The Playbook for Finding Your Minimum Viable User
“Why did she do it that way?” People buy milkshake in the morning to combat long boring commute. In that moment, the milkshake isn’t competing against a doughnut. It’s competing against a toy store...
I recently watched a YouTube video from Harvard Innovation Labs called Create a Product People Will Actually Buy. In the video, the speaker introduced a concept I had never heard before: Minimum Viable Segment, or MVS.
He defined it this way:
“The MVS simply says you want to find one path where you get the same needs for the same users that allows you to sell the same product over and over and over again without you having to change the product.”
We talk a lot about MVP — the minimum viable product. Build the smallest version, test it, learn from the market, and iterate. But this idea of MVS made me pause, because it shifts the question from “What is the smallest product I can build?” to “Who is the smallest group of people I can repeatedly serve with the same product?”
A product does not become viable just because it is small. It becomes viable when it meets a real need for a specific group of people with enough consistency that the same solution can work more than once.
Since watching th…
