If Lean Startup is a philosophy of learning amid uncertainty, then MVP (Minimum Viable Product) is the tool to learn the fastest, cheapest, and most truthfully. But “minimum” does not mean “half-hearted,” and “viable” does not just mean “can survive.” A true MVP is Meaningful – Valuable – Practical: meaningful in its learning goal, valuable to real users, and practical within available resources.
Over 10 years of practicing Lean Startup in Vietnam, KisStartup has witnessed many ventures that began with a “small” MVP but unlocked entirely new business models. Conversely, some failed because they “loved their product more than the market.” These lessons reveal that MVPs are not meant to prove you are right, but to discover what is right for the market—even to redefine what “product” really means.
MVP Is Not a Product – It’s a Question Materialized
One of the most common misunderstandings about MVPs is to treat them as the “first version” of a complete product. In reality, an MVP is the cheapest way to answer the most expensive question: Do customers truly need this solution?
Tony Hsieh, founder of Zappos, did not launch a full e-commerce platform, buy inventory, or write code. He simply photographed shoes from nearby stores and posted them online. When someone placed an order, he went back to buy and ship them himself. That MVP taught him the key insight: people were willing to buy shoes online even without trying them on.
Dropbox did something similar. Before building any software, they created a short video demonstrating how it would work. The three-minute clip attracted tens of thousands of sign-ups—clear proof of real demand.
These classic cases teach us that an MVP is not an “unfinished product,” but a carefully designed learning experiment. It measures not “technical quality,” but the market’s readiness.
A Meaningful MVP – When the Product Helps You Learn What Matters Most
From KisStartup’s experience, the value of an MVP lies not in whether it succeeds or fails, but in what the team learns and can act upon afterward.
We’ve worked with many founders who believed they needed a “complete version” before selling. But testing with MVPs often revealed that the market wanted something entirely different—sometimes just a component, a complementary service, or even data they had unintentionally created.
An agricultural startup once spent nearly two years developing farm management software. Encouraged to test an MVP by selling only the soil moisture sensor module, they unexpectedly received large orders from fertilizer companies interested in monitoring soil quality. That “small” MVP not only generated sales but also opened a new B2B model—selling intermediate products instead of final ones.
Such cases convinced KisStartup that MVPs help expand the definition of “product.” Intermediate goods, data, accompanying services—all can be “products” if they create customer value and fit current capabilities. MVPs free founders from the “perfection trap,” shifting them from product-oriented to market-oriented learning.
Meaningful – Valuable – Practical: The Three Pillars of a Living MVP
Meaningful – Focused Learning
A meaningful MVP must help you learn something specific and measurable. It’s not about “seeing who likes it.” “Meaningful” means each experiment must link to a clear hypothesis and decision criterion.
If you launch a website without knowing what you’re testing—pricing, messaging, or distribution—you’re running a guessing exercise, not an MVP.
Being meaningful also means accepting the truth, even if it’s uncomfortable. If data show customers don’t care, that’s not failure—it’s cheap tuition for an expensive lesson.
KisStartup once guided a food startup to run an MVP through a free tasting session. Sales were low, but feedback revealed that customers preferred traditional flavors over the “modern” ones the founders had assumed. The next version succeeded precisely because they learned the right lesson. The MVP wasn’t flashy, but it was meaningful—it taught them what mattered.
Valuable – Real Value for Real People
An MVP meaningful to you may not be valuable to customers. “Valuable” means your MVP must deliver real, tangible value to users, however small. No one wants to participate in an “experiment” unless it benefits them somehow.
Value can be functional, emotional, or experiential. Dropbox’s simple demo video wasn’t a working product, but it clearly conveyed value: syncing files effortlessly.
In Vietnam, many teams mistake MVPs for “internal demos,” tested only among friends or employees—not real users. Data from such contexts are fake data. A valuable MVP must be exposed to the real market, face real reactions, and handle real feedback.
In our programs, we often ask founders: “Why would someone spend time trying your MVP?” If you can’t answer that, you don’t yet have a valuable MVP.
Practical – Feasible with What You Have
Even the most meaningful and valuable MVP will fail if it’s not practical. “Practical” doesn’t mean oversimplified; it means achievable within your current constraints—money, time, technology, and team capacity.
Many Vietnamese startups fall into the “perfection syndrome”: waiting until they have enough funding, people, and time to start. But Lean Startup teaches that learning doesn’t require “enough”—only “enough to learn.”
A herbal tea cooperative in Lào Cai wanted new packaging, a registered brand, and an online shop before launch. Instead, they tested a practical MVP: temporary labels, direct sales at a fair, and feedback recorded manually. Immediate responses revealed their real target audience—elderly consumers, not young people.
Practical means doing it now with available means. A practical MVP sustains continuous learning and prevents endless “preparation loops.”
When MVP Makes You Love Data More Than Products
The magic of MVPs is that they shift founders’ love from products to data. When you truly aim to learn, you stop trying to prove your product is great—you start trying to understand why users react the way they do.
A community-based tourism startup in Sơn La once spent months designing full service packages. When they ran an MVP by inviting a small group to stay with local families, they learned travelers loved the food and culture but disliked poor sanitation and comfort. The insight: invest in service standards, not infrastructure. The result—lower cost, higher impact.
When MVPs are executed with the Meaningful – Valuable – Practical mindset, data becomes the compass, and the market—not your plan—becomes the teacher.
MVP as a Never-Ending Learning Loop
An MVP doesn’t end when you make your first sale. It ends only when you stop learning. At KisStartup, we call this the “learning saturation point”—when the product, market, and behaviors are clear enough to move from exploration to optimization.
Yet even then, the MVP spirit continues. Every marketing campaign, every feature tweak, every new version can be seen as a new MVP—a new learning loop. Successful startups maintain a learning velocity faster than the market’s change velocity.
Three Practical Principles for Building a Meaningful MVP
There’s no universal formula, but from hundreds of cases, KisStartup distills three core principles:
- Ask right before acting right. Every MVP should begin with the question: “What assumption, if wrong, would collapse my plan?” Identify your riskiest assumption first—then design to learn about it.
- Start small but measure seriously. A 100-user MVP with real behavior data beats 10,000 views with no measurement. Tie your data to actions: clicks, purchases, feedback, returns.
- Stay flexible. MVPs are not for defending your idea but discovering opportunities. If customers want to buy intermediate goods or rent instead of own, treat that as insight, not deviation. Many great business models emerged from such small turns.
MVP as a Mirror of Awareness
A meaningful MVP doesn’t just generate quick revenue—it reveals unseen realities. It’s a mirror that strips away illusions, narrowing the gap between expectations and actual customer behavior.
After 10 years of Lean Startup practice in Vietnam, what KisStartup values most isn’t the successful products but the transformation in founders’ mindsets—from “making what I like” to “learning to make what the market needs.”
Meaningful – Valuable – Practical aren’t just words; they represent three levels of founder maturity:
- Meaningful: I know what I’m learning and why it matters.
- Valuable: I know who truly benefits from my product.
- Practical: I act within my limits, yet continuously expand my learning capacity.
MVPs are meaningful because they help entrepreneurs fall in love with data, not illusions—observe rather than assume—and, above all, learn by doing.
“The market doesn’t speak in words; it speaks through behavior. MVPs are how we listen.”
— KisStartup, 10 Years of Lean Startup in Vietnam
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