[kevinpet]

Sign up landing pages as MVP? Never. Sign up pages to assess interest may be valuable, but they aren't MVP. MVP is "this is most stripped-down version of our vision that we think anyone would actually pay for". It's drawing a line in the sand. It's not expected to be profitable or grow quickly, or anything like that, but it's expected to be something that you can actually sell to someone. If you make the MVP, and no one buys, and you go through a couple cycles of "who's our target market", and there's still nobody buying, you need to kill it. Give up on that product, take anything you've managed to learn from your prospective customers, and build something else.

In other words: MVP isn't a catch-all for everything you could do to interact with your customers before you validated your vision. MVP means the "minimum" (stripped down, only the core features) "viable" (you must believe someone will buy it as-is) "product" (it must actually do something and provide value).

[lucisferre]

So then what was the Dropbox video MVP?

[kevinpet]

I'm not sure I understand you. If you're talking about the creative craft "What is Dropbox?" video, that was definitely post-MVP. Dropbox launched publicly with the ability to pay for it in Sept 2008. The video that made them take off like a rocket was in Sept 2009.

You could argue that sept 2008 was already post-MVP and they had what they considered a tentative MVP in March 2008 when they launched the private beta. Remember, the whole lean startup philosophy is about testing and learning. If they knew in March 2008 that their product was actually good enough to sell, then they should have let it out earlier.

I don't actually know anyone at Dropbox and I don't know if they are lean startup fans or if they would characterize anything this way, but I think it's a good example of the best case scenario for how you can build a great product: initial beta followed closely by minimal MVP with real paying customers, then some tweaking to get all the kinks worked out (technical and marketing), then one of your marketing pushes finds the market and you take off like mad.

[lucisferre]

I'm talking about this http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/19/dropbox-minimal-viable-prod...

Also that Eric specifically mentioned this in the book. I'm confused that this is surprising to you. I'm assuming you've read the Lean Startup?