I’m sorry, this is a rant on blogging and does not have anything to do with minimum viable products. Well, technically a blog can be a minimum viable product, so let’s extrapolate a bit.
Does your minimum viable product (or blog) really matter if no one is viewing it?
Yes and no. Yes, because the goal is to have people view it. And no because the odds of someone finding your mvp at this stage or finding your first 20 blogposts are extremely rare.
Launch when it sucks, when there’s not much there, when the content sucks, and when you’re completely embarrassed to exist. Launch your website with half a product – just don’t tell the world it exists.
Why should you do this?
You should do this because it takes a while for organic processes to happen that make your product or blog popular to the search engines and other communities. If you don’t tell the world you launched, the world won’t find it, but google will start to give you relevance for existing from a certain point in time.
The google sandbox is a real thing that can hurt you to different extents. If you’re not familiar with the google sandbox, it’s a testing ground to prove that you’re not a spammer that will close his site in three months if you’re not able to gain the system and get traffic. Google gives preference to websites that have existed for 20 years versus websites that popped up last week.
You want google to know you exist. You want to appear in search results. To do this, launch early. Do your development on a live server and tell google you exist. Put one link on your blog to your new project, and google will recognize you as a living, breathing project.
Your project will morph. It will change. It will get better. You just want it to be born. You want it to exist, so it can grow.
Does your minimum viable product or first 20 blogposts matter? Yes, but only to the extent that they exist.