Lean startup and MVP: how to test an idea before you spend the whole budget

Most new products don't fail because someone programmed them badly. They fail because someone built something nobody needed in that form. Lean startup is a way of working that is meant to catch this early and cheaply.

Eric Ries described the method in his 2011 book "The Lean Startup", building on Steve Blank's work on customer development. The core idea is simple: treat your idea as a set of assumptions, test the most important ones on real people, and build only as much as you need to get an answer.

Who this guide is for

For founders who have an idea for an app or a service and wonder where to start. For companies that want to add a new product and don't want to spend hundreds of thousands on something that may not catch on. And for anyone who hears "let's do an MVP" and wants to know what it actually means.

What you'll find in the four topics

1. What is an MVP — a definition without jargon, types of MVP, well-known examples and the most common misunderstandings.
2. The lean startup methodology — the build–measure–learn loop, hypotheses, the decision to change direction, and what the method looks like when you build a real product.
3. Lean canvas — how to describe a business model on one page and find the riskiest assumption.
4. Product-market fit — how to tell that your product has hit a real need, and what to measure after the first version goes live.

The key points in one paragraph

Don't start with a list of features. Start with the question: which assumption, if it turns out to be false, would kill the whole idea? Find the cheapest way to test it: sometimes it's a conversation with customers, sometimes a sign-up page, sometimes a working app with a single feature. Measure what people did, not what they said. Then decide: keep going, change direction, or stop before you spend more.

If you want to build the first working version of your product, see how I work on MVPs: a fixed price of €1,900–9,300 and 2–6 weeks to launch.