"The minimum viable product is that version of a new product a team uses to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort." — Eric Ries, The Lean Startup
"Minimum Viable Product" (MVP) has become one of the most overused terms in Silicon Valley. If you walk into any of Palo Alto's many coffee shops, you'll hear the term being used by wannabe entrepreneurs at nearly every table.
But what is an MVP, exactly? Some people seem to think it's a pretty slide deck of their startup idea; some think it's a nice design mockup of the product; some people seem to think they need to build a fully functional, production-ready product.
As Eric Ries explained in his book, The Lean Startup, learning about customers is the important part. That's the purpose of an MVP.
History is littered with the dead bodies of startups that built a product no actual customers wanted. Some spent millions of their investors' money proving there was zero market demand for their product (hey, I did that!). The value of an MVP is to avoid that sort of startup death by creating a bare-bones product first, getting it in front of real customers to see how they react, and then building out and refining the product in a way that is informed by actual customers.
Tesla launched by buying car bodies and chassis from Lotus, putting Tesla's EV motors in them, and selling them branded as the Tesla Roadster. They made and sold five hundred of those, and from the learnings gained, they developed the Model S, the first car that was actually entirely their own design.
Peloton launched by creating a picture of a prototype and making the product available for pre-sale on Kickstarter. Two hundred ninety-seven people paid $1,000 each to get one of the first models, and based on the feedback from that first production run, they built a company now worth over $3 billion.
The concept of an MVP is straightforward: get an early, imperfect version of the product out into the market so you can learn from actual customers as you refine the product offering. Yet there still seems to be confusion about what an MVP is, so here are my own thoughts. First, let me tell you (from my personal experience) what an MVP is not:
An MVP is not something you build to show; it's something you build to learn from.
Many people working on their MVPs think they are building a demo to impress someone. That's nice, but the purpose is to learn actionable insights from real customers.
It's not going to get you funded.
No doubt you've heard someone say, "As soon as our MVP is complete, we'll show it to venture capitalists and raise lots of money!" In truth, this is backward thinking because it implies that the purpose of an MVP is to show something. Showing that you can create a clickable prototype isn't going to impress investors—any fifth-grader can do that. But proving to them that you have discovered key insights into the wants and needs of real-world customers by having an initial product out in the actual marketplace? In investors' minds, that's golden.
It's not even a thing; it's a process.
If you embrace the MVP concept, you are embracing an iterative process of idea generation, data collection, analysis, and learning. You're embracing the concept of optimizing your path to Product-Market Fit by getting early product releases into the hands of customers so you can learn from them. Marc Andreessen has written that, if you do this right, "the market actually pulls the successful product out of the startup." That's what you want from your MVP. Twitter thought they were developing a group SMS platform when they released their MVP at the 2007 SXSW festival, but the market pulled out a real-time media platform that has been a billion-dollar success.
Now I'll tell you (again, from my own personal experience) what a good MVP is:
It's simple.
When DoorDash launched, it was a simple landing page with PDF menus and a phone number that the founders answered themselves. It probably cost less than one hundred dollars to build, but the learnings they got from it allowed them to build a company with a market capitalization of $35 billion.
It tests the right things.
When Pandora first launched, the playlists were manually managed by humans. The question they needed to test was: Will people pay for a streaming music service? (Note that the test question was not: Can we write a software algorithm that chooses good music?) Once they successfully proved market demand with their MVP, they made the investment to write the complex software required to algorithmically choose music.
It's built for rapid iteration.
The whole idea of an MVP is to rapidly try out new features and see how the market responds. This process accelerates the path from your guess as to what the market wants to something that the market has proven it wants.
Want one more example? Here's one you can eat.
My favorite kind of MVP is food trucks. For a relatively small investment, an aspiring restaurateur can take her menu on the road, get feedback from real customers, create daily menu iterations based on that feedback, and then—after having proven market demand—can make the investment in leasing restaurant space and building a kitchen and full dining room. That's how a good MVP should work.
I've already mentioned my favorite Steve Blank quote: "No business plan ever survived first contact with customers." The entire purpose of an MVP is to avoid this by getting early learnings from actual customers before you start executing a plan.