What Your MVP Says About Your Market

Tuomas Artman, Linear’s CTO, recently claimed that increasing SaaS competition is raising the bar for what’s required of MVPs. Mocks, demo videos, and even ugly prototypes aren’t enough anymore. Others have made the same claim.¹

They’re wrong. There are lots of markets where minimal MVPs are good enough, and if you aren’t in one of those markets, you may be better off pivoting instead of building a fancy MVP for picky customers who are flush with alternatives.

My co-founder’s furnace broke a few months ago. It was cold, and he spent hours lining up multiple contractors to visit his home. No one could fix it.

My co-founder also hates cold email, and is generally a skeptical, cautious guy, but in that moment, he told me he would still answer an email like this one:

Hey,

I’m a VC-backed founder working on an software platform that manages HVAC contractors for you. We manage HVAC issues from start to finish, including price negotiation and scheduling. If one contractor doesn’t fix you’re issue, we’ll find another one, and if you’re unhappy with our service, we’ll refund your money.

If that sounds useful, here’s my calendly.

If we remember the original definition of an MVP — the fastest way to validating the key assumptions of your startup — this email could be the MVP of a startup. Neither a working prototype, website, nor video was needed to understand if this HVAC management value prop was compelling.

Would an email MVP like this work for Linear? If it’s delivered to the right segment at the right time, I don’t see why not. Say the following email was sent to an IC at a small startup²:

Hey,

I’m a dev turned VC-backed founder who hated working in Jira at previous startups. We’re working on a keyboard-centric, Jira alternative that responds to every command in less than 50ms. It makes your project management tool feel more like Vim or VSCode.

We’re looking for early beta users. If you’re interested, here’s my calendly.

I suspect a simple cold email like this would have been enough to see if a Vim-like project management tool was compelling.

But let’s say an email like this wasn’t good enough for Linear. Shouldn’t that make us worried as founders? If people need to “see it to believe it,” it suggests we’re selling to people who have lots of other alternatives, people who can afford to be skeptical because they don’t have a compelling need for what we’re offering.

The CEO of Singular mobile, the exclusive cellular partner of the original iPhone, never saw the iPhone before signing a partner agreement. He knew Jobs could do it, and the value prop of a new revenue stream via selling data was too good to pass up. The MVP for one the most successful B2B products of our generation — the iPhone as a new data-centric revenue stream for cell carriers — was a conversation and a handshake.

Because the smartphone market was crowded, the consumer side of the business required more of an MVP to validate whether Apple was on the right track. Maybe the fancy demo with the charisma of Steve Jobs was a part of that MVP. We like fancy demos and charismatic CEOs, but if we need either of them to validate the riskiest parts of our business, we might be in a bad business.