MVP Is Not a Product. It’s a Question.

How to Build a Minimum Viable Product That Actually Works

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Back in the early days of digital products, building something new felt like constructing a cathedral: years of work, an army of craftsmen, and a budget fit for a duke.

But times have changed. Today, if you don’t show the world at least a rough sketch of your idea — the market simply forgets you exist.

A Minimum Viable Product (MVP) isn’t some half-baked prototype, like many still assume. It’s the first working version that does one single important thing — but does it so well that users are willing to overlook everything else. Sometimes it tests just one hypothesis. But the key is: fast, cheap, and focused.

Take Dropbox.
Instead of launching the product, the team doubled down on something simpler: a video.

Drew Houston recorded a 3-minute screencast showing — as if the product already existed — how the service worked: file syncing, clean UX, a little magic. Viewers watched his mouse glide across the screen — and that was enough.

📌 Within a few days, the site got over 100,000 visits. Beta signups jumped from 5,000 to 75,000. The video got over 10,000 views — in just one day. And only then did the team start public development.

That’s the essence of MVP: not to build — but to first find out if you even should.

And that’s why MVPs aren’t just for startups. In large companies — where projects often drown in approvals — MVPs can cut through the red tape and validate if an idea has real potential. It could be an internal tool, a revamped service, or a process redesign. The point is to test value before making a big investment.

There are plenty of misconceptions here:
❌ MVP isn’t a “student project.”
❌ It’s not “let’s just launch and figure it out later.”

The point of an MVP is not to release something crappy.
It’s to learn — quickly — whether anyone actually needs what you’re building. And if so, what exactly they need.
The sooner you know that, the less time and money you’ll waste.

How MVP Differs from a Wireframe, Mockup, or Prototype

Let’s be honest — there are way too many terms out there.
Wireframe, mockup, prototype, MVP — sounds like you need a UX design degree just to make sense of it all.
But if you zoom out, it’s actually pretty simple.