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Lesson 1 of 3 · beginner

What a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) Actually Is

An MVP is not a smaller app. It's a test wearing an app's clothes.

Prefer to listen? This video is also an episode of the CodeYam podcast: Lesson 1: What a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) Actually Is.

In this lesson3 chapters
  1. 00:00What's a Minimum Viable Product?
  2. 00:22You don't actually have an app idea right now, you have a belief.
  3. 00:47How to think about it
TranscriptClick any timestamp to jump the video there.
00:00

What's a Minimum Viable Product?

On today's lesson, I'm going to talk about what a minimal viable product is: an MVP. So everybody thinks an MVP means a smaller version of their app, but that's not wrong and that's not completely correct either. So MVP stands for minimal viable product, and the word that matters there isn't minimum, it's viable.

00:22

You don't actually have an app idea right now, you have a belief.

So you don't actually have an app idea right now, you have a belief. A guess that some group of people has a problem and that your solution would make their life better. An MVP is the fastest, cheapest way to find out if that guess is true before you spend three months building something nobody asked for. It's not a stripped down version of your dream app, it's an experiment. And experiments only need to be good enough to get you an honest answer.

00:47

How to think about it

So before you open a single tool and start building and probably like lose a lot of time building something nobody wants, just ask yourself. What is the one belief I need to test first? Write that down. That question is what the that whole That question is what the whole series is about.