Hmm, perhaps you&#x27;re right on the confusion, though the quote<p>&gt; So, the minimum viable product is that product which has just those features (and no more) that allows you to ship a product that resonates with early adopters; some of whom will pay you money or give you feedback.<p>Seems pretty clear to me, perhaps the trickiness comes around whether or not absolutely anything that gets feedback is an MVP? I don&#x27;t get how you&#x27;d say with a straight face that you shipped a product when what you actually did was go around with a questionnaire.<p>&gt; How do you do know if it&#x27;s &quot;smallest&quot; or &quot;viable&quot;?<p>You explicitly chose situations where there were extra, unused features and where the product as a whole was completely useless. If you have a product with more features than you needed, you can&#x27;t really say you succeeded in making the <i>minimum</i> viable product, and if you have a product nobody wants is it really sensible to refer to it as a viable product?<p>Is the startup world at such a point that nobody knows what might constitute a viable product? Sure, there&#x27;s some blurred points around not-yet-profitable-but-growing things, but if your target audience finds your thing absolutely useless is it really that unclear?<p>&gt; Walk me through your process.<p>Again, I have no problem with the process and it&#x27;s a shame this has picked up so much attention instead of actual discussion around that. I just don&#x27;t want to have to deal with the following conversations:<p>&quot;We&#x27;ve built an MVP&quot;<p>&quot;Great! How did the launch go?&quot;<p>&quot;Launch? Oh my no, we&#x27;ve just finished a focus group session. The next MVP is at 4pm if you want to sit in.&quot;<p>&gt; I think it&#x27;s fair to say that you need more than an acronym to understand what to do.<p>Yes, this is true, which is surely why we already have terms like market research. I just don&#x27;t understand what benefit calling market research &quot;building an MVP&quot; has.<p>My initial criticism was that you&#x27;d redefined what I thought was a well understood term. If I&#x27;m wrong about that (which I seem to be) then I&#x27;d change my criticism to &quot;If something is poorly understood, please don&#x27;t redefine it to mean something different <i>again</i>&quot;. When I see a title like &quot;X isn&#x27;t X, it&#x27;s Y&quot; my immediate thought is that someone is trying to give an old idea a new name to make it more current and sexy, that may not be fair but it&#x27;s my first reaction to this kind of thing.<p>Perhaps I just need to step back from all this for a while. Perhaps in this world you really can refer to a marketing video as a viable product, and I&#x27;m a crazed outsider. I&#x27;d hoped to be clear about simple definitions of words yet caused&#x2F;opened up even more confusion and disagreement, so I guess I&#x27;ve failed at my minimal useful comment.