I was reading The Lean Startup by Eric Ries the other day. In one of his stories, he talks about how his team at IMVU spent over six months building what they thought was their minimum viable product. They launched it to the market with high hopes… only to realize that customers didn’t care.
Of course, they walked away with lessons because that’s what startups do when things don’t work out. But Ries asked a question that stuck with me:
What if we didn’t need six months to learn this lesson? What if we could’ve learned it in weeks, maybe even days?
That question got me thinking about something I now call the MVP of MVP.
Why MVPs sometimes fail us
The MVP idea sounds great in theory: build the smallest possible version of your product, put it in front of customers, and learn quickly.
But in practice? Founders often spend three to six months building their MVPs. By then, they’ve poured in countless assumptions, lines of code, and a good portion of their emotions. If customers don’t care, the crash is brutal.
It makes you pause and wonder: Is there a way to test whether an MVP is even worth building in the first place?
Enter the MVP of MVP
Here’s how I see it: the MVP of MVP is the smallest, quickest, cheapest experiment you can run to figure out if your idea even deserves an MVP.
It’s not the product. It’s not even a prototype. It’s simply a test to answer one question: should I go ahead with building an MVP at all?
This isn’t a new idea, but it deserves a new name
When I thought about it more, I realized some of the most successful startups actually did this without calling it that.
- Dropbox didn’t start with a file-syncing app. They made a short demo video. People signed up, proving demand.
- Airbnb didn’t start with a polished platform. They put air mattresses in their apartment and rented them to conference attendees.
- Zappos didn’t begin with warehouses of shoes. The founder took pictures in stores, posted them online, and manually fulfilled orders.
Each of these could’ve taken months of engineering. Instead, they ran quick experiments in days or weeks. That’s the MVP of MVP in action.
Why it matters even more today
Things move faster now than when The Lean Startup was published. By the time you spend six months on an MVP, the trend you’re chasing might already be gone.
On top of that, the tools we have today - no-code platforms, website builders, AI design tools, and even simple WhatsApp groups - make it ridiculously easy to test an idea almost instantly.
And let’s be real, attention spans are short. You don’t always get multiple shots to convince people. Early signals matter.
The honest limitations
I won’t sugarcoat it: an MVP of MVP isn’t a silver bullet. Sometimes, a scrappy test makes people walk away when they might have loved a more polished version. And sometimes people say “yes” to a landing page or demo video but don’t stick around when the real product launches.
That’s fine. Think of it as a filter. The MVP of MVP tells you whether to even bother building an MVP. The MVP itself then tells you whether it’s worth scaling into a full product.
How to think about it
Next time you’re hyped about an idea, pause and ask yourself three questions:
- What’s the core assumption I am making?
- What’s the quickest way to test it without spending months?
- What signal will convince me to build a real MVP?
That “quickest way” could be as simple as:
- A landing page with a signup button
- A few ads to measure clicks
- Manually offering the service over chat
- A short explainer video
The point is that it takes days or weeks, not months.
Wrapping up
If IMVU had tested their idea with an MVP of MVP, maybe they wouldn’t have spent six months building something nobody wanted.
For founders today, this isn’t just a “what if.” It’s becoming a necessity. Before you spend months building an MVP, ask yourself: what is my MVP of MVP?
Because sometimes, the fastest way forward isn’t building faster - it’s learning faster.
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