The very first iPhone.<p>I feel like sometimes people confuse Minimum Viable Product with Minimum Sellable Product. That is, MVP is not about building the smallest thing that someone will pay you money for. It's about cutting out all the pieces that might fall onto the 20 side of the Pareto principle. It's about resolving any 50-50 decisions by picking one way and going with it, instead of quibbling over which way is the best ("Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good" sort of thing). It's about making every really difficult design decision answer the question "do we really need this feature? right now?".<p>If I can take you back, you might remember that the first iPhone didn't have a customizable home screen or a unified inbox. It went with "The Web is Your API" instead of native apps. It didn't even have copy-paste!<p>That said, if someone handed you an original iPhone, it is still very recognizable as an iPhone. It still took YEARS to iterate internally and reach that first model iPhone. From friends who've worked on the iPhone, I've heard there were something like 5 unreleased precursors to the iPad. That's right, the iPhone was actually the MVP of the iPad.<p>So, MVP doesn't mean you don't have to work at it. It doesn't mean that it won't take a lot of time to develop internally. At CodeConf, Wil Shipley said to think about it as Minimum Viable Awesome. MVP is about recognizing which decisions are best made by the engineers and product managers, and which are best made by the customers. Your MVP shouldn't be the first thing you can charge money for, it should be the first thing you can charge money for and feel proud about.
As we seem to be allowing a personal bias, I'll submit my MVP - <a href="http://bugmuncher.com" rel="nofollow">http://bugmuncher.com</a><p>I've built the minimum in order to get it live in 2 weeks. I've got a HUGE list of features to add in future, including customisation, multiple highlights, automate the subscription process, API, etc.
Groupon<p>"Groupon 1.0 started on a WordPress blog"<p><a href="http://www.tomloverro.com/2010/08/19/groupon-1-0-started-on-a-wordpress-blog/" rel="nofollow">http://www.tomloverro.com/2010/08/19/groupon-1-0-started-on-...</a>
Well, I'm obviously pretty biased here because I made it, but I really enjoy using <a href="http://cueyoutube.com/" rel="nofollow">http://cueyoutube.com/</a><p>It was a "sunday night" project, and the first thing I've ever done where I thought I did just the right amount of work and no more. It hasn't, like, gone viral or anything but has a few likes and a few people using it - who knows maybe some more will use it.<p>But it was a great feeling - to really get something useful made, throw it out there and see what happens without investing a whole lot in it.<p>Another I made earlier this year was <a href="http://pickdropapp.com/" rel="nofollow">http://pickdropapp.com/</a> which was even less successful than cueyoutube :)<p>I find that whipping up things like this and just releasing them is a great way of "staying in shape". Releasing software is like a habit and the more you do it, the easier it becomes.<p>To deviate from my shameless self promotion, I would also like to add that I love the story of TKs <a href="http://toutapp.com/" rel="nofollow">http://toutapp.com/</a> - he's actually turned that into a real product now with thousands of users, but he got a lot of validation from his initial MVP release so that's a real success story. He's written about it quite a bit on his blog.
A friend of mine sent this to me a few years ago:<p>"""My favorite video on bootstrapping/minimum viable product:<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zv17lF60OHY" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zv17lF60OHY</a><p>It's well worth watching the whole thing."""
I'll be absolutely shameless and plug our two services, Momentomail and Wormwall (<a href="http://www.kymalabs.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.kymalabs.com</a>). Momentomail is a bit more mature since it's older. But when we first launched it, the entire site wasn't much more than a login page and the "Schedule an email" interface.<p>We made Lifehacker (after only adding a couple more things) not <i>too</i> long after that.<p>Wormwall likewise is about as basic a web authoring system as you can get. A WYSIWYG editor and a publish button. Nothing fancy.<p>We have well over a thousand users now.
If you discuss MVP in terms of Customer Development and the Lean Startup methodology, I think that Eric Ries puts it best by saying that whatever you, as the entrepreneur, think the MVP is, is already WAY too big. Whatever you think the minimum viable features are for your product/service, you should cut it in half - and then do that 2 more times. That's your MVP.
