This article is entirely about startups, which means the title is too click-baity. The idea of MVP makes a lot more sense in its more common setting: mundane co

This article is entirely about startups, which means the title is too click-baity. The idea of MVP makes a lot more sense in its more common setting: mundane corporate backoffice applications. In such a setting your audience is not millions of people; sometimes it can be one person. When you have a small audience you aren't afforded the freedom to decide what the product should be. Of course you control the eventual product, but the stakeholder has a huge say in what must be done, and they often have a fairly clear idea of what they want. That's where MVP comes in. You and the "customer" (stakeholder) come to an agreement on the eventual product, and you deliver an MVP to them as a milestone. The point of this MVP is to give the customer something that delivers a bit of value early on, and gives them a way to try out their initial idea to see if it really holds water. Through their time using the MVP they are able to sooner refine and readjust their wish list. Maybe the end product they initially asked for wasn't quite right after all. In the case of startups, I sort of agree with the author, but he's still missing something: the first customer is you. Yes you should have a crystalline idea of your eventual product (similar to corporate stakeholders) because that is what separates you from your competition. But you should still use MVP! MVP doesn't mean delivering unfinished garbage. MVP just means there's more to come later. "Viable" is completely subjective, and in the case of a startup with a grand vision it should absolutely be a much higher bar than usual. You the customer/entrepreneur need the MVP because you need to see how your product performs when you present it to millions of people. The whole point is just to avoid the morass of never-ending vaporware with years of missed deadlines, only to finally deliver something nobody wants. If "MVP" is too much of a trigger word you're welcome to call it whatever you want ¯\_(ツ)_/¯