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Comment by dsugarman | Hacker News Reader

This article really vibes with me in general and is just a great piece of content.

I was a little disappointed in the examples though, running a course is an MVP and delivering a meal is an MVP. MVPs don't need to be software, in these cases, the software is actually definitively not a minimal approach, proven with a non software example of the MVP.

So is a test viable? I have asked people to pay for things I hadn't built yet and didn't intend to build if they wouldn't prepay, is that an MVT and not an MVP? Are waitlists and crowdfunding campaigns MVTs?

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As Sprig was shuttered after 4 years and $56 million in funding, it doesn't seem like it was a good test.

Being able to cook meals and deliver them doesn't seem like a test. Thousands of restaurants do that every day, and national chains do it at scale. The test needed to be is there a market at the price point necessary to sustain the kind of meal he envisioned and I guess the answer to that was no.

What would have been enlightening in the article are examples of negative tests -- something one of the firms he was involved with tested and failed at, which led them to reevaluate.

Further down in the article he mentions a failed test for a tour marketplace where locals will show you around, but I agree that I would have liked to have seen more negative result examples than just the one.

> running a course is an MVP and delivering a meal is an MVP.

Yes I too was hoping for something a bit more radically different to my existing definition of what an MVP is.

I definitely agree that it's easy to over engineer MVPs - I'm guilty of that myself, a lot, but many/most of the "MVT's" described here really just sound like non over-engineered MVPs.

Nevertheless, the article is still useful as a reminder to really pair it down to the absolute bare essentials at the beginning. So essentially what we end up with is a "minimal viable MVP"!

I was curious to see no mention of doing any kind of research via some sort of survey - to not necessarily canvass potential customers on whether they'd buy the product, but more around the problem space, what problems they currently have etc. To me this seems like quite a low-hanging fruit to help validate ideas?

Paying someone to plan a trip for you is definitely not a product, so not a MVP. Running a course is closer to a full-fledged product (more than a MVP) for a company that sells courses to students, but Maven is a platform for creating courses...

By the definitions laid out in the article waitlists and crowdfunding campaigns would be MVTs to address marketing or "building something people don’t want" risk.

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