The Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is one of the most widely used terms in product development. Yet it is also one of the most misunderstood.

Many founders and product leaders treat MVPs as a smaller, cheaper versions of the final products. An MVP becomes an early version of the product, with a reduced set of features. But an MVP is not a product to reach the market faster. It is rather an experiment to learn about the market faster.

This post debunks the most common myths about MVPs, using examples where useful. They are not scientifically valid, but reflect my own experience with MVPs.

1) An MVP is the first version of a product

This is probably the most controversial myth. An MVP is not necessarily the first version of a product. An MVP is an instrument for learning about the market. It is an experiment designed to test whether a customer need, market or business hypothesis is strong enough to justify further investment. Sometimes that experiment requires building a product. Sometimes it does not.

Many startup founders correctly place an MVP as an early milestone in their go-to-market plan. But then they spend too much time building it simply because they interpret it as the first version of their product. There is nothing wrong with building a product early, but it is not always necessary. An MVP can be something much simpler than an app, and sometimes it can be a landing page, a prototype, a manual service or even a direct sales experiment. The point is not to build the smallest product. The point is to find the simplest way to learn what you need to know about the product’s value proposition.

Let us take Jenny, an entrepreneur wanting to build a business around plants and agriculture. She is very good with plants, but she does not know how to create a shiny app where people can post photos, receive updates and generate real-time feeds.

The problem is that Jenny does not need a product. She has already moved one step too far. She is assuming that somewhere there are people who want this product. But she does not yet know who these people are, how much it would cost to reach them, whether they can find the business themselves, or whether they will like the idea. In a nutshell, she does not know whether her idea can become a business.

The more original the idea, the more important it is to validate that there are people who recognize the need the product is supposed to address. That is what MVPs are for.

2) Building an MVP requires developers

Since an MVP is an experiment for learning, it does not necessarily require a team of developers.

Nowadays, there are many tools for running market tests: landing-page builders, no-code tools, integration platforms and AI tools that can help founders and marketers create prototypes, content and experiments quickly.

Does this mean Jenny will never need developers to build her product? Of course not. Building a product is a different story. A product is not a short-lived experiment. It is something designed to create value repeatedly, for real customers, and to support the business over time. That requires technical competence and product ownership.

What Jenny needs is not an app, but a way to test whether her target segments are interested in her value proposition. She could, for example, set up a simple web page and run different campaigns, one for each segment. She does not need a shiny product for this. What matters to her is proving that customers buy into her idea.

3) An MVP is a Proof of Concept

Technical teams are often looking for new technologies or new ways to integrate them into a product. For this type of work, they often use a Proof of Concept (PoC) to test whether a technical approach is feasible.

The problem starts when a successful PoC is treated as proof that the market will care about the product. In reality, a PoC and an MVP answer two different questions.

While a PoC asks: “Can we make this work?” an MVP asks: “Does this create enough value for someone to use, adopt or pay for it?”

A successful PoC is therefore not necessarily a successful MVP. A technology can work perfectly and still solve a problem nobody cares enough about. A PoC reduces technical uncertainty. An MVP reduces customer and market uncertainty. Both uncertainties are required to go from an idea to he market.

4) An MVP requires efficient operational processes

For products where value proposition is tangible or requires some kind of physical product, product teams often consider an MVP as an assembly of various components to reproduce the process that delivers value to the customers.

This can be a good strategy to test the operational process behind the value proposition. But it can lead to spend resources to build a process that customers do not care about.

In one of his posts, Steve Blank tells about a Stanford startup that wanted to sell to farmers hyperspectral images acquired using drones. The team was preparing to buy drones, cameras and image-processing software and integrate the whole system. The problem was that the farmers did not care how the data was produced. They cared about whether the data could help them do their jobs better. The team had confused the goal of the MVP with the process used to deliver the solution. The real goal was to find out whether farmers would pay for useful data, not whether the team could successfully fly a drone, capture images and process them.

That distinction between value proposition and process behind the scenes is extremely important. An MVP may need to reproduce the customer experience, but it does not necessarily need to reproduce the future operating model. A delivery platform does not need inventory management, route optimization and a full team of riders to test its value proposition.

5) As the MVP is for market testing, product quality comes second

Because an MVP is often considered the first version of a product, teams sometimes assume that customers should tolerate poor quality, poor performance or unreliable service.

An MVP can have fewer features than the final product. It can be narrow, manual and incomplete. But the core experience must still live up to the value proposition.

A bank testing a new peer-to-peer lending model cannot afford to make the MVP unsafe just because it is the first version of a new value proposition. A stock-trading platform cannot compromise on basic reliability, security or availability simply because the product is being tested. An MVP in the health-care space cannot have a sluggish user experience.

