What Eric did is the heart of the build-measure-learn loop described by Eric Ries. And by Ries’s definition, each release that Eric shipped was a minimum viable product. But you can see that it wasn’t viable in the eyes of his target customers and users—at least, not yet. For that reason, I like referring to Ries’s MVP as a minimum viable product experiment—or MVPe for short. It’s the smallest thing I could build to learn something. And what I learn is driving toward understanding what’s really viable in the eyes of my target customers and users.
Ha, MVPe (Minimum Viable Product experiment) to get around the debate.
