Process
What an MVP actually is
Most people asking for an MVP describe a finished product with fewer features. That is not an MVP. That is just a worse version of the thing you wanted. A real MVP is the smallest thing that answers the one question you do not have an answer to yet.
4 min read · published May 17, 2026
The question, not the feature list
Every product idea has one question that decides whether the rest is worth building. Will people pay for this? Will they come back twice? Will they trust us with their data? The MVP is the cheapest experiment that answers that question.
If your MVP has eight features, seven of them are not part of the experiment. They are decoration. Cut them.
What we build for $3,000
The Spark MVP tier launches in two weeks. It is a real product, not a clickable mockup. Users sign up. They use it. Data flows. You see usage from day one.
- One core flow, end to end. Landing page, sign-up, the one thing the product does
- A real backend. Database, auth, payments if relevant
- Hosted and live on a domain you own
- Analytics so you can see what people actually do
What we do not build at this stage
Admin dashboards nobody will look at for three months. Mobile apps when a mobile-friendly website does the job. Multi-language support before the first user shows up. Feature flags for features that do not exist.
These are not bad things. They are just not what tells you whether the idea works.
What happens after week two
Three things, in this order. Show it to ten real users. Read what they do, not what they say. Decide if the question got answered.
If yes, we plan v2 with the second-most-important question. If no, you have spent $3,000 and two weeks instead of $50,000 and six months. That is the point.
When you do not need an MVP
If you already know the question has a yes. There are five competitors making money on it, customers already ask for it, you have done it on paper for two years. You do not need an MVP. You need v1. Different conversation, different tier.