The MVP Trap: Why Your Minimum Viable Product Isn't
Most MVPs are either too minimal to learn anything or too built-out to call minimum. Here's how to find the sweet spot that actually validates your idea.
Everyone says “build an MVP.” It’s startup gospel at this point. The problem is that almost nobody does it right.
What we typically see falls into two camps. Either you get a barely functional prototype that teaches you nothing because nobody can actually use it. Or you get a six-month development effort with 40 features that someone insists is “minimum.” Both are traps. And both burn time and money that early-stage companies can’t afford.
The two failure modes
Too minimal: the landing page fallacy
“Just put up a landing page and see if people sign up.”
This advice gets repeated constantly, and it’s not wrong exactly - it’s just incomplete. A landing page tells you if people are interested in an idea described in three bullet points. It doesn’t tell you if they’ll use the actual product. It doesn’t tell you which features matter. It doesn’t tell you where the workflow breaks down.
We’ve seen founders collect 2,000 email signups, spend four months building, and launch to crickets. The signups were curiosity, not commitment. The landing page validated a headline, not a product.
Too viable: the “just one more feature” spiral
This one’s more common with technical founders. You start building the MVP and then think: “Well, if we’re going to launch, we need proper authentication. And we should handle edge case X. And the onboarding flow needs to be smooth, otherwise people will bounce.”
Each addition is reasonable in isolation. Together, they turn your two-month MVP into a six-month product that still hasn’t been tested with real users. You’ve built what you think people need instead of learning what they actually need.
What an MVP should actually do
An MVP has one job: generate learning. That’s it. Not revenue. Not growth. Not press coverage. Learning.
Specifically, it should answer one or two critical assumptions about your business. Not all of them - just the ones that would kill the idea if they’re wrong.
Identify your riskiest assumption
Every product idea rests on a stack of assumptions. Some examples:
- “Restaurants will enter their inventory data weekly” (behavior assumption)
- “Freelancers will pay $30/month for this” (willingness-to-pay assumption)
- “We can deliver results 10x faster than the current process” (technical assumption)
- “HR managers are the right buyer” (market assumption)
Your MVP should test the assumption that’s most likely to be wrong and would be most fatal if it is. Everything else can wait.
Build only what tests that assumption
If your riskiest assumption is “freelancers will pay $30/month,” you don’t need a polished app. You need enough functionality that freelancers can experience the core value - and a payment screen. Hardcode the rest. Use manual processes behind the scenes. It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t scale. You’re not scaling yet.
If your riskiest assumption is technical - “can we actually process these documents in under 5 seconds?” - build just the processing pipeline. The UI can be a command line. Nobody needs to see it except your test users.
Set a learning deadline
Before you write a line of code, write down:
- What assumption are we testing?
- What does success look like? (Be specific. “People like it” is not specific.)
- How many users/data points do we need?
- When will we evaluate?
Give yourself 4-6 weeks. If you can’t build enough to test your core assumption in 6 weeks, you’re building too much.
The manual MVP: your secret weapon
The most underrated approach is doing things manually first. Before building the software, deliver the service by hand.
Want to build an AI that summarizes meeting notes? Sit in on 20 meetings and write the summaries yourself. You’ll learn more about what a good summary looks like, what people actually want, and where the edge cases are than any amount of upfront planning would teach you.
Want to build a marketplace? Manually match buyers and sellers over email for a month. You’ll discover the real friction points - and they’re almost never what you expected.
This feels slow. It’s actually the fastest path to a product people want, because you’re learning from reality instead of guessing from a whiteboard.
Common MVP mistakes we keep seeing
Mistake: Building for scale from day one. You don’t need microservices. You don’t need Kubernetes. You probably don’t even need a database migration tool yet. Use the simplest architecture that works. You can refactor later when you have the best problem in the world: too many users.
Mistake: Ignoring existing tools. Before building a custom dashboard, ask if a Notion template would work. Before building a notification system, try a Slack webhook. Your MVP can be duct tape and existing tools held together with a thin custom layer. That’s fine. That’s good, actually.
Mistake: A/B testing too early. You don’t have enough traffic to A/B test anything meaningful. Talk to users instead. Five good user interviews will teach you more than 500 visitors split across two button colors.
Mistake: Treating negative results as failure. An MVP that proves your assumption wrong is a successful MVP. It just saved you months of building the wrong thing. The only failed MVP is one that doesn’t teach you anything.
The right mindset
Think of your MVP as an experiment, not a product launch. Experiments have hypotheses, controlled variables, and defined success criteria. They’re designed to generate data, not revenue.
This framing changes everything. You stop asking “is this good enough to launch?” and start asking “will this teach us what we need to know?” The bar for launch gets lower. The bar for learning gets higher. And the result is that you move faster and waste less.
When to graduate from MVP mode
You’ve validated your core assumptions. Users are coming back without you asking them to. You can articulate exactly who your customer is and what problem you’re solving for them - not in theory, but from evidence.
That’s when you invest in polish, scale, and growth. Not before.
The companies that build great products aren’t the ones who had the best first version. They’re the ones who learned the fastest.
At IndieStudio, we help founders scope MVPs that actually validate assumptions - and build them fast. If you’re planning your next product, let’s figure out what to build first.