Minimum Buyable Product

The “minimum” in minimum viable product (MVP) is the minimum it takes to get someone to open their wallets, not the minimum it takes for the product to work.

Minimum Buyable Product > Minimum Viable Product – @jasonfried

Often conflated, but not the same!

I learned this the hard way recently.

Lists Kit is a HTML boilerplate for making info directories. It’s an idea that started from me wanting to replace old directories built on nocode platforms. So my idea of a MVP is the something bare and basic—functionally—that I can use replace a directory site. Something workable.

But what workable for me might not be buyable for a customer (even though 3 customers bought so far… but it’s just 3 after all). After all, I wasn’t paying!

So here’s where the old indie hacker way of “scratching your own itch” needs some nuance. I was scratching my own itch with Lists Kit. But for it to become buyable, it might not be enough to just scratch an itch. It has to have something more. Something enough that people will want to pay for. So far, I’m not sure I found it yet. “It” can be a set of features that solves enough pain for it to become buyable. Or it can be positioning it to the right group of customers. Finding what “it” is will be the main unlock to Lists Kit being a real business.

Till then, it’s just a minimum viable product, not minimum buyable product.