How fast should a startup get to a minimum viable product?

I recently had the chance to compare an organization to an email.

The organization has had a number of meetings and made some useful decisions. They’ve put up a small site, but want to reorganize it and update the copy (it’s currently a shell with no visitors). This has been going on over approximately two months.

The email was from an email list about a startup competition:

On Friday night individuals pitch ideas for new ventures

Teams form around the best ideas and then work over the weekend to develop and launch a prototype on Sunday

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Useful observations:

• In a startup, your limiting reagent is how fast you can build. If you have a fast engineering team, you can iterate quickly.
• Just because a product is minimal doesn’t mean it’s viable. The key criteria: Does the user have something to do?