Why examples matter
The antidote to
overscoping.
Founders consistently try to match the market leader on day one — a product with 10 years of development and hundreds of millions in funding. The cure is seeing what those same companies looked like when they launched. The answer is always the same: one feature, one user type, one clear hypothesis.
Airbnb
Three air mattresses on a floor in San Francisco. A basic website built in a weekend. No payments, no reviews, no messaging, no maps. Just a listing, a price, and an email address. Three people booked. That was enough.
Dropbox
A three-minute video showing what the product would do — seamless file syncing. No actual product. The waiting list went from 5,000 to 75,000 overnight. The engineering challenge was enormous. The video eliminated the risk of building it blind.
Buffer
Two web pages. Page one explained the concept. Page two showed pricing. When visitors clicked sign up, they were told the product was not ready yet. The founder tracked click-throughs to the pricing page to validate willingness to pay, not just interest.
Zappos
The founder photographed shoes at local shops, listed them on a basic website. When someone ordered, he bought the shoes at full price and shipped them. No warehouse, no inventory, no logistics. He was the supply chain.
Stripe
A payment API that let developers accept credit cards with seven lines of code. No dashboard. No reporting. No fraud detection. Just the ability to charge a card. The simplest possible solution to the hardest part of payments.
Uber
An iPhone app available only in San Francisco. Tap a button, get a black car. No ratings, no fare estimates, no surge pricing. Three drivers, a handful of users, one city, one car type, one interaction.
The pattern
What every successful
MVP has in common.
The same principles appear in every example above — and they are the same principles we apply when building MVPs at Wall & Fifth.
01
One core hypothesis
Each MVP tested exactly one thing. Not five things. Not the whole concept. One specific, falsifiable assumption about user behaviour.
02
Minimum scope, maximum clarity
Features were cut ruthlessly. What remained was sharp, focused, and designed to answer the question being asked — nothing more.
03
Real users, real behaviour
None tested demand through surveys alone. They put a real product in front of real users and measured real behaviour — signups, purchases, retention.
04
The commercial model was present
Even in the earliest versions, money changed hands. These founders were not testing interest — they were testing willingness to pay.
05
Speed over completeness
Every company launched with obvious gaps. Those gaps were deliberate. Filling them would have delayed learning by months.
Deep dive
Spotify — one feature, one country.
A desktop application — no mobile — available only in Sweden. It did one thing: stream music instantly without downloading. No playlists, no social features, no podcasts, no algorithmic recommendations. Just a search bar and a play button.
What was deliberately left out: global availability, mobile, social, discovery, and every other feature that makes Spotify what it is today. The only hypothesis: will people stream music instead of downloading it? Validated in a single market with a single feature, that answer funded everything that followed.
What founders can learn: launch in one market. Build for one platform. Solve one problem. Geographic and platform constraints are features of an MVP, not limitations.
Your product
What your MVP should look like.
Your MVP will not look like Airbnb’s or Stripe’s. It will look like your product — stripped to its core, focused on the one problem that matters most, built well enough to put in front of real users and charge real money.
That is what we build at Wall & Fifth. Minimum viable products — the real kind. Working software, delivered in 8 weeks, at a fixed price from £16,000.
- Read our complete guide to building an MVP
- Understand what features to include in your MVP
- See how the process works week by week
- Compare web app vs mobile app for your product
Or skip the reading and book a scoping call. Tell us what you are building and we will tell you what the right MVP looks like.
FAQ
Questions people usually have before the next step feels obvious.
What is a good example of a minimum viable product?
Airbnb is the most cited. The founders rented out air mattresses and built a basic listing site. No payments, no reviews, no messaging. Three people booked. That validated the core idea — people would pay to stay in a stranger's home.
What are some SaaS MVP examples?
Buffer started as two web pages — a landing page and a pricing page. Stripe launched a payment API with seven lines of code. Both tested commercial viability before building the full product.
How simple should an MVP be?
As simple as possible while still delivering real value. If users can get value from it, it is viable. If it has fewer features than you are comfortable with, it is probably the right scope.
What should an MVP include?
Only the features required to test the core hypothesis. One user type, one core workflow, one clear value proposition. Authentication, the primary functionality, and just enough interface to be usable. Everything else comes after validation.
Can a website be an MVP?
A website alone is not an MVP — it is a marketing tool. But a web application can be. A web app that lets users sign up, perform a core action, and get value is a perfectly valid minimum viable product.
Related pages
Your turn
What will your MVP
look like?
Tell us what you are building. We will help you define the minimum scope that validates the idea — and give you a fixed price to build it.