The MVP Excuse: When 'Minimum' Became an Excuse for Garbage

According to Failory's research, about 90% of startups fail, and 17% fail specifically due to poor product quality. Eric Ries didn't invent MVP so founders could ship garbage and call it learning. Somewhere along the way, "minimum viable product" became a permission slip for broken software.

The logic is sound on paper.

The original concept was elegant: build the smallest thing that lets you test a hypothesis about customers. Not the smallest thing you can ship. Not the cheapest thing you can build. The smallest thing that generates validated learning.

That distinction has been lost. Now MVP means "we didn't have time to do it right" dressed up in Lean Startup language. Having evaluated hundreds of early-stage products, I've watched this corruption happen in real time.

The Prototype Fallacy

Here's the financial reality that makes "ship fast, fix later" so expensive:

There are two fundamentally different ways to build early software:

1. The Prototype: Built to learn. Destined for the trash. You know going in that you'll throw it away.
2. The MVP: Built to launch. Destined for production. You're committing to maintain this code.

The mistake founders make is treating the Prototype as the MVP. They ship the "Learning Code" directly to customers.

This is Subprime Technical Debt. You're borrowing time at 100% interest. The code that let you ship in week one becomes the code that blocks every feature in month six. When you try to scale the Prototype, you will go bankrupt on the refactor.

The honest question: did you build something to learn, or something to launch? If you built to learn, that's fine—but don't ship it. If you built to launch, it needs to actually work.

What Eric Ries Actually Meant

Go back to the source. In "The Lean Startup," Ries defined MVP as "the smallest thing you can make or do to test your hypothesis." Note what's not in that definition: a working product. Sometimes the smallest thing is a landing page. Sometimes it's a concierge service where you do things manually.

Ries was explicit about this: "MVP, despite the name, is not about creating minimal products." He clarified that "minimally viable does not mean operating in a sloppy or undisciplined way." Remove any feature, process, or effort that doesn't directly contribute to the learning you seek.

The purpose was experimentation, not cost-cutting. You build small to learn fast, not to ship cheap. The "viable" part matters as much as the "minimum" part. A buggy, confusing product doesn't teach you whether customers want your solution. It only teaches you that people hate buggy, confusing products.

How MVP Became an Excuse

Somewhere between 2011 and now, the concept got corrupted. As IT Revolution's analysis documents, the core Lean Startup concept got lost and its meaning bastardized. Ask people what MVP means and you'll get as many definitions as people you ask.

The most common misunderstanding: MVP is the smallest amount of functionality you can deliver. No consideration of whether it's sufficient to learn anything. No concern for quality standards. Just minimum, minimum, minimum.

Teams stress the minimum part of MVP to the exclusion of viable. The product delivered isn't quality enough to assess whether customers will use it. You ship something half-finished, users bounce immediately, and you conclude there's no market. The real conclusion: your execution was poor.

I've seen this pattern repeatedly: a startup ships a barely-functional product, gets negative feedback, pivots, and repeats. They think they're being lean. They're actually being lazy. The friction you're eliminating was work you didn't realize you valued - building something worth testing.

A concrete example: I advised a B2B scheduling startup in 2019. Their "MVP" had a 40% crash rate during demo flows. Users would start booking a meeting, the app would freeze, and they'd leave. The founders concluded "enterprises aren't ready for AI scheduling." The real conclusion: their product didn't work. After three months of stabilization work—reducing crashes to under 2%—the same target customers signed paid pilots. The market was ready. The MVP wasn't viable.

The Quality Threshold You Can't Skip

Here's what the MVP-as-excuse crowd doesn't understand: there's a quality threshold below which you learn nothing useful.

Ship something that crashes constantly? You learn that people hate crashes. Ship something with a confusing interface? You learn that people hate confusion. Ship something that looks like a weekend project? You learn that people don't trust amateur-looking products.

None of that tells you whether your core value proposition works.

Today's users expect polish from day one. The tolerance for obviously unfinished products has collapsed. What counted as "minimum" in 2011 doesn't count anymore. Today's minimum includes quality, adaptability, and emotional resonance that would have been premium a decade ago.

