Man who graduated with honors from the University of Clickbait by naming his article, “How My App Grew By 5800 In One Month With No Branding Or Marketing,” and later renamed it an even more clickbaity, “How my app grew by over 1M users in one month,” tells me my article is clickbait. It’s not, but you’re the expert.

Interesting notes about your article, beyond the title change:

1. Texas sharpshooter. Congrats on your friend’s success. Some people smoke heavily and live disease-free to over 100 years old. I will still recommend against smoking.
2. We appear to define MVP different. The minimally viable product for reminders is probably a website where you enter when you want to be reminded of something and you’re later reminded. “First, we hired data scientists to build a state of the art NLU algorithm for understanding complex reminder requests.” Doesn’t sound like an MVP. It sounds like a pretty strong v1, even if your delivery method started simply as a Facebook Messenger chatbot.

Lean Startup suggests building the least you can so you can start getting feedback, out of the building, and talking to real humans about their needs, tasks, and opinions of your MVP. Hiring multiple data scientists to build something state of the art sounds like you went for serious early value and capabilities, even if it seemed like a less-featured chatbot.

So, there’s that.

IMO you didn’t follow Lean Startup, but hey, makes a great clickbait title and article, as you’d know!