There will be done uncertainty, as all possibilities cannot be tested. But just because something is hard or even impossible to identify, it does not mean the concept is not valid.

> So, the minimum viable product is that product which has just those features (and no more) that allows you to ship a product that resonates with early adopters; some of whom will pay you money or give you feedback.

Seems pretty clear to me, perhaps the trickiness comes around whether or not absolutely anything that gets feedback is an MVP? I don't get how you'd say with a straight face that you shipped a product when what you actually did was go around with a questionnaire.

> How do you do know if it's "smallest" or "viable"?

You explicitly chose situations where there were extra, unused features and where the product as a whole was completely useless. If you have a product with more features than you needed, you can't really say you succeeded in making the minimum viable product, and if you have a product nobody wants is it really sensible to refer to it as a viable product?

Is the startup world at such a point that nobody knows what might constitute a viable product? Sure, there's some blurred points around not-yet-profitable-but-growing things, but if your target audience finds your thing absolutely useless is it really that unclear?

> Walk me through your process.

Again, I have no problem with the process and it's a shame this has picked up so much attention instead of actual discussion around that. I just don't want to have to deal with the following conversations:

"We've built an MVP"

"Great! How did the launch go?"

"Launch? Oh my no, we've just finished a focus group session. The next MVP is at 4pm if you want to sit in."

> I think it's fair to say that you need more than an acronym to understand what to do.

Yes, this is true, which is surely why we already have terms like market research. I just don't understand what benefit calling market research "building an MVP" has.

My initial criticism was that you'd redefined what I thought was a well understood term. If I'm wrong about that (which I seem to be) then I'd change my criticism to "If something is poorly understood, please don't redefine it to mean something different again". When I see a title like "X isn't X, it's Y" my immediate thought is that someone is trying to give an old idea a new name to make it more current and sexy, that may not be fair but it's my first reaction to this kind of thing.

Perhaps I just need to step back from all this for a while. Perhaps in this world you really can refer to a marketing video as a viable product, and I'm a crazed outsider. I'd hoped to be clear about simple definitions of words yet caused/opened up even more confusion and disagreement, so I guess I've failed at my minimal useful comment.

In this case, the video was the minimum viable product. The MVP validated Drew’s leap-of-faith assumption that customers wanted the product he was developing not because they said so in a focus group or because of a hopeful analogy to another business, but because they actually signed up.

I think this is a very interesting quote. For one thing, it urges us to expand our notion of what a product is. It isn't necessarily an actual working piece of software; it can be a mock-up or faked demo -- but in any case it's still something that can be shown to potential customers.

But the question that some of us are raising is, when could the video be called an MVP? The answer we would suggest is, it becomes an MVP only after it receives an enthusiastic response from the market. Note that the Ries quote is completely consistent with this interpretation: by the time Ries wrote it, the video had received such a response. Our argument is that while Drew Houston was making the video, it wasn't an MVP yet: it was only an experiment, an attempt at making an MVP, but not yet a validated MVP.

So I disagree that "MVP" is "a term of art and can't really be broken down word by word". Rather, I think that people haven't understood exactly what Ries and Blank mean by it.

That's like saying the Most Valuable Player is the fan that provided the most value to a player. You named it wrong.