How to Develop an MVP

So, you might be asking yourself, “What the hell is an MVP?” MVP stands for Minimum Viable Product - a term and concept introduced by Eric Ries in 2011, in his book The Lean Startup, which was (and still is) wildly successful in the startup world. Eric defines the MVP as:

“The version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.”

Let’s set the stage - 2011 was a different world for startups

When The Lean Startup was published in 2011, and the MVP subsequently became wildly popular, starting a business was a different beast. To put it in perspective, 2011 was the year that Groupon had their IPO. Stripe had just launched and was quickly gaining traction with their easy to use interface and laser-focused mission to solve online payment friction. Instagram was seeing massive growth, foreshadowing a $1billion acquisition by Facebook a year later. Warby Parker was quietly creating an industry even your grandfather didn’t know he needed. 

3 years on the heels of the 2008 financial crisis, fear still ran amuck, and the opportunities surrounding tech and internet businesses were still ripe for pickin’.

From a numbers perspective, in 2011 there were approximately 1,173,373 companies with 10 or more people in the United States. Today, just 14 years later, there are approximately 33,200,000 businesses in the United States. A near 30x increase…

The MVP poster child: Stripe

In 2011 Stripe was one of the most prolific examples of a successful MVP (Minimum Viable Product), and quickly became the unicorn that all startup founders wanted to be. Even today, founders we talk to mention the MVP approach and Stripe’s wild success.

There’s no doubt that the founders of Stripe, the Collison brothers, saw a problem, built a lean and simplistic version that solved the problem, tested the idea, and ultimately validated it very quickly. But here’s the thing - the MVP was just one thing that contributed to the success of Stripe, but yet it gets all the credit. I’d go as far as attributing an equal amount of success to their go-to-market strategy, which basically consisted of making it as easy as possible for developers to integrate the Stripe product into the products they were building for their clients. They also plugged themselves into other founders in the Y-Combinator ecosystem, and introduced them to their seamless payment solution. Stripe was a simple value proposition solving a high-friction problem. This combination is why it caught fire, posting $40 million in ARR in 2014. By 2016 they had climbed to a whopping $450 million in ARR. One year later they hit the $1 billion mark…Truly unbelievable growth.

Stripe was in the right place at the right time, solving the right problem. They layered on a massively valuable distribution strategy which poured gas on the fire. The MVP itself had little impact on their growth, but what it did do early on was create an ecosystem that listened to user feedback. And as smart founders, they didn’t get too attached to any preconceived notions. They were flexible but dialed, and given the fact that their product was extremely innovative at the time, it gave them runway to experiment, test, fail, refine, and validate without any real competition. In 2025, with the exception of rare outliers, that runway does not exist…

The hard truth: Building a startup today is wildly different than it was in the days of Stripe

Now that we have a little background on how we got here, let’s talk about what’s different about building a startup today. We’re in the midst of an intellectual property crisis, fueled by generative AI and tech companies sidestepping privacy and copyright laws to feed their LLM’s at all costs. The worst part? No one is stopping them…

So what does this mean for startups? Well, to put it bluntly, none of your ideas or intellectual property are safe. AI crawlers can access your products and scrape your code within seconds, with AI coding tools like Replit and Lovable recreating it within minutes. 

When we look back at unicorns like AirBNB, the idea was majorly innovative, but the product was the vessel for users to experience the remarkable idea. AirBNB has spent tens of millions of dollars on UX, UI design, and software development, making the product highly valuable up to this point. But now, with unchecked scraping and rapid generative AI reproduction, the tens of millions of dollars invested in their product is no longer their moat. Anyone can now purchase a subscription and build a shell of a product in minutes, not years. Sure, they still have to have a team of devs to take it from 0.5 to 1, but a lot of the foundational work can be done by generative AI. Do I believe this is morally right? Not a chance in hell. But it’s the reality we’re living in right now, and no one is stopping these companies.

So how does all of this relate to developing an MVP?

In 2025, thinking you’re going to build a half-assed MVP, get some user feedback, and iterate your way into something people will love is honestly just completely foolish. We’re experiencing the most competitive and saturated market of all time, and generative AI is making access to research and development available to the masses. Politely put, your product doesn’t mean shit. 

Founders are still stuck in the Stripe days, thinking random strangers are lining up to be early adopters for their products, and will hold hands with them while they make it great. That mentality is what sinks so many startups nowadays. There’s way too much emphasis on the “Minimum” in Minimum Viable Product, and this reckless shipping of BS products is being fueled by rhetoric from startup founders that were successful in the Stripe era, not in 2025. 

