The MVP Is Dead. Build an MLP Instead.
Minimum viable products set the bar too low. Minimum lovable products set it just right. Here's the difference and why it matters.
Key Points
- The MVP (minimum viable product) concept conflates “fast shipping” with “shipping unpolished work”—they’re not the same thing
- An MLP (minimum lovable product) ships fast but makes the core experience delightful, meeting users where their expectations are highest
- The deciding framework: nail the one thing that matters, ship it with care, cut everything else ruthlessly
When Eric Ries popularized the concept of the MVP in The Lean Startup, it was genuinely revolutionary. The core insight—that you don’t need to build the perfect product before you start learning from real users—changed how thousands of companies approach product development. But somewhere along the way, the MVP became an excuse.
Today, MVP doesn’t mean “minimum viable product” anymore. It means “let’s ship something that barely works and call it learning.” The MVP has become a get-out-of-jail-free card for shipping garbage.
I think it’s time we killed it and replaced it with something better: the MLP, or Minimum Lovable Product.
The MVP Got Misinterpreted
The original MVP concept wasn’t about shipping low-quality work. It was about shipping constrained work. You build the smallest possible feature set that lets you test your core hypothesis and get market feedback. But the definition got bent over time.
Henrik Kniberg’s famous skateboard illustration captures what an MVP was supposed to be—a series of increasingly complete products, each one functional and valuable on its own. You ship a skateboard first, not a wheel with a promise that the other parts are coming. A skateboard is usable, delightful even, if you want to ride it. It does what it’s supposed to do.
But the internet turned that into “ship the wheel, ignore that people want to ride something.” Somehow “minimum” became synonymous with “bad,” and “viable” became an excuse for “doesn’t really work properly yet.”
The problem is that users don’t care about your theory. They care about whether your product makes their life better. If you hand them something half-baked in the name of learning faster, you’ve wasted their time and burned your credibility. One bad experience sticks harder than ten conversations about your roadmap.
Minimum Lovable Product: A Better North Star
An MLP is different. It’s the smallest set of features that makes your users genuinely happy to use your product. Not delighted by comparison to competitors, but delighted in an absolute sense. The core loop feels good. The experience is seamless where it matters. You’ve thought about edge cases. It doesn’t crash.
This doesn’t mean polishing everything. Quite the opposite. It means being ruthless about what you cut, and then pouring care into what remains.
When Airbnb launched, they didn’t build the perfect marketplace. They built something much more focused: the ability to list a space, see listings, and book with trust. Everything else was secondary. But those core flows? They worked beautifully. Brian Chesky and his team didn’t just ship fast—they shipped with craftsmanship. They paid attention to the details that would make someone feel comfortable trusting a stranger with their home.
That commitment to the core experience is what separated Airbnb from every other marketplace attempt that came before and after. They understood that on the internet, where users have infinite alternatives, you can’t afford to be mediocre. You have to be lovable from day one.
Rahul Vohra from Superhuman talks about this in his work on product-market fit. He found that the difference between products that stuck and products that didn’t wasn’t about feature count. It was about whether users loved the core product. His famous question: “How would you feel if you could no longer use this product?” Products with strong product-market fit have users saying “very disappointed”—not just satisfied, but disappointed to lose it.
An MLP is built to generate that response. It’s built for love, not just viability.
The Bar Has Changed
Here’s the reality: your users have too many options. They’re choosing between your product and a dozen others that might solve the same problem. They’re choosing between your product and doing it manually. They’re choosing between your product and not doing the thing at all.
In that environment, shipping something that “technically works but feels rough” isn’t learning—it’s losing. Users will tolerate a limited feature set. They won’t tolerate a clunky experience in the features you do ship.
I learned this the hard way building products for both Rotate and side projects like Openmark and Refract. When you ship an MVP in the bad sense—something that works but feels like a chore to use—you get one of two things: no one uses it, or the people who do use it give you feedback shaped by frustration rather than potential.
When you ship an MLP, you get different feedback entirely. Users tell you what they’d love to see next. They tell friends about it. They stick around through the rough edges because they trust that the core matters. They become evangelists instead of beta testers.
The Practical Framework: What’s “Lovable Minimum”?
So how do you decide what makes the cut for an MLP? Here’s how I think about it:
Start with the core loop. What’s the one action that defines your product? For a note-taking app, it’s writing and retrieving notes. For a marketplace, it’s discovering and transacting. For a creator platform, it’s creating and sharing. That loop is non-negotiable.
Make that loop feel great. Polish the hell out of it. Think about the micro-interactions. Does it feel fast? Does it feel intentional? Does it work reliably? This is where you spend your care. This is where you earn love.
Cut everything else. Everything. Authentication can be basic at first. Analytics can wait. Admin dashboards aren’t for launch. Fancy filtering, sorting, search optimization—future you will thank you for shipping without these. They can all come later, and they will, because now you have a product people actually use.
Test on real users, quickly. Once you’ve shipped something lovable in the core, get it in front of people. Not a thousand people—just enough to see if the core resonates. Their feedback will be clearer and more useful because they’re reacting to something they actually enjoyed using.
Plan your velocity backwards. How long can you afford to take to build the MLP? One month? Two? Three? That constraint determines your scope. If you’re building a marketplace and you’ve got two months, you can’t build escrow and sophisticated ratings. You ship with payment processing and basic reviews. Those aren’t ideal, but they’re lovable-enough to test your hypothesis.
This is different from shipping it ugly, which is about accepting imperfection in the name of speed. An MLP still prioritizes speed—but it refuses to compromise on the user experience where it matters most. The two concepts work together: ship it ugly except for the one thing that defines your product.
Why This Matters Now
The MVP was the right philosophy for 2011, when distribution was hard and everyone was learning about startups. We needed permission to ship imperfect work. We got that permission, and it was useful.
But we’re in 2025. Users expect more. They’ve used great products. They know what good feels like. And they’re evaluating your product against every other option available to them—not against your competitors’ MVPs, but against the best of category across all products they use.
The MLP is the philosophy for this moment. Ship faster than you think you can, but make sure the core experience is something you’d be proud to show your friends. Be ruthless about scope. Be generous with care on the things that matter.
When you’re deciding what to build, ask yourself: what’s the one thing this product has to do beautifully? Everything else is secondary. That clarity is what separates products people use from products people abandon.
The MVP’s time has passed. The MLP is the smarter bet.
Want more on shipping and building? Check out how creators and small business owners think about launching products without resources, or dive deeper into the philosophy of ruthless prioritization and shipping.