foundedceo Michael Seibel built his reputation by helping create and scale companies like Twitch, which sold to...
If your MVP isn’t a little embarrassing, you’re moving too slow. The Instagram reel shows Michael Seibel sitting at a bare table, laptop open, next to a simple sign that reads, “Make something people want.” It looks more like a scrappy office hour than a glossy product launch ad. That’s the whole point: your job in the first 30 days is to ship something real, not something pretty.
Week 1: Pick one painful problem and sketch the tiniest version that solves it for one type of user. Week 2: Hack together the jankiest working version using whatever tools you already know. Week 3: Put it in front of 5–10 real users, watch them use it, and write down every confusing moment. Week 4: Fix only the top three issues and relaunch. That loop, not perfection, is how Twitch and Airbnb went from clunky experiments to billion‑dollar companies.
Airbnb began with a tiny website renting air mattresses to conference attendees before becoming a company worth tens of billions of dollars.
Twitch started as a rough live‑streaming product with minimal polish before being acquired by Amazon for nearly a billion dollars.