Thank you everyone for the feedback. Some of your advice has already played a role in some recent decisions I have made.

To re-enforce what others have said, I can attest to what they are saying firsthand. Not getting our application in the hands of the intended users until it was too late killed my first startup. We spent a lot of time "making things perfect" and by the time we finally got in front of customers we realized very quickly we were missing the mark. At this point, not only did we not have enough runway to pivot, but this was also devastating to our morale.  I read an interesting quote from Reid Hoffman just this morning where he discussed an internal disagreement over a feature before launching LinkedIn. They decided to ship without, and still have never added this feature. Your customers will tell you what you need, but they need something to see first.

Pending on what you're building... Keep the MVP simple and iterate on user feedback by keeping the front end simple and stub the backend where possible where complex logic could come later.  You can waste a lot of time trying to build the perfect front end.

I would suggest to reduce the dev time as much as possible. Cut every possible corner, don't afraid to launch buggy/incomplete software (but don't launch completely useless stuff). The goal is to get to user's interviews as soon as possible and then let your users shape your product, incrementally. Building a product based only on yours or your team's vision is a vacuum way in my opinion.

My biggest piece of advice is to split your time 50/50 between development and customer acquisition. Show customers every step of the way what you're building, trying to pre-sell it, and that way you won't go in the wrong direction. If you join me during MVP workshops on Tuesdays at noon eastern, we can talk more about it.