People often get hung up on the ‘viable’ part of a minimum viable product (MVP) and tend to think of it as something that can be crappy. Framing how you are building the first revision of a product idea as a minimum remarkable product (MRP?) makes clear that it has to be obviously better than what’s currently out there or it will not get anyone’s attention.
This framing is less of a functional definition (minimum viable evokes ‘it kinda sorta works’) and more of a user centered definition (minimum remarkable evokes ‘what would get our users attention?').
(I couldn’t find a source, but it comes from Amazon or Jeff Bezos).
See also:
- This is closer to the advice of build an initial product a small group of users love
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Having ‘good taste’ is difficult to define. Taste is subjective, it is only confirmed by assent from others (from Immanual Kant) a kind of determinate negation.
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Rather than spend months building an MVP, which might not work, you can test a startup idea incrementally. Minimum viable testing is when you create a real-life test of the riskiest assumptions you are making about an idea. If it fails a test, you can disqualify an idea or iterate on it. It can be done faster than building an MVP and give more confidence that your idea will work so you can skip the MVP and move directly to company building.