The Minimum Lovable Product Era

It’s time for the MVP to level up.

Forget MVP (Minimal Viable Product). The new baseline is MLP: Minimal Lovable Product. Because if it’s not lovable, it’s not viable in the market anymore.

And sure, we can debate what ‘viable’ is supposed to mean, but let’s be real - MVP devolved into “minimal functioning product” because ‘viable’ got watered down to ‘it performs bare minimum.’

And that’s because dev work was expensive. Like very expensive. But we live in the new reality now where dev costs are collapsing. Everyone’s a builder now. Software functionality is becoming a… commodity. So an MVP just means you built another tool people tolerate until they re-create it themselves or a better one comes along.

An MLP is different: earliest version that’s genuinely lovable. The kind of product where people feel it. It’s fast, obvious, opinionated, and gives you that ‘wait, this is actually… nice’ moment.

But most people still don’t get why this matters so much right now.

When I bring up MLP, I always get pushback. ‘You’re describi…