Product term
Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
Coined by Eric Ries, MVP is the smallest version of the product that lets a customer complete a meaningful job and produces validated learning about whether they would do it again. The 'viable' in MVP is doing work — the product must be viable, not just minimum. Many indie SaaS launches confuse minimum with broken; the discipline is to ship the smallest complete loop, not the largest incomplete one.
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How to operationalize this
Define the smallest user-job your product enables, end-to-end. Ship that. Add features only when the job-as-shipped reveals what is missing — not before. Pre-launch feature creep is the MVP's failure mode; shipping the half-complete version is the other failure mode.
Common misuse
Shipping a half-product with broken signup, missing payment, or one feature that does not work end-to-end. That is not an MVP; that is a beta. MVP requires a complete loop, even if narrow.
What “good” looks like for indie SaaS
MVP that does ONE thing end-to-end, has working signup + payment + delivery + access, and lets a real customer complete the value loop without founder intervention. Anything less is pre-MVP and customer-development territory.
Frequently asked
- Should the MVP have a free tier?
- Usually no. Free-tier complexity slows MVP shipping and produces non-customer feedback. Free-tier decisions are a Year-2 question, not an MVP question.
Apply the term to a live page
The free 90-second Launch Diagnostic labels which Brunson failure mode your page hits — many of these terms have direct connections to the diagnosis.