It’s not that founders no longer have amazing ideas, they 100% do. It’s the unfortunate reality that ideas (and even executions) can no longer be protected like they were even 10 years ago. To add to that, there are 50x more entrepreneurs in the mix, with multiple startups working on the same “innovative” idea at the same time, without even knowing it. 

They launch their MVP and realize someone else has just launched something nearly identical. They continue to test and iterate at the product level, trying to “out feature” their competitors. They’re feeling the pressure to nail it faster than the other startups, so they increase speed and iteration, with users basically shaping the entire product. 

Sometimes it becomes unrecognizable. Sometimes it’s differentiated on the feature level, but no one cares, they go with the cheaper option.

The Lean Startup MVP is still valid in its overall concept, but it’s wildly misunderstood by the vast majority of founders

The whole point of the MVP is to not get too attached to your original idea, taking early user data and feedback to iterate and make a product more valuable. The problem is that founders hear what they want to hear, or what self-proclaimed business gurus (business coaches) tell them they should do. They mistake the MVP as taking the absolute shittiest piecemeal version of their idea and bringing it to their friends and family for feedback. They use the MVP as a validation tool, when validation needs to happen before you build a single thing.

The typical playbook for startups is something like this:

1. Have a product idea, but unsure if it’s an actual problem.
2. Immediately start producing an MVP (minimum viable product).
3. Put out a clunky prototype that’s littered with bugs, and lacks any attention to detail. It has a painful user experience and is reminiscent of 1990’s AOL, wrapped in a barely basic functionality bow. No emotion, no soul, just thumbtack-sized utility.
4. Gather user feedback with anyone and everyone (yes, even aunt Cheryl). In this stage founders get their product in front of anyone and everyone. They’ve gotta load up that user feedback so they can iterate themselves into greatness, remember? There’s no product roadmap, no targeted ICP for all testing and feedback efforts, and most importantly, there’s no conviction.
5. After they’ve desperately gathered a less than adequate amount of feedback from any person who would try their thing, they start to iterate on it. They’re building requested features and functionalities, and keep in mind, there are real resources (people, time, and capital) being used on every round of iterations. Once they complete the feedback from initial “testing,” they reintroduce it to the market for more “testing.”
6. Rinse and repeat, with more capital benign burned on each thoughtless reactive iteration. After all, startups are all about speed, right?
7. Shit! We need to raise again! By the time founders have done this 5 rounds over again, they have burned all their capital, tested their product in 20 different ICP’s, and it’s unrecognizable from the initial MVP. In some cases that’s great. In nearly all cases, it’s not.

So what do they do? They raise more investment (if they're lucky) and ultimately get copied by someone with more cash, or that's further along. They test more, implement more features, and eventually disappear into oblivion.

This is NOT the approach.

It’s super unfortunate, and all too common. But it doesn’t have to be this way. This product-first (and at all costs) mentality needs to take a damn seat and simmer down. There’s better, more thoughtful and sustainable ways of doing things in 2025.

If you want to succeed as a startup, this is the playbook we used on over 40 startups, and built Powerbomb around it:

1. Founders need to have an idea that solves a REAL problem. Don’t be the founder that starts a business to “find a problem.” The best startup ideas come from problems people encounter in their everyday lives. Get out and experience things. Try new things. Startup ideas take time - they need to marinate in your brain, people.
2. Next, when building a startup from the ground up, founders need to map what’s important to them, and their unique vision as a founder that will push the company forward through thick and thin for the next 10+ years. The buzzwords are “mission and vision” but it’s much simpler… What motivates you? What is your unique experience to share with the world through your idea? What do you want to say you accomplished 15 years from now? This seems so obvious, but it’s excruciating how many people start businesses nowadays without giving the “why” an ounce of thought.
3. After you know why you wanna do the damn thing, it’s time to break out the bifocals for some serious research. This stage consists of market research, trend forecasting, assessing the total addressable market (TAM), competitor research, and so on. This early research phase should be treated as your first validation stage. You should be trying to figure out if your idea already exists, and if it does, is there an opportunity to bring your badassness from Step 1 to annihilate competitors?
   
   Research who your competitors are selling to. What is the TAM (total addressable market), and whose needs are not being met? Reddit subreddits can be gold mines for raw unfiltered qualitative consumer data. Just make sure you’re looking for patterns in data, not one-off’s.
   
   If your idea happens to be an outlier and no one has pursued it yet, it’s always smart to use Google Trends to see what the monthly search volume is for phrases based around your idea. This can help you see if search volume has increased over time, which is another nugget of validation to add into the hopper. It’s also helpful to look way back in the industry to know if something similar was tried decades ago, and why it may have failed. A lot of times ideas are too early, so if you can piggyback off of one of those, it could work to your advantage. History repeats itself. 
   
