What an MVP should look like

Summary:
- If your user-acquisition strategy is 'cold-approaching' people (ie asking people to try it who don't know you), the app should look polished. It doesn't have to look like a billion-dollar company created it, but it has to look polished. Facebook's MVP looks a little less stylish, but Zuck wasn't cold-approaching the campus; he was already well-known. And even Facebook is using some CSS and a custom heading to make things look somewhat decent. And then when he was expanding to other campuses, they had the advantage of being able to say "It's this new thing that everyone at Harvard is using." IIRC when I first heard about Facebook, I also heard that it had started at Harvard.
What "polished" means:
- Fonts:
  - Custom fonts
  - Shadows
  - Inner shadows / gradients
  - Sans-serif fonts
    - Instagram's non-cursive font is serifed but it's so heavy/bold that it looks like a sanserif font.
    - Tumblr's font is also serifed, but again, the font is so heavy/bold that it looks like a sanserif font.
- Pictures:
  - Stock-photo-level pictures
- Buttons:
  - Bevels
  - Inner / outer shadows
  - Inner gradients
  - Transparency
- Colors:
  - A modest variety of colors. Maybe 2-3 colors other than white.

My Thoughts on Various Topics