Podcast · ~15 min read

Building Minimum Lovable Products

Jiaona Zhang · Lenny's Newsletter Freemium Intermediate

A useful counterweight to the raw MVP idea, drawing on stories from Airbnb and WeWork about building the smallest thing people actually love. It helps you decide how much polish your test really needs so you learn something real and not just that a rough demo felt rough. Read it once you understand the basic MVP and want to avoid shipping something too thin to judge.

  • Aim for the smallest thing people genuinely love
  • Too little quality can invalidate your own experiment
  • Pick one slice of the problem and solve it well

The question it answers

  1. What is an MVP and what's the smallest one I can build?

Read with it

  1. The single best thing ever written on customer conversations. It teaches you to ask about the customer's life and past... momtestbook.com Book · ~130 pages The Mom Test Rob Fitzpatrick
  2. The essay that put 'product-market fit' into the startup vocabulary. Read it for the gut-level description of what PMF feels... pmarchive.com Essay · ~15 min read The Only Thing That Matters Marc Andreessen
  3. The permission slip to recruit users by hand, do things manually, and deliver 'insanely great' experiences to your first few... paulgraham.com Essay · ~15 min read Do Things That Don't Scale Paul Graham
  4. The origin text for the modern MVP and validated-learning vocabulary every founder now uses. Read it for the mental model that... theleanstartup.com Book · ~330 pages The Lean Startup Eric Ries
  5. The customer-development originator's clearest statement on scoping the minimum feature set to reach your earliest believers.... steveblank.com Article · ~8 min read Perfection by Subtraction, The Minimum Feature Set Steve Blank
  6. Long-form, candid interviews with Indian founders and investors on how they actually grew, distributed and built brand, one of... The Neon Show / Neon Fund Podcast · 200+ episodes The Neon Show (100x Entrepreneur Podcast) Siddhartha Ahluwalia
eChai Partner Brands The partnership →