Is MVP Outdated in 2025?

It's 2025, nearly a quarter-century since Frank Robinson coined "MVP" in 2001.

Robinson described MVP as a functional product "just the right size" for immediate needs. Eric Ries later refined it as "the smallest thing you can make or do to test your hypothesis."

Here's where things get interesting: Ries never required this "smallest thing" to be a working product. He explicitly recommended against writing code until evidence justified that investment.

There are two major problems tho:

1. People don't read the fine print 2. The P in MVP stands for Product

This creates a narrative that founders must build something to test ideas. The result? Countless founders spend thousands on MVPs only to discover nobody will pay for them.

## The Monkey and the Pedestal: A Mental Model

Consider this analogy: You need to teach a monkey to juggle flaming torches while standing on a pedestal.

Building a platform (pedestal) is straightforward, but teaching a monkey to juggle torches may be impossible.

The real challenge for any SaaS product is determining if people will pay for your solution. There's no point in creating a beautiful interface if nobody wants your product.

This mental model emphasises tackling the hardest problems first. For SaaS products, building the digital product is actually the easy part—it's just creating a pedestal. The difficult task is verifying if anyone would pay for your solution.

## From MVP to Pre-Build in|Validation™

Maybe we need a new framework that prioritises challenging our assumptions before writing code.

Enter Pre-Build in|Validation —an approach where we deliberately challenge ideas before investing resources in building them.

The term deliberately places "in" before "validation" because this process is equally about invalidating ideas as validating them. Many founders fall victim to confirmation bias, seeking evidence that supports their hypothesis while ignoring contradictory signals. Catching fatal flaws early saves tremendous resources. A quick, inexpensive "no" is far more valuable than an expensive, time-consuming "maybe."

## A Real-World Example: Bilingual Books

I had an idea for bilingual books with flexible language alternation—allowing readers to choose how text is displayed across two languages.

Instead of building this product, I spent just 5.5 hours over 10 days gathering feedback from parents raising bilingual children. This minimal investment provided invaluable feedback that led me to abandon the idea. Had I built an MVP first, I would have wasted months of development time and significant resources.

## Is MVP Truly Outdated?

Perhaps not entirely but its interpretation needs recalibration.

Somewhere along the way, "minimum viable product" became interpreted as "the smallest product we can build" rather than "the smallest experiment we can run."

What if we returned to Ries's original intent? What if we recognised that the "P" in MVP doesn't necessarily mean "product" in the conventional sense?

Our industry might benefit from embracing approaches that emphasise challenging assumptions before writing code. The true bottleneck isn't technical capability—it's finding a genuine problem-solution fit that people will pay for.

## The Path Forward

As founders in 2025, we have unprecedented access to tools and frameworks. The barriers to creating digital products are lower than ever. Paradoxically, this ease of creation makes it even more critical to validate ideas before building.

Perhaps it's time to move beyond MVP as our guiding framework and embrace methodologies that prioritise early invalidation over premature validation. After all, the most valuable learning often comes not from confirming what we believe, but from discovering why we might be wrong.

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What do you think? Has MVP served its purpose, or does it still have relevance today?