Minimum Viable Product Examples: Real Businesses That Started Small

The minimum viable product is one of the most cited and least understood concepts in the world of business building.

Most people hear minimum viable product and picture a half-finished version of the thing they eventually want to build. A rough draft of the real product. Something to launch with while the better version is in development.

That is not what an MVP is. That is a beta product. And the difference matters enormously.

A minimum viable product is not a reduced version of the final product. It is the smallest possible thing that tests the most important assumption underlying the business.

Usually that assumption is: will someone pay for this?

The MVP exists to answer that question with real evidence in the minimum amount of time and at the minimum possible cost. Once the answer is yes, you build more. Until you have the answer, building more is waste.

These real examples show what that actually looks like in practice.

Dropbox: A Video Before a Product

Before Dropbox built anything, Drew Houston made a three-minute video.

The video explained what Dropbox would do. It showed the problem it solved. It described the experience of using it.

There was no product. The video linked to a waitlist signup page. Overnight, the waitlist went from 5,000 names to 75,000.

The MVP was a video. The assumption being tested was: do people actually want seamless file syncing badly enough to sign up for early access?

The answer was unambiguous. And the answer came before a single line of production code was written.

The lesson is not to make a video instead of a product. The lesson is that before you build, the most valuable thing you can do is test whether the demand is real. A video that explains the thing and a page that captures signups is sufficient to test that. Houston did not need to build Dropbox to find out whether people wanted Dropbox.

Airbnb: Three Air Mattresses and a Website

The founders of Airbnb needed to pay rent. There was a design conference in San Francisco and hotels were sold out. They bought three air mattresses, put up a simple website offering their apartment as a place to stay, and charged a nightly rate.

Three people booked. They learned that strangers would pay to stay in someone else's home. They learned what the experience felt like for both sides. They learned what the hosts needed to feel safe and what the guests expected.

The MVP was three air mattresses in an apartment and a basic website. The assumption tested was: will people pay to sleep on a stranger's air mattress?

Yes. And that yes changed the entire direction of what they built.

Note what the MVP was not. It was not a platform. Not a trust infrastructure. Not a review system. Not an insurance product. Not any of the complex things Airbnb eventually became. Those things came after the fundamental assumption was confirmed with a real transaction.

Zappos: Buying Shoes From Other Stores

Nick Swirnmurn wanted to test whether people would buy shoes online.

He did not build inventory. He did not build a warehouse system. He walked into shoe stores, photographed the inventory, posted the photos on a basic website, and when someone ordered, he went back to the store, bought the shoes at retail price, and mailed them.

He lost money on every transaction. That was not the point. The point was to test whether people would buy shoes without trying them on first.

They did. The assumption was confirmed. And then Zappos built the real infrastructure.

The MVP for Zappos was a man buying shoes from a store and mailing them. It tested the most important assumption at zero infrastructure cost. The entire business model, and the eventual billion-dollar acquisition by Amazon, rested on that early confirmation.

Buffer: A Two-Page Website

Joel Gascoigne had an idea for a social media scheduling tool. Before building it, he put up a two-page website.

Page one described the product and had a button that said plans and pricing. Page two said the product was not ready yet but invited visitors to enter their email to be notified when it launched.

He drove traffic to the page. People clicked through. They entered their emails.

The MVP was two pages and a button that led nowhere. It tested whether people were interested enough in a social media scheduling tool to take any action at all. When they did, it confirmed enough interest to build the first version.

Then he built a slightly more functional version and sent it to the email list. People used it. He charged them. They paid. And then he built Buffer properly.

Two pages. Then a basic product. Then the real thing. The sequence of small confirmation steps before significant build investment is the entire principle.

Concierge MVP: Before the Software Exists

This is one of the most useful MVP patterns for solo founders and one of the least discussed.

The concierge MVP is when you manually deliver the service or outcome that your eventual software or product will deliver automatically.

You do the thing by hand, for a small number of customers, before building any automation. The customer experience looks like using a product. The back end is a person with a spreadsheet.

This works because it lets you confirm that customers value the outcome before you invest in automating the delivery. And it generates the feedback that shapes what you eventually automate in a way that isolated product building never could.

