIY capability to build more without spending more is a strategic asset.
When the alternative is waiting. If you can’t afford to pay for development right now, building yourself lets you make progress instead of waiting. Progress beats paralysis.
When Building More Doesn’t Make Sense
⚠ DIY Isn't a Free Pass
Building yourself doesn’t automatically mean you should build more. Time is still a constraint—sometimes the most important one.
When validation genuinely needs to come first. If you’re honestly not sure anyone wants what you’re building, spending months building a complete product yourself is still premature—even if it’s free in dollar terms.
When time is your scarcest resource. If you’re building nights and weekends while working a demanding job, your hours are precious. Scope discipline might still be paramount, just for different reasons.
When you’re avoiding launch. Building more features can be a way of avoiding the scary part: showing your work to real people. If you catch yourself adding “just one more feature” indefinitely, the problem isn’t the scope calculation—it’s fear of feedback.
When it’s not your zone. Just because you can build something yourself doesn’t mean you should. If building is taking you away from things you’re better at—sales, marketing, customer development—the time cost might be higher than you think.
The Hybrid Approach
In practice, the smartest DIY founders I know use a hybrid approach:
Build the core yourself—the things that touch your differentiation, that embody your unique approach, that you need to deeply understand. Consider help for the rest—commodity features, standard integrations, things that don’t drive learning.
Timebox experiments. Give yourself a fixed amount of time to explore a feature or direction. If it’s not working after that time, cut it—just like you’d cut a feature that was over budget in a paid development scenario.
Track where time goes. It’s easy to lose sight of how much time you’re actually investing. Track it. You might find you’re spending weeks on features that could have been done in days with different tooling, or months on an approach that’s fundamentally flawed.
The Real Trade-off
Here’s what it comes down to:
The standard MVP advice optimizes for conserving cash. Minimize scope, minimize spend, maximize learning per dollar.
The DIY version should optimize for learning per hour. Sometimes that means building less. Sometimes it means building more. The answer depends on what you’re trying to learn and how quickly you can learn it.
If building yourself lets you reach a level of completeness that generates better signal, do that. If building yourself lets you iterate faster because you’re not waiting on anyone, leverage that. If building yourself gives you domain expertise that becomes a long-term advantage, invest in that.
But don’t fall into the trap of building forever because it’s “free.” Your time isn’t free. It’s the most limited resource you have. Spend it on the things that will actually move you forward.
Making the Call
Questions to guide your scope decisions
- What am I actually trying to learn? Be specific—the answer should guide scope.
- What's my real constraint? Time, money, both, neither?
- Am I building to learn or building to avoid? Honest self-assessment matters.
- What would I build if I had to launch in two weeks? Maybe launch that version first.
- What's the cost of waiting? Competition? Motivation? Learning that only comes from real users?
The DIY capability to build without paying isn’t a free pass to overbuild. It’s an option to optimize differently. Use it wisely.
The MVP playbook was written for a world where development costs money. When you’re building yourself, the math changes—but the underlying principle doesn’t. You’re still trying to learn as efficiently as possible. Sometimes that means building less. Sometimes, when you’re the one building, it means building more. Know which situation you’re in.
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Founder, 1123Interactive
25+ years building products, from consumer electronics scaled to $5M to production SaaS shipped in weeks. Helping founders and businesses turn ideas into working software.
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