I find myself rethinking "minimum". Instead of asking, What's the least we can do to launch? I'm asking, What's the least we can do to make people love this?

Half-baked functionality is not enough in an age where AI accelerates the product development lifecycle—people want experiences that feel intuitive, engaging, and yes, delightful.

Sometimes, it's the smallest things—a clever animation, seamless usability, or a thoughtful touch—that leave a lasting impression. An MDP isn't about perfection; it's about ensuring even the simplest version of a product creates joy. In a world of endless options, delight isn't a bonus; it's a competitive advantage.

Per-seat pricing only works when your users are human. But when agents become the primary users of software, that model collapses.

Executives aren't evaluating software against software anymore. They're comparing the combined costs of software licenses plus labor against pure outcome-based solutions. Think customer support (per resolved ticket vs. per agent + seat), marketing (per campaign vs. headcount), sales (per qualified lead vs. rep). That's your pricing umbrella—the upper limit enterprises will pay before switching entirely to AI.

enterprises are used to deterministic outcomes and fixed annual costs. Usage-based pricing makes budgeting harder. But individual leaders seeing 10x efficiency gains won't wait for procurement to catch up. Savvy managers will find ways around traditional buying processes.

This feels like a generational reset of how businesses operate. Zero upfront costs, pay only for outcomes—that's not just a pricing model. That's the future of business.

The winning strategy in my books? Give the platform away for free. Let your agents read and write to existing systems through unstructured data—emails, calls, documents. Once you handle enough workflows, you become the new system of record.

Building something valuable is no longer about validating a novel idea as fast as possible. Instead, the modern MVP exercise is about building a version of an idea that is different from and better than what exists today. Most of us aren’t building for a net-new market. Rather, we’re finding opportunities to improve existing categories. We need an MVP concept that helps founders and product leaders iterate on their early ideas to compete in an existing market.

It’s not good enough to be first with an idea. You have to out-execute from day 1.

The MVP as a practice of building a hacky product as quickly and cheaply as possible to validate the product does no longer work. Many product categories are already saturated with a variety of alternatives, and to truly test the viability of any new idea you need to build something that is substantially better.

Airbnb wanted to build a service that relied on people being comfortable spending the night at a stranger’s house. When they started in 2009, it wasn’t obvious if people were ready for this. Today, it’s obvious that it works, so they wouldn’t need to validate the idea. A similar analogy works for Lyft when they started exploring ridesharing as a concept.

Today, the MVP is no longer about validating a novel idea as quickly as possible. Rather, its aim is to create a compelling product that draws in the early users in order to gather feedback that you then use to sharpen the product into the best version of many.

If you look at successful companies that have IPO'd in the recent years–Zoom, Slack, TikTok, Snowflake, Robinhood–you see examples not of novel ideas, but of these highly-refined ideas.Since many of us are building in a crowded market, the bar for a competitive, public-ready MVP is much higher than the MVP for a novel idea, since users have options. To get to this high bar, we have to spend more time refining the initial version.

The original MVP idea can still work if you’re in the fortunate position of creating a wholly new category of product or work with new technology platforms, but that becomes rarer and rarer as time goes on.

Let’s jump over the regular startup journey that you might take today when building a new product:You start with the idea on how you want to improve on existing products in a category.You build your first prototype.You iterate with your vision and based on feedback from early users.You get an inkling of product market fit and traction.Optional: You start fundraising (with demonstrable traction).Optional: You scale your team, improve the product, and go to market.

In today’s landscape, you’re likely competing against many other products. To win, you have to build a product that provides more value to your users than your competition does.To be able to do this with limited resources, you must scope down your audience (and thus your ambitions) as much as possible to make competing easier, and aim to solve the problems of specific people.

When we started Linear, our vision was to become the standard of how software is built. This is not really something you can expect to do during your early startup journey, let alone in an MVP. But you should demonstrate you have the ability to achieve your bigger vision via your early bets. We chose to do this by focusing on IC’s at small startups. We started with the smallest atomic unit of work they actually needed help with: issue tracking.

We knew we wanted our product to demonstrate three values:It should be as fast as possible (local data storage, no page reloads, available offline).It should be modern (keyboard shortcuts, command menu, contextual menus).It should be multiplayer (real-time sync and teammates presence).

Remember, you’re likely not building a revolutionary or novel product. You’re unlikely to go viral with your announcement, so you need a network of people who understand the “why” behind your product to help spread the word to drive people to sign up. Any product category has many people who are frustrated with the existing tools or ways of working. Ideally you find and are able to reach out to those people.

Once you have a bunch of people on your waitlist, you need to invite the right users at each stage of your iteration. You want to invite people who are likely to be happy with the limited set of features you’ve built so far. Otherwise, they’ll churn straight away and you’ll learn nothing.

To recap:Narrow down your initial audience and build for them: Figure out who you're building the product for and make the target audience as small as possible before expanding.Build and leverage your waitlist: The waitlist is the grinding stone with which you can sharpen your idea into something truly valuable that will succeed at market, so use it effectively.Trust your gut and validate demand with your users: Talk, talk, talk to your users and find out how invested in the product they are (and if they’d be willing to pay)