I think the usefulness of insisting on reserving the term &quot;MVP&quot; for a <i>successful</i> experiment is that it could help prevent someone from spending months in development, telling themselves &quot;we&#x27;re building our MVP, we&#x27;re building our MVP&quot;, and thus thinking, when they&#x27;ve built something but not yet shown it to anyone, that it <i>is</i> an MVP.  No; you hope it is, but it may not be (and in fact, the odds are against you if you haven&#x27;t discussed it with potential customers).<p>So this is not just a semantic quibble, but actually supports the thrust of the article.  While you&#x27;re doing market research experiments, you should <i>call</i> them that.  When you actually strike gold, <i>then</i> you have an MVP.