   ‍Heater: Don’t let competition scare you away. Business thrives in competition, and if your research surfaces some players already doing your idea or similar, it tells you there is a market for your idea. Embrace it, and get ready to roll your sleeves up!
4. Once you have done your initial validation stage, it’s time to start mapping any and all competitors through a detailed competitive analysis. Powerbomb developed our own competitive analysis framework that goes extensively into competitors businesses, even looking at things like SEO strategy to find out current marketing initiatives. The competitive analysis is crucial. 
   
   The next piece of this phase is to drill down into your core audience. There’s loads of data out there to start developing a high-level ideal customer profile (ICP) based on who needs your solution the most. Who are they? What motivates them? What are they into? What social platforms (and communities within them) do they hangout in? Map demographics and psychographics if you can. Again, there’s so much consumer data out there readily available, the more we know the better. This will also help with any segmentation within your ICP, which will be done at a later stage. 
   
   Once you’ve mapped out your ICP(s), we will combine our findings from that with the competitive analysis framework to begin building out the brand positioning within that competitive set. Your positioning should be HIGHLY differentiated from anything that is currently happening. Remember, this still has absolutely nothing to do with product or product positioning - this is much bigger, at the brand / company level. Differentiation is detrimental, and your success depends on your ability to do so, without fear or hesitation. 
   
   More often than not, startups look to other successes in their industry, or even adjacent ones, and they copy them. They look, sound, and act in a predictable and painfully underwhelming way. They blend in, constantly fighting for attention because there’s nothing to bookmark them in the brain of the consumer. They are drenched in a pail of beige paint, consumed by ever-increasing customer acquisition costs, and ultimately competing on price. It’s a race to the bottom.
   
   As Marty Neumeier puts it in his iconic book Zag, “Radical differentiation is a business strategy founded on the idea that determining a market specialty and consumer base is key to the growth and success of your company. The strategy is the best way to fight traditional marketing practices.”
   
   IT TAKES GUTS.
5. Now, the rest of our strategic sprint process is done in our Live Onboarding Workshop with key stakeholders from the company. This is the juice. The workshops we facilitate before every single Powerbomb Sprint are frameworks that have been developed over years working with dozens of companies - fortune 500’s to startups, in all areas of business, from CPG to SaaS. The process is the same 100% of the time, and it’s the core piece of Powerbomb that has generated 9-figures in ROI for our clients. What does it entail? Well, you might just have to book a call to figure that one out…
6. Coming out of the workshop, or once you’ve finalized your brand / company strategy, it’s time to take the brand foundation and start developing your brand identity. What do you look like, sound like, feel like based on your positioning and detailed ICP? Branding is everything you do as a company, from customer service to internal company culture. In the most simple form, branding is a feeling. I like to describe branding as a symphony, with dozens of small integral pieces producing magic to create the masterpiece we hear. Logo, typography, color system, iconography, illustration, photography, animation, tone of voice, messaging, customer service, user experience - those are all instruments contributing to the holistic harmony (your brand).
   
   Branding is not purely visual, it’s all encompassing. Branding lives at the top of the pyramid, providing detailed direction for marketing, advertising, sales, etc. to properly and cohesively function. Branding is what makes products sticky.
7. Once you’ve finalized your brand identity and the unique way you communicate with your customers, it’s time to start developing your MVP. But before we get into this, let’s pretend we have no idea that the “M” in MVP stands for “minimum.” Minimum should never be the goal, especially in today's market. You’ll get swallowed faster than a cat lapping chain lightning.
   
   Your product should be created around the brand you have developed, the unique point of view, and the brand positioning that you nailed down earlier in the process. Your entire user experience should stem from the problems your users have, and how you’re using empathy to help them in a way they will appreciate. This goes for apps and tech products just as much as it goes for CPG products, if not more. The tech industry has been sterilized into submission - nothing feels warm or human. It all feels rigid and purely transactional. The product-first gurus have chapped throats from shouting so hard from the rooftops about it. We heard you, but it’s not working guys…Grab a Ricola and chill.
   
   Be special. This allows you to show up in the right way, solving the right problems for your ICP - NO ONE ELSE. 
   
   Focus, focus, focus.
8. Now you’ve created the first version of your product. The goal here IS NOT perfection. But the goal is to have something that isn’t a steaming pile of dookie so you can actually test it and get sufficient qualitative feedback without seeing a bunch of rage clicks or people spotting your protein bar into the waste bin. Yes, that means little to no bugs if it’s an app or SaaS. 
   
