Minimum viable product
A minimum viable product, or MVP, is the smallest version of a new product that still lets real early customers use it and give feedback, built to test whether an idea works before a team invests in every feature a fuller version would eventually need.
Submit a project Scope your first releaseReviewed by Huy Nguyen (David), CEO · Updated 15 Oct 2026 · 3 min read
This term is one of the entries in the OutsourcingVN glossary of words buyers meet while scoping a first software release.
Why does a minimum viable product matter?
A minimum viable product keeps a team from spending a year building features nobody asked for before anyone outside the company has used the thing at all. OutsourcingVN is operated by Netbase JSC, and a buyer preparing a first release should treat "minimum" as a discipline about evidence, not a euphemism for an unfinished or badly built product — an MVP still has to work properly for the narrow job it is scoped to do.
What is an example of a minimum viable product in practice?
A founder plans a booking product for clinics and salons with forty designed screens. Discovery with three pilot customers shows that only booking, reminders, deposits and a role-based account cover what the pilots actually need on day one; a loyalty scheme and a marketplace listing the founder wanted are dropped from the first release because no pilot asked for them. That smaller release is the minimum viable product: small enough to ship quickly, but complete enough for the three pilot customers to run real bookings through it and report back.
What are the common misreadings of a minimum viable product?
A minimum viable product is not a prototype or a demo — a prototype is for feedback on an idea, while an MVP is a working release real customers use for real work, which is a higher bar. It is also not the same as cheap or fast: the product must still be viable, meaning it does its narrow job properly, even though its feature list is short. And a minimum viable product is not a one-time milestone a team moves past and forgets; the same discipline of asking what the next smallest useful release is applies again at every later stage.
Plan the next step for your project
Common questions
Small enough to reach real users quickly, and no smaller than what the pilot customers you named during discovery actually need to do real work with it.
No. "Minimum" describes the feature list, not the standard of what is built; a narrow release still has to work reliably for the job it covers.
Which decisions does a minimum viable product affect?
Deciding which discovery questions to answer before committing to a first release, including customers, tenancy, roles and plans, is the subject of the SaaS product discovery questions guide, which turns those answers into a scoped build. When you are trying to size a first release against real pilot customers, describe them, and Netbase will respond through Netbase's own outsourcing-services platform; submit a project when you are ready.