Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is a concept that comes to us from the world of product management, but it's extremely valuable for an entrepreneur to understand, especially if your startup is creating in the tech space. An MVP is a first version of your product that does just the single most vital job for the customer and is then released to the market (or a subset of the market) as a test of the concept or some assumption that the venture idea hinges on.
MVPs are one of many tests that are performed as part of the Lean Startup methodology. Some of the most common assumptions that are tested by an MVP are simply based around demand: if you make the simplest version of this app, do people download it?
<aside> 🚨 The letter people struggle with most in the acronym is the V: an MVP is not a prototype and should not look like one. CarMax's tech teams, when putting together an MVP, describe the product as "scrappy, not crappy" because while it may not have every single functionality the final product will, it shouldn't look bad or unpolished.
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One of the most crucial things to remember when piloting an MVP is that it does not need to be profitable because the profitability assumption is not necessarily what you're testing (unless it is.) At the end of the day, the MVP is an experimentation and validation tool that allows you to figure out what your Vision got right, and more importantly, what it got wrong.
With your MVP learnings in the bag, you likely have enough information to start looking to the next step of your project: sharing your idea with others. (Or, if things didn't go quite as you planned, changing your direction.)