The world is coming to the idea of the MVP, Minimum Viable Product, which is a short-cut way of saying build the simplest product that will accomplish the goals of your organization.  This is a terrifically clarifying mode of thinking, and leads to all sorts of useful decisions about what NOT to do, which will allow you to be as productive and efficient as is reasonable. It’s a great habit, and leads to really nice things like sustainability, profit, iterative development, etc.

The problem with an MVP is that if you’re not careful, you can create a product that has the kind of limitations that will force you to have to start over at some point when it would be really inconvenient to do so. Like anytime in the next ten years. Or ever.

A Minimum Viable Platform is just like a minimum viable product, except that the philosophy of Platforms applies: make sure that the entire scope of the application is considered at the beginning, and important ideas that will become more important in the not-too-distant future are included. Think about features like multi-lingual, multi-currency, additional layers of administrative or user control, security, and extensibility options like an API. Really REALLY tough to retrofit most of these.

So, make sure to think about this even as you are working on the prototype that will get you your first dozen or hundred clients. Soon you’ll be scrambling to meet their needs. The time to think about these features is now.