What is an MVP?

MVP meaning

MVP stands for minimum viable product. (In sports it means most valuable player, which is a different thing.) The term was coined by Frank Robinson in 2001 and made popular by Steve Blank and Eric Ries, whose 2011 book The Lean Startup put it at the center of how startups are built.

Ries defined an MVP as the version of a new product that lets a team collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort. The important word is learning. An MVP isn't a cheap first version of your product. It's an experiment that answers a question: will people use this, and will they pay for it?

Minimum and viable: both matter

Founders usually get one half wrong. Some build for six months and call the result an MVP. Others ship something so thin that nobody can tell what it's for, then conclude that nobody wants it.

Minimum

Cut everything that doesn't help answer your main question. No settings page, no admin panel, no second platform. If a feature doesn't change what you'll learn, it waits.

Viable

It still has to solve the problem well enough that someone would use it, or pay for it. A broken prototype tells you about bugs, not demand.

Types of MVP

Landing page

A page that describes the product, shows a price and asks for an email or a pre-order. It tests whether the promise alone makes people act.

Explainer video

A short video showing how the product would work. Good when the product is hard to describe in words.

Concierge

You deliver the service by hand, openly, to a few customers. You learn exactly what they need before automating anything.

Wizard of Oz

It looks automatic to the customer, but a person does the work behind the scenes. It tests whether people want the result before you build the machine.

Single-feature product

One feature, done well, for one group of people. Everything else waits until that feature has users.

Pre-sale

Customers pay before the product exists, with a clear delivery date and a refund if you don't deliver. The strongest evidence of demand there is.

See landing pages built for real ideas

Famous MVP examples

Dropbox

Before building the full product, Drew Houston made a short video showing how file syncing would work. Ries reports that the beta waiting list went from 5,000 to 75,000 people overnight.

Zappos

Nick Swinmurn tested whether people would buy shoes online by photographing shoes in local stores and posting them on a website. When someone ordered, he bought the pair at the store and shipped it.

Buffer

Joel Gascoigne put up a simple site describing the app, with a pricing page and a sign-up form, before writing the product. People who clicked a plan were told it wasn't ready yet and asked for their email.

Food on the Table

The meal-planning startup described in The Lean Startup began with one customer, served by hand: the founders met her every week with recipes and a shopping list, and automated only once they knew what customers valued.

How to build your MVP

Whatever type you choose, the steps are the same:

1. Write down the one assumption that would sink the idea if it's wrong. Usually it's this: people with the problem will pay to fix it.
2. Pick the cheapest type of MVP that tests that assumption. If the question is demand, a landing page or a pre-sale is often enough.
3. Decide in advance what result means yes, such as 10% of visitors leaving an email or five pre-orders.
4. Put it in front of people who have the problem, not friends or other founders.
5. Measure what they do, talk to the people who acted, and decide: build more, change it or stop.

Test demand before you build anything

Many founders treat the MVP as the first thing they build. It works better as the last step of validation. If you skip the evidence that people want it, even a small MVP can take weeks, and you still won't know who to give it to.

It's a common story. These founders built their product first and then went looking for users; their posts are from our ideas library, where this is one of the problems founders ask about most:

How to run a landing page test

MVP vs prototype vs MLP

Prototype

Shows how something might look or work, usually to a team or a few testers. It answers design questions, not demand questions.

MVP

A real product or offer, used by real customers, built to answer one question about demand or value.

MLP, or minimum lovable product

A newer idea: the first version should be something people love, not just put up with. Useful once demand is proven, as a reminder that viable should mean good enough to recommend.