A founder building a financial tracking tool for freelancers might start with a spreadsheet template and a monthly consultation call. They manually produce the insights the eventual software will produce automatically. They charge for this. They learn what insights actually matter to the customer. Then they automate what the customer values.

The concierge MVP is particularly well-suited to solo founders building while employed because the manual delivery phase requires no technical build time. You can start generating revenue and customer knowledge immediately and build the automated version when you understand exactly what to build.

The Pattern Across All of These

Every real MVP example shares one thing.

It tested the most important assumption with the minimum possible build.

Dropbox tested demand with a video. Airbnb tested willingness to pay with air mattresses. Zappos tested online shoe purchasing with manual fulfillment. Buffer tested interest with pages that led nowhere.

None of them built the full product first. All of them confirmed the central assumption before committing significant resources to the build.

The question for your own business is: what is the single most important assumption that needs to be true for this to work? And what is the minimum possible test of that assumption?

For most businesses, the assumption is whether people will pay. The minimum test of whether people will pay is asking someone to pay before the full product exists. This is the pre-sale, and it is the most direct MVP available for most solo founders.

How to Pre-Sell a Product Before You Build It covers exactly how this works.

What Most People Build Instead of an MVP

They build a product that is fully functional across the core use case, polished in the interface, complete with multiple features, technically sound, and ready for scale.

Then they find out whether anyone wants it.

This is not an MVP. This is a product. And discovering at product-complete stage that the assumption was wrong is the most expensive possible place to make that discovery.

The version of your product that you feel comfortable launching publicly is almost always four to six times larger than the minimum viable test of the core assumption. That extra development time is not wasted if the assumption proves correct. But it is entirely wasted if the assumption proves incorrect, which happens more often than founders admit.

The permission the MVP concept is trying to give you is this: you do not need to build what you eventually want to build in order to find out if you should build it. You need to build the smallest possible thing that tells you whether the core assumption holds.

Then, if it does, build more.

Building an MVP While Employed

The MVP is particularly well-suited to the employed founder because the MVP is small.

Not eight months of evenings and weekends building a complete product. A concierge MVP might take two weeks to get to first customer. A pre-sale page takes a day. A video explaining the product and a signup form takes a week.

The timeline to meaningful market feedback is measured in days and weeks, not months. That feedback either confirms you are building something real or tells you to adjust before significant time has been invested.

If you are building toward leaving your job, the MVP approach is the correct one not just philosophically but practically. You do not have the time or the risk tolerance of a full-time founder with investor capital. You need to know whether your idea has a viable market before committing months of after-hours effort to building the full version.

How to Validate a Business Idea in 7 Days Without Spending Anything runs the validation process that precedes the MVP. And How to Find Your First 10 Customers Without Ads or a Big Audience covers what to do with the small customer base your MVP produces.

Build small first. Build right after you know it is worth building.

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FAQ

Q1: What is a minimum viable product? A minimum viable product is the smallest thing you can build or do to test the most important assumption underlying your business with real evidence. It is not a rough version of the final product. It is a specific test of a specific assumption, usually whether people will pay, designed to produce a real signal with the minimum investment of time and money.

Q2: What are some real examples of minimum viable products? Dropbox used a three-minute video before building any product. Airbnb started with three air mattresses and a basic website. Zappos manually bought and shipped shoes before building any infrastructure. Buffer used a two-page website with a button that went nowhere. Each tested one central assumption before committing significant build resources.

Q3: What is a concierge MVP and when should you use it? A concierge MVP is when you manually deliver the outcome your eventual product will deliver automatically, for a small number of paying customers, before building any software or infrastructure. It is particularly useful for solo founders because it generates real revenue and customer knowledge immediately without requiring technical build time. Use it when the value you are delivering is an outcome or insight that can initially be produced manually.

Q4: How do you know when your MVP is small enough? Ask what the single most important assumption is that needs to be true for the business to work. Design the smallest possible test of that one assumption. If your current MVP plan tests more than one assumption simultaneously or involves building features not directly required to test the core assumption, it is not minimal enough.

Q5: Should you launch an MVP publicly or test it with a small group? For most solo founders starting from zero, a small group is the right starting point. A public launch requires distribution you may not yet have. Testing with five to ten targeted people through direct outreach produces faster, higher-quality feedback and confirms the assumption with real payments before you invest in broader distribution.