   At this stage, it’s time to start doing cool shit to get your audience's attention. The goal is to get a “beta 100” as early adopters that can test your product and provide actionable feedback. ONLY TEST YOUR PRODUCT WITH YOUR ICP - their feedback is the only valuable data for your business. Stay focused and ignore the majority of feature requests unless they show up in large quantifiable patterns. At the same time, look for patterns in user feedback and assess them strategically. Features are not always the right solution - feature bloat kills UX, resources, and potency of core functionality. This goes for hardware and software. If you’re a consumer product, it’s a bit easier to tweak and refine a recipe in small quantities, but be careful when people ask for things that change the purpose of the product. For example: you made an herbal lemonade with adaptogenic mushrooms foraged in the forests of the Pacific Northwest. An early tester says something like “I like it, but I wish there was a sugar-free version because I don’t consume sugar. Can you make one with Stevia? I would for sure buy it.” Yeah, no. 
   
   User testing is not done with a founder's friends and family, unless of course they happen to fall in your ICP. Time and time again founders go and test their MVP with anyone and everyone who will try it, and they gather all the feedback and immediately start adding or subtracting features / product benefits. The problem is, the people who are testing it would never buy their product in the first place, so their early input is in all honesty worthless. 
   
   Brands for everyone are brands for no one. 
   
   Those founders will spend months iterating and testing with anyone and everyone, burning loads of capital on designers and engineers, and by the time they are ready to launch the product is a smorgasbord of disconnected features that completely flops. Now they need to raise another round of funding to try again…

Has the playbook really changed? I’d argue no, it’s slightly evolved, but brand has always been the driving force behind long-term success and risk-aversion, and history proves it

If we look at the biggest companies in modern history, they didn’t just build a faceless product that’s “really good” and expect customers to stay forever loyal, even when other companies were creating equally good products. That would be incredibly foolish, right?

At its inception, and through decades under the leadership of Steve Jobs, Apple is one of the greatest examples of brand-led mega growth that no one could compete with at the time, and still can’t today, 50 years later. To put it in perspective, Apple hasn’t done anything wildly innovative since Jobs left the company, and ultimately passed. Jobs knew the Apple brand and their vision is what would crush Microsoft and any other competitor that dared to step to them. They hired the most talented people in the world who fully aligned with the company DNA, and in return, they only shipped the absolute best products in the world. The brand Jobs began building on day one will last generations. 

I’m psychotic about typography. To me, it’s the single most important component of identity design, and I’ve spent years learning and crafting nitty gritty details and intricacies most overlook.  So naturally, I loved hearing this story…Steve Jobs snuck into a typography class at Reed College after dropping out of the university several months before. LIke me, he nerded out on the use of typography to beautifully communicate in so many ways. That class was the reason the first Mac OS had a set of different beautiful typefaces the user could choose from. Steve was obsessed with every single detail and knew brand affinity would be their biggest loyalty driver. It goes right along with his line: “You don’t have to be the first, but you’ve got to be the best.”

Apple had world-changing products and innovation, with their “Think Different” campaign summing it up brilliantly. Think Different was a call to action, turning fans into superfans, and giving them a place of belonging. It was a container for community building, bringing people together for something larger. 

They knew innovation, simplicity, design and exceptional messaging would be the concoction that would lead them to world domination. Those 4 things had to exist in unison, not in isolation. Their obsession and incomparable detail in those areas is what would differentiate them from anything the world had seen at the time. Ultimately, their world-changing innovation would manifest as their legendary “Think Different” campaign. Think Different was a call to action, turning fans into superfans, and giving them a place of belonging. It was a container for community building, bringing people together for something larger. 

Apple’s messaging was a work of art. In contrast with what Dell, HP, Microsoft, and every other competitor was doing at the time, Apple focused on outcome-based messaging to communicate powerful ideas through simplicity and emotion. The brand felt effortless. 

For example:

iPod: 1,000 songs in your pocket

MacBook Air: The world’s thinnest notebook

iPhone: An iPod, a phone, an internet communicator... these are NOT three separate devices

“Marketing is about values. It’s a complicated and noisy world, and we’re not going to get a chance to get people to remember much about us. No company is. So we have to be really clear about what we want them to know about us.”

“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

Apple built a dream that fans could attach themselves to. Experiences, wonder, and values that a person associates with when they buy their products. 

They understood branding and what it meant for their organization, and that vision radiated from the core of the business throughout every single thing they did. 

The brilliance of Steve Jobs and its effect on Apple is a potent reminder that cult brands like Apple, Harley Davidson, Patagonia, and Nike didn’t become legend status by putting out a Minimum Viable Product.

I guarantee the slightest mention of an MVP would have Steve Jobs rolling in his grave, black turtleneck and all.