MVP (Minimum Viable Product)

A Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is the most stripped-down version of a product that still delivers enough value to attract early adopters and generate meaningful feedback. The concept, popularized by Eric Ries in "The Lean Startup," emphasizes learning over perfection: build the smallest thing possible, get it into users' hands, and iterate based on what you learn.

The key word is "viable": an MVP must actually solve a real problem well enough that people will use it. A landing page with an email signup is not an MVP; it is a smoke test. A buggy, confusing product that frustrates users is not an MVP; it is a bad product. The best MVPs solve one problem exceptionally well and ignore everything else.

Common MVP mistakes include building too much (spending months perfecting features nobody asked for), building too little (releasing something so incomplete it does not test the real hypothesis), and not defining success criteria upfront. Before building an MVP, founders should articulate: what specific hypothesis are we testing? What metric will tell us if it is validated? What will we do if it succeeds or fails?