If you already have any reputation, publicly launching a traditional MVP can be disastrous. One that leans more "minimum" than "viable" can hurt your reputation for years, even if you improve the product.

Learning Requires Isolating Variables

Scientific experiments work because they control variables. You change one thing and measure the result. Lean Startup was supposed to bring this rigor to product development.

But when your MVP is broken in multiple ways - bad performance, bad design, bad onboarding, bad reliability - you can't isolate what's causing rejection. Maybe they hate your core concept. Maybe they hate your buggy implementation. Maybe they'd love it if you fixed the obvious problems.

A proper MVP isolates the variable you want to test. Testing whether users want automated calendar scheduling? Build something that does it well - even if only for Google Calendar in one time zone. Don't build something that crashes half the time and blame the concept when users leave.

This connects to a larger problem in startup culture. Founder ego often prevents honest assessment of why products fail. Blaming the market or timing is more comfortable than admitting execution was poor.

The 90% Failure Rate Isn't Random

About 90% of startups fail. Of these, 17% fail due to poor product - user-unfriendly products that don't meet expectations lead to high churn and eventual failure. Another 20% have quality issues or fail to deliver on promises.

But the biggest killer is building something nobody wants - 42% of startups fail because they create something the market doesn't need. Here's where MVP corruption makes things worse: how do you know the market doesn't want your product if your product was too broken to evaluate fairly?

Startups need 2-3 times longer to validate their market than founders expect. If you burn validation time shipping broken MVPs and drawing false conclusions, you run out of runway before you ever really tested your hypothesis.

This is the same rot that accumulates in codebases - shortcuts compound. Each broken MVP builds on the previous one. Each false conclusion leads to another pivot. Learning gets replaced by thrashing.

Real MVP vs Fake MVP

Here's how to tell the difference. Understanding this distinction is as important as knowing when to raise funding versus bootstrap - both require honest assessment of what you're actually building.

MVP Viability Audit

Score your current MVP. Be honest.

What "Viable" Actually Means

Let's reclaim the word viable. A viable product is one that:

Works reliably. Not perfectly, but reliably. Core functionality should function correctly every time. Edge cases can wait; core cases cannot.

Communicates value clearly. Users should understand what the product does and why they might want it within seconds. If they're confused before they can evaluate your value proposition, your MVP has failed.

Provides a complete experience for one use case. Better to do one thing well than ten things poorly. An MVP that handles calendar scheduling for Google Calendar flawlessly beats one that theoretically handles all calendars but breaks constantly.

Enables honest feedback. Users should evaluate whether the core concept meets their needs, not whether they can tolerate the bugs long enough to find out.

Steve Blank, the intellectual godfather of Lean Startup, never said "build a product, then validate it." He said, "get out of the building." He warned against starting with a prototype. Founders should start with customer discovery - not interviews, but immersion.

The MVP comes after you understand the problem. It's a test of your solution, not a tool for discovering whether a problem exists.

The Right Way to Think About Minimum

Minimum doesn't mean cheap. It doesn't mean fast. It doesn't mean low quality.

Minimum means: what's the smallest scope that tests the hypothesis? If your hypothesis is "users will pay for automated meeting scheduling," you don't need every calendar platform. You don't need enterprise features or a mobile app.

But you do need the meeting scheduling to work. You do need the interface to be clear. You do need the product to not crash.

The minimum is about scope, not quality. Cut features, not corners. Ship something small and excellent, not something large and broken.

Here's a practical test: if your MVP fails, will you know why? If the answer is "no, because too many things were wrong," your MVP isn't viable. If you can identify the isolated variable you tested, you've built a real MVP.

Why This Matters More Now

Competition has intensified. Users have more choices. Attention spans have shortened. User forgiveness for early software products has evaporated.

In 2011, being first mattered more than being good. Today, being first with something broken creates space for someone else to be second with something that works.

The bar for "viable" keeps rising. That doesn't mean you need to build more before launching. It means what you build needs to work better. Scope can stay small. Quality cannot.

AI tools have made this easier, not harder. You can build a polished small product faster than ever. The excuse that quality takes too much time holds less water every year.

"If your product is too broken for users to evaluate your value proposition, you haven't built an MVP - you've built a broken product."