Minimum Viable Product

People who think MVPs are either crap versions of the real thing or not viable as a product, don’t understand the concept of “niche” #agile

~ Vasco Duarte

I came across that post by Vasco Duarte on LinkedIn, and it made me wonder, after replying in the comment section of his LinkedIn post, how many definitions for MVP there are and what I actually think an MVP is.

Why is there so much confusion about this?

Let’s explore this!

First of all, I wanted to see if there is a generalised definition for MPV, so I turned to Wikipedia (Wikipedia, after all, is the source of the “truth” for so many people).

Here is what Wikipedia had so say about MVPs:

A minimum viable product (MVP) is a version of a product with just enough features to be usable by early customers who can then provide feedback for future product development.

– Wikipedia

That quote, at the top of the article has two references.

The first reference is from an article on Technopedia. At the top of the article they answer the question, “What is Minimum Viable Product(MVP)?” like so:

A minimum viable product (MVP) is a new product that has just enough features to attract early adopters. The goal of releasing an MVP is to acquire customer feedback that can be used to guide the product’s future development.

– Technopedia

The second reference, is a blog post by Eric Ries from 2009. The interesting thing about his blog post is how he defines an MVP:

[…]the minimum viable product is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.

– Eric Ries

The interesting bit is just in the next paragraph of his blog post: Some caveats right off the bat. MVP, despite the name, is not about creating minimal products. 🤔

So what is an MVP then?

I’ll give you my personal definition for an MVP, which I think is more in line of what Eric Ries describes in his blog post.

I, like so many others, used to believe that an MVP was a version of a real product that had the smallest amount of features (or just one) that would allow the validation of the idea (when in contact with real customers).

Since then my view of an MVP has changed quite a bit. A few years ago I came into contact with the bootstrapped SaaS communities. This group of people, mostly solopreneurs, are dedicated to get their products out and into the world to escape the 9-5 and live their lives as they choose to.

From this community of entrepreneurs I learned a completely different way of looking at this very notion of something viable – not only that, I even was confronted by it by not really defining one early on with a SaaS I co-founded (and failed) with a friend of mine (that’s a story for another time though).

Okay, okay, here comes my current definition for a Minimum Viable Product…

An MVP is the process of validating the market fit of a product or service you want to offer.

This means that, instead of building any software or service, you do the minimal amount of work to get people to unequivocally show interest for your product/service.

But how? I will tell you in a future blog post. Here is a hint: it has nothing to do with building an actual software project; stay tuned!