Every founder dreads that moment: your product isn’t quite ready, but a huge opportunity knocks. Do you take the leap or play it safe?

MAGIC AI, faced this dilemma when luxury retailer Selfridges wanted to showcase their AI fitness mirror. The catch? MAGIC AI barely had a working prototype.

This question came up again when I was chatting with Sunil Jindal, co-founder of MAGIC AI (the company behind that cool AI-powered fitness mirror).

“Selfridges basically reached out to us and said, okay, can you sell this in our store? At the time, there was really no product,” Sunil told me.

Talk about pressure!

What’s Actually “Minimum” in an MVP?

The whole point of an MVP is to test your core value proposition without burning months on features that might get tossed anyway. But here’s what they don’t tell you in startup school: the “minimum” varies wildly depending on who you’re selling to and what you’re charging.

When Magic AI faced their Selfridges opportunity, they took a pragmatic approach:

“We dumbed it down and said, okay, we need like an even simpler version that we can use for demoing in the store,” Sunil explained.

Their first version had just six exercises to demonstrate the tracking technology — nothing fancy, just enough to show what made their product special.

This approach isn’t unique to Magic. Often used examples are:

Airbnb, Dropbox, and Groupon all started with bare-bones MVPs that nailed the core offering.

The Price-Polish Equation

Here’s where context matters enormously. Magic AI wasn’t selling a $5 app — they were selling a premium fitness device that costs hundreds of pounds.

“The fact that Magic is a premium product, people are paying a lot of money for, the expectation is higher,”

This is what I call the Price-Polish Equation: as your price point increases, so does the minimum acceptable level of polish.

But even with premium products, you still need to prioritize. As Sunil put it: “We’ve got to balance it out with not spending time on something that’s not high priority in terms of design, like 80,20-ing it basically.”

The first version wasn’t perfect, and Sunil was refreshingly honest about it: “There were quite a few negative comments back then, and they were very understandable… the product wasn’t in an amazing place when we first started, which is very common.” What mattered most was what came next: “What was key for us is quickly improve things and we did do that.”

The Founder’s MVP Checklist

So where does this leave you? Instead of obsessing over “how polished,” consider “polished in which ways?” Here’s my quick checklist:

1. Does it demonstrate your core value? Magic focused on showing their tracking technology worked, even with a bare-bones UI. Research shows users forgive rough edges if the core value is clear.

2. Does it meet expectations for its price point? A $10,000 product can’t look like it was built in a weekend. Consider the context of your offering.

3. Have you avoided the feature creep trap? According to research, the #1 MVP mistake is including too many features. Focus ruthlessly on what matters.

4. Can you rapidly improve it? The most successful MVPs aren’t static — they evolve quickly based on user feedback.

The biggest lesson from MAGIC AI’s story? Sometimes, getting to a phenomenal product means starting with something that’s not.

So what’s your MVP’s core value, and what parts could you launch without? That’s the question worth obsessing over.

If you’re wrestling with your own MVP decisions or want to chat about product strategy, drop by at notforthefaint.space — it’s where we help founders navigate these exact dilemmas through our startup wing at Non Zero Design.

Cheers!