Product-Market Fit
Business & StrategyThe moment a product satisfies a real market so well that customers pull it from you instead of you pushing it on them — and growth starts to feel almost easy…
Business & Strategy
Minimum Viable Product
MVP
Robert KlimantCo-founder
What is Minimum Viable Product?
A Minimum Viable Product, or MVP, is the simplest version of a product that delivers enough value for real users to try it and give feedback. Popularized by Eric Ries in The Lean Startup, the MVP is a learning tool, not a final product. It exists to test a core hypothesis with as little time and money as possible before investing in scale.
Why it matters
Most products fail because the team built the wrong thing well, not the right thing badly. An MVP forces a different question. What is the one assumption that, if wrong, makes everything else pointless. Then it ships the smallest thing that can answer that. Teams that skip this stage spend twelve months polishing features for a market that does not exist. Teams that embrace it find out in six weeks. The MVP is not an excuse to ship something ugly. It is permission to ship something narrow — and learn before you scale.
How it works
Define the one job the product needs to do, and the one customer it needs to do it for. Strip everything else. Build only what is required to deliver that job — sometimes a working app, sometimes a landing page with a waitlist, sometimes a manual concierge service behind the scenes. Put it in front of real users, measure whether they actually use it, and interview them. If the core hypothesis holds, expand. If it does not, pivot. The output of an MVP is not revenue. It is evidence — for or against the idea you were about to spend a year on.
Related terms
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Prototype
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