Since we're including our personal projects :-) I built the Birdy over a weekend. <a href="http://thebirdy.com" rel="nofollow">http://thebirdy.com</a> A couple weeks have gone by and it's going strong with hundreds of users. I've added a few features, and fixed a few bugs, but otherwise, it's as I built it.
One of the greatest surely has to be the original Yahoo. Started as the founders' personal list of links. No categories - they only added those later.<p><a href="http://docs.yahoo.com/info/misc/history.html" rel="nofollow">http://docs.yahoo.com/info/misc/history.html</a>
Personal bias, but <a href="http://chatvoting.com" rel="nofollow">http://chatvoting.com</a> is my latest MVP. There are a ton of features I want to add, but it does exactly what I originally intended.<p>If you want massively successful MVPs, twitter is probably the king.
I think most great examples of MVP are pretty invisible because you are typically starting off testing it with small groups of users -- just enough to get feedback to move it to the next stage. Otherwise it isn't the M in MVP -- It's not the minimum.<p>We are big fans of using Dave McClure's Pirate Metrics model... building activation first, then retention, and then going for acquisition, etc.<p>The first version of CoderBuddy was very minimally-viable compared to where we're at today. It was enough to get something done and to use in workshops. Since then we've analyzed where the biggest bottlenecks are improving activation etc., along the lines of the Pirate Metrics model.<p>Hope this helps.
Launchrock, a service for hosting and tracking launch pages, launched with a launch page<p><a href="http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/01/launchrock-rocks-launches/" rel="nofollow">http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/01/launchrock-rocks-launches/</a>
I think my lil mac screen capture app is actually a pretty good example, originally in v1 it only uploaded to imgur and had no UI except for the menu. V2 I added advanced features like a preferences window and history.<p><a href="http://captured.codeography.com" rel="nofollow">http://captured.codeography.com</a><p>While building this I did try hard to focus on what I could do to ship right away, and nothing more. Even for v2 I had to concentrate on limiting the features, which was quite the challenge. At this point, I cant even remember half the things that I <i>needed</i> to implement.
The original gameboy. No backlight. No stereo sound. No colour! No game saves.<p>(edit: although colour would have been ahead of its time, the other features could easily have been scope-creeped into the final product)
I consider my service, Subjot as an MVP but we're just starting to move beyond that. Since branching out on my own, its the first product I've built that I'm moving beyond the MVP.<p>Why? 68% of all registered users visited Subjot last week. Our total number of users are still small (private beta) but our engagement is very high.<p>It's in private beta but you can use this code to check it out if you are interested - <a href="http://sjot.it/nXM96E" rel="nofollow">http://sjot.it/nXM96E</a>
My favorite examples are where the product satisfies its objective (fulfills the customer need) AND does it does it better than the competition (via user experience, number of features, visual design, speed, cheaper). Often people create an MVP that fulfills a customer need but is worse than the competition. Every metric will point toward the fact that the MVP failed since they are based on product market fit (PMF).<p>HackerNews is a great example.
86-DOS, aka Quick and Dirty Disk Operating System, which was sold to MicroSoft famously, was designed to duplicate C/PM's operating system API's. As the story goes, all the money was in the hardware as software so easy to copy. Look up the history of FCopy on the C64 to see just how prevalent it was on the much higher volume platform of the day, Commodore.
Another shameless plug: ShelfLuv.com The original version of ShelfLuv was just instant search for Amazon books - nothing else - wrapped in a pretty UI that was done at a hackathon. It would have stayed just that had people not started using it and validating the idea that there was something there and people valued a better UX for searching books.
As has been discussed, MVP can have a varying definition. If you take the <i>minimal</i> part very seriously, one of the products I love to reference is: <a href="http://notepad.cc" rel="nofollow">http://notepad.cc</a>
The controller of family computer from Nintendo.
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Famicom_controllers.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Famicom_controllers.jpg</a>
Zappos started as a website with pictures of shoes and a price. When someone would order, they would go down to Footlocker, buy the shoes, and ship them off.
This is great. I have been trying to figure out what a MVP is. Is a landing page with a description of your product and a sign up form considered a MVP?