METHODOLOGY

MVP

Minimum Viable Product

The smallest version of a product that lets you learn whether the idea is wrong. Not the smallest version that ships, the smallest version that teaches.

Last reviewed: byKevin Riedl wiki ↗

The word “viable” does the work in MVP, and almost everyone gets it wrong. Viable does not mean “a stripped-down version of the eventual product”. Viable means “sufficient to test the hypothesis that this product is worth building”. A landing page with a waitlist can be an MVP. A working product with three features can be a worse MVP than the landing page.

Worked example: a founder is convinced their hypothesis is “users will pay for automated invoice reconciliation”. The instinct is to spend three months building the reconciliation engine. The cheaper MVP that tests the actual hypothesis is a manual one: a landing page, a price, and a human doing the reconciliation by hand behind the scenes (a Wizard-of-Oz MVP). If nobody pays for the manual version, the engine would have been three wasted months. The build only starts once the willingness-to-pay is proven, which is exactly the kind of de-risking a discovery-phase is for.

There is an Austrian funding wrinkle worth knowing. aws Preseed and similar grants are often framed around reaching a “prototype” or “MVP” milestone, and founders sometimes let the grant’s definition dictate the build, padding the MVP with features that tick a funding box rather than test a hypothesis. Use the money to learn faster, not to build a heavier MVP than the learning requires. The grant rewards a milestone; the market rewards a validated assumption, and those are not always the same artifact.

The most common failure is building the MVP you imagined six months ago instead of the MVP that tests this week’s most uncertain assumption. Every week the riskiest assumption shifts, and most MVPs are obsolete before they ship. The honest trade-off: an MVP deliberately under-builds, so it will look unimpressive next to the polished thing in your head, and that discomfort is the price of learning fast. If the build phase runs past 8 to 12 weeks you are not building an MVP, you are building V1 under a kinder name. Wavect runs short agile cycles toward an MVP and names the hypothesis before scoping the build. Related: Fractional CTO Austria covers MVP leadership end to end.

// FAQ

FAQs

Confusing ‘minimum’ with ‘small version of the final product’. The right MVP tests this week’s riskiest assumption with the cheapest possible artifact. A landing page, a Wizard-of-Oz demo, or a Figma click-through often beats a real working build for the same learning.
If the build phase is over 8 to 12 weeks, you are probably not building an MVP, you are building V1 under a different name. The point of an MVP is fast learning, not feature-complete launch. If discovery says you need six months of build before you can test the hypothesis, the hypothesis is wrong-sized.
Polished enough that users do not bounce on aesthetics, ugly enough that you do not get attached to it. For B2C the bar is higher; for B2B you can ship behind a Loom video and a Calendly link and still learn what you need.