Love this, via Creative Something 

First off, congrats. Not many folks even get to this stage where you have a successful MVP with many users. Now, here are a few more things to think about.

Your Minimal Viable Product (MVP) is for experimentation and likely has many bits of code and shoddy-ish practices that are fantastic for testing out ideas, but not for sustained use on your client-facing platforms. So, don't use your MVP as a technical foundation for your company for any longer than the initial stages of product/market fit and before scaling up to a brand new batch of employees.

Sticking with a MVP because of time constraints will kill you in the long run - you're adding heavy floors on top of sticks and stones.

Write APIs, and then use thin clients for your app's UI. These decouple the UI from the backend, and are both are easier to discard when the time comes without having to do a massive rewrite of both the frontend and the backend. I personally like Rails + Backbone.js for this at this point in time.

More often than not, the issue for not discarding MVPs is a lack of time/money. Just remember that technical debt is a lot more expensive in both sanity and money in the long run, so be mindful of every line of code you write.

Speaking of massive rewrites, the odds of success for one of those is comparable to that of a new startup. The longer your MVP sticks around, the more technical debt you incur. You never want to get to the point where the code needs to be rewritten but nobody wants to actually do it. Or even worse, if none of the new devs who rolled in actually understand the product well enough to make those many changes.

Commit yourself to discarding the MVP from day one, both verbally to your team and using TODOs in your code, especially if there are hacks in there that cannot be sustained over time. 

Finally, actually do it and keep flying the plane while you do. It's tough, but your product and your sanity will improve.

2011 was great. Here's why:

Personal Life & Travels

I got married to Fharzana, the love of my life. This was a long time coming, to say the least. The wedding was small, quiet and just about perfect. Every day since then has been more blissful than the last. 

Travel was restricted to California for most of the summer due to the new startup, but we still managed to see the redwood trees at Big Basin and Muir Woods. We also went to Cambria for a short oceanside stay, and then drove back up through Big Sur (awesome). Sprinkle in short day trips to Monterey & Carmel in the middle, and trip to Portland for a conference.

In September, Fharzana & I went to India for our wedding reception there. A thousand people showed up, including many friends and family I hadn't seen in ages; it was great. We then went to Pondicherry with friends (always awesome), and then Kerala for a brief coastal stop before heading back to the Bay Area.

I left my old job and started Kicksend with Brendan Lim. Now I get to work with one of my best friends on awesome products that help everybody.

Things were shaky at the beginning, but we were still heads down and improving our product. We got into YCombinator, which was really great. We got to meet a bunch of Silicon Valley luminaries, and made a lot of new friends in our batch. We then raised a lot of money to turn Kicksend into a product that people know about and love. 

Startup life is stressful, but once you get a taste, it's hard to do anything else.

Other Random Thoughts

Every one of my friends is either having kids or getting married. The transformations are incredible to see, almost overnight folks seem more worldly and mature :)

I'm starting to appreciate a slower pace of life more. Cities no longer hold the same appeal to live in (except NYC). Now I like places with a lot of trees and fresh air.

Meditation helps a lot.

Fharzana cooks like a beast, and I'm really enjoying being the test subject for the new cooking classes she's hosting nowadays.

It was a good year :)

Rajini-fest only happens once every few years.