Customers judge the promise they are experiencing. But they also have basic, non-negotiable, expectations that the product, or the MVP, must meet.

6) An MVP does not need to be maintainable

As an MVP is often short-lived, maintainability is sometimes considered irrelevant. That is partly correct.

On one hand you do not need to optimize the MVP as if it were the final architecture of your product. You may deliberately use shortcuts, manual processes or temporary components. But this should not be considered as an excuse for an MVP that is difficult to maintain. This is especially true when using AI tools to build MVPs, that are often difficult to maintain.

An MVP that takes longer to repair than to learn from is already becoming expensive.

So, the real objective to build a lean MVP is to avoid building infrastructure for a future that has not been validated yet. At the same time, the MVP should be reliable enough to run the experiment, understand what is happening and learn from it without spending excessive time maintaining it.

7) An MVP is only for products, not for features

The concept of MVP is typically for startups building products from scratches. But this does not mean that it cannot be applied to companies upgrading their existing products with new features.

A product and a feature both contain assumptions about customer value. Both can therefore be tested before making a large investment.

There is also the Minimum Viable Feature (MVF): the smallest version of a feature that can create enough value and evidence to determine whether the feature is worth developing further. Instead of building a complete feature and then asking whether customers use it, you can first test the underlying assumption that customers will actually use the feature.

8) A two-sided platform requires only one MVP

A two-sided platform is a special type of business in which two different customer groups depend on each other. Typically, one side represents supply and the other demand. Uber has drivers and passengers. Airbnb has hosts and guests.

Both sides are essential. As such, they should be validated separately.

Let us return to Jenny for a moment. Suppose she wants to build a platform where different landowners grow and maintain plants rather than Jenny doing all the work herself. She now has two markets to test: the people who want to adopt the plants and the people willing to grow them. Jenny might first create a simple page where customers can choose a plant and a location. To test the experience, she could manually arrange supply through a few friends or existing growers. If customers show strong interest, she can move on with recruiting landowners who provide the service under the proposed model.

There is one more aspect that is critical for two-sided platforms: liquidity. Liquidity is the ability of buyers and sellers to find a suitable counterpart when they need one. A marketplace may have plenty of buyers and plenty of sellers and still fail because they cannot match each other at the right time, place or price. For some two-sided platforms, the MVP is complete only when both sides of the market and liquidity have been tested.

For Jenny, liquidity may not be a deal breaker. A customer looking to adopt a chestnut tree somewhere in Italy may accept an avocado tree in Greece instead. For a food-delivery or taxi platform, that flexibility does not exist. If the restaurant, driver or customer is not available in the right place at the right time, the platform does not work.

So, a two-sided platform may require multiple MVPs, each addressing one different aspect of the business.

9) The success of an MVP is a proxy for the success of the product

An MVP is an experiment designed to test one or more hypotheses. Its results therefore depend heavily on how the experiment is designed, particularly which customers are included in the test and what is measured.

A narrow or unrepresentative market sample can create a very convincing but completely misleading result. For example, imagine a market where customers traditionally buy through distributors or sales agents. Creating a landing page and running an online marketing campaign directly to consumers may produce weak results. That does not necessarily mean there is no demand. It may simply mean that the MVP is testing the wrong route to market. In this case, the more relevant experiment may be to approach distributors directly and test whether they are willing to carry the product.

This is one of the most important things to understand about MVPs. An MVP does not tell you whether your business will succeed. It tells you something about a specific hypothesis under specific conditions. The quality of the conclusion depends on the quality of the experiment.

10) An MVP requires venture capital

This is probably the myth that summarizes all the others.

Many startups think they need external funding to build their MVP. A hardware company may need to buy physical components. A biotech startup may need laboratory work. A regulated medical product may require regulatory compliance. Customer acquisition itself can also be expensive.

Yet the essence of an MVP is to reduce market uncertainty before making a larger commitment. Reducing uncertainty can often be done with very little money, especially when the experiment can be run manually or with existing tools.

Thus, the philosophy process is not to define the scope of an MVP, figure out how much it costs and then go after the money to build it. The right approach should be to define the most icritical piece of uncertainty about the market, and then find the cheapest credible experiment that can reduce that uncertainty.

This changes the role of early capital. Its purpose is no longer simply to turn an idea into a product. It is to move the company through the next meaningful uncertainty-reduction cycle. Moreover, once you reduce market uncertainty by showing evidence of real customer demand, investors will see the product vision as more valuable than before.