What is an MVP for a B2B startup?
The funny thing is that every Lean Startup founder who delays shipping struggles with excuses like this. Most customers in any market (consumer, SMB, enterprise) do not want to take a risk. He&#x27;s ignoring the important advice in Moore&#x27;s <i>Crossing the Chasm</i> [1] and Blank&#x27;s <i>Four Steps to the Epiphany</i> [2]: the people who will buy a very early stage product are a tiny fraction of your total market; you have to aggressively find them.<p>That process is definitely different in an enterprise market. For whole-hog adoption, giant companies will want a mature solution. So instead you find ways to derisk it. Maybe it&#x27;s a pilot program with a larger player. Maybe it&#x27;s proving out the technology in an SMB context. Maybe you just find one mom-and-pop hotel who pays you not in money but in their time and data. Maybe you start with a single floor or even a single hotel room into which  you preferentially book people who you think will be early adopters.<p>The M in MVP is for Minimum, and that applies not just to the product, but to the context of use. You start as small as possible, just enough to test your hypotheses. The smaller your tests, the faster you learn.<p>He makes another rookie mistake here: &quot;I still need to buy the same number of tablets to rent to hotels, and can’t even really discount the product that much.&quot; Lean Startups are not  cheap startups. It cost Toyota millions to build the first Prius, but they did not sell it for millions. That&#x27;s fine, because the point of your early MVPs is not to cover the expenses. It&#x27;s to learn things, including about what people will pay. In Lean thinking you price based on <i>value</i>, not cost, and then work hard to minimize costs while maintaining value.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Crossing_the_Chasm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Crossing_the_Chasm</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Four-Steps-Epiphany-Steve-Blank&#x2F;dp&#x2F;0989200507" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Four-Steps-Epiphany-Steve-Blank&#x2F;dp&#x2F;09...</a>