How can you use an MVP approach effectively?

Emphasis on "minimum". You really should get your MVP out there quickly and as barebones as possible. Often Founders spend too much time and money making the MVP better than necessary, and then have to scrap the whole thing when the idea doesn't gain traction or if they need to pivot.

The important thing is that it's specific. Focus on a particular use case (or limited number) and make that great. Your target here is to test for interest, but the bar for what is accepted as a minimum has been raised quite high. So, instead of building 15 basic features, go with 2. But 2 features which work really well and solve an important problem for your target audience.

Along with keeping the product specs bare minimum, an MVP is also about leap of faith - both for the founders as well as for the customers.

Yes. The goal with an MVP is to test and validate (or possibly invalidate!) an idea as quickly as possible using minimal resources.

Use your MVP to gain confidence that the direction you're choosing to go towards has potential. You cannot really 100% validate it, but you'll get signals from the market that what you're building is interesting. 60-70% positive feedback is good enough to go ahead.

If your end vision is to build a car, do not start by building a skateboard or motorbike. Those serve different purposes and different audiences. Build the basic car for your audience. And similarly for you MVP. Focus on specific problems that a particular market segment has, and start solving for it. Only you know what good will look like in your particular instance. Just don't ship bad software.

I wouldn't overcomplicate this. The #1 metric here is customers willing to pay to use the MVP (and how much they are willing to pay). Things like cost to acquire customers will go down, later. Usage is important as an indicator of possible churn (customers that leave you), but really you'll want to focus almost exclusively on who is willing to pay for the product.

Launching is only the first part... but well done for getting there! Many just get stuck in a planning cycle. The real work starts now. This is the time to talk to users, to see exactly what's happening in your app, and to measure the successful completion of key flows, together with failures and issues. This is your time to learn, to study the data, and to iterate. Just be careful to act properly. It's very likely that you do not have a large sample base, and that sample base might not all be your ideal customer profile. So balance the data with your instinct and join the dots accordingly. I like having a flow completion goal as the main metric to measure. Revenue is not always the key thing in these initial stages.

Again, paying customers are key here. Feedback from people who are not paying customers should be taken with a grain of salt, and can sometimes actually be bad advice.

You'll need to constantly analyse what's happening. As more and more users start using your product, the data you're collecting will become more relevant and you'll start seeing common patterns - both for failures, but hopefully also for what's working really well and what's resonating with your audience.

Iterations imply rapid testing, which implicitly direction and prioritization. You can't iterate everything under the sun. So, you need a direction and then another one. In the best-case situation, your next move would ultimately lead to a clear value prop for the customer. In the second base-case situation, it should give you enough data to find another direction. Along with direction, MVP iterations also require prioritization. You might want to test out 100 new features, but with limited time, effort and development bandwidth, you need to pick 1-2 priority areas to focus on your next iteration.

I'd say an MVP is not intended to be scaled. Use your MVP to get your first customers, validate your is concept, and raise enough to build an enterprise version. If your MVP is good enough to be scalable, then it probably is not a true MVP!