Most people think of a Minimum Viable Product, or MVP, as a basic app that barely does the job. Just enough features to work, nothing fancy.
That definition isn’t wrong, but it’s only part of the story.
In reality, MVPs can take many forms. Some are incredibly simple. Others don’t involve a working product at all, just a smart way to check if your idea is worth building.
This article breaks down the most common types of MVPs used to launch projects. Whether you’re planning to build an app or just want to test an idea before spending too much, there’s a version of an MVP that can help you move forward with confidence.
The fake door MVP
Let’s be honest, this one barely counts as an MVP in the traditional sense. Mostly because there’s no actual product behind it yet.
But that’s exactly the point.
A fake door MVP is more of a clever experiment. You build something that looks like a real product, usually a landing page. It explains what your app does, talks about the features, maybe even shows a mockup or prototype, and then asks people to sign up or click to get started.
Nothing exists behind the scenes. When someone clicks, they’re taken to a message like “Coming soon” or “We’re building this now , want to stay updated?”
It’s a simple but effective way to test if anyone’s actually interested in what you’re offering, before you spend weeks (or months) building the real thing.
Most people use a landing page because it’s easy and quick to set up. But honestly, you can use the same idea in an ad, an email, or even a social media post wherever you can test if your concept sparks curiosity.
For example Blitzit
Before Buffer became a full-blown tool for scheduling social media posts, the team behind it ran a small experiment. They put up a landing page explaining what the app would do. It even had a pricing section. But here’s the catch, the app didn’t exist yet. If someone tried to sign up, they’d get a polite message saying it was still in development. The reaction? Plenty of interest. Enough to prove the idea was worth building. And that early feedback helped shape the product into what it eventually became.
Limitation
This method can feel a little sneaky if you’re not careful. If someone thinks they’re signing up for a working app, only to hit a dead end, it might leave a bad impression. The key is transparency. Let people know you’re still building and just testing interest. Most will appreciate the honesty and some might even want to stay in the loop.
In the end, the fake door MVP is one of the fastest, most budget-friendly ways to test an idea. It helps you find out what people really want before you dive into development.
The Landing page MVP
Consider this the more polished alternative of a fake door MVP. The key similarities to a fake door MVP is that both take place before you have a working product, but a landing page MVP is a step above.
Instead of just describing an idea and seeking opinions like “what do you think”, you have the opportunity to deepen the engagement. After a very brief introduction to the app and its value proposition, they will sign up for a waitlist or for updates.
That engagement is important transition. At this point you are not just testing for interest, you are actually building a list of potential users. When you have a working app, you will not be starting from zero; you will already have a cohort of people who raised their hand and said “let me know when this is live”. Some of these people might be your first testers.
In brief, a landing page MVP is a moderately interactive method to assess if your idea resonates with real people - all before writing your first line of code! The more people who see your pitch, and sign up for the waiting list - the more confident you can be that you have something!
How Dropbox Did It Before designing a file-sharing service with a tech team, Dropbox’s founders created only a simple landing page. On the landing page, they presented a short video illustrating how the product would function. Nothing else. No app, and no backend functionality. This was simply a concept. That page came with a sign-up form, allowing them to collect emails. When it was all said and done, thousands of people had signed up in a matter of hours. The surge in signups was a surprise. It confirmed one thing: people wanted a solution like Dropbox. Armed with this validation, they could move forward with building.
What to Watch Out For This is the tricky part. Just because someone signed up doesn’t mean they will still be there later. Many people will enter their email and forget about it entirely. So, when launch day arrives, the enthusiasm that you expected could very well be missing. Keep the conversation going. Share helpful updates. Maintain the excitement, so that people do not forget why they got excited about it in the first place.
Landing page MVPs are fast, cheap, and can be done by beginners. You do not need development skills or a technical team to get off the ground. Platforms such as Unbounce, Instapage, and Leadpages allow you to create a clean and polished landing page through easily accessible drag-and-drop editors.
Email Campaign MVP
Sometimes the best way to test an idea is just to talk to people, and email can be a great way to do that.
This method is like a twist on the fake door method. Rather than creating a website, you send an email to introduce your app idea. You outline what it is, how it helps people, why they should care, and ask them to click, reply, or sign up if they’re interested.
Like the other low-effort MVPs we looked at, the goal is to find out if your idea is worthwhile to build. Are people opening the email? Are people clicking? Are they replying with follow-up questions? These signals can help you assess if you are onto something interesting before you even write a single line of code.
One of the biggest advantages is speed. You don’t have to design a page or think about visual identity. You just need to write a clear, honest message, and send it.
It is also nice knowing that your email list will typically consist of people that know you or trust you. So those people are more likely to interact with your email, which means you will get better feedback than a cold audience.
If you’ve organized your list properly, you can even send messages to people based on their interests or behaviors. This is useful not only to know if your idea works, but who it is working for.
Real Example: Superhuman Before launching Superhuman, a fast, premium email app, its founder, Rahul Vohra buildup their initial user base through email. He didn’t do a blast marketing campaign, but started real conversations where he asked questions and was listening to the answers in order to shape what the actual product would be. This personal email interactions established word of mouth buzz and built valuable committed users pre-launch.
Limitation Of course, this only works to the extent you have an already existent people list to send email updates. If you aren’t starting with a committed list of potential subscribers, your capacity for reach is limited. Creating that list takes time to create, so if you are completely starting from scratch, focusing on an MVP may be more prudent with some other strategy.
Still, if you have an audience with trust in you, an email campaign MVP may be one of the fastest, most personable avenues to initially test your idea and have real conversations to inform your next steps.
Marketing campaign MVP
Let me ask you to imagine this: what if you combined the fake door, landing page, and email campaign MVPs and then gave that MVP a boost by running paid ads to drive targeted traffic? You would create what we call a marketing campaign MVP.
A marketing campaign MVP allows you to run a full-scale promotional campaign for your app idea nearly as much as if the product existed. You can generate buzz, test your messaging, and see how the audience behaves the only caveat is the app is not yet live.
From this stand-point, not much changes. You are still performing market research, competitor analysis, messaging, ad creative development, platform selection and budgets for paid advertising - the only thing you don’t do is launch it.
Due to the scale of marketing campaign MVPs, they can often reach a wider audience than simple landing pages or email campaigns. Paid advertising helps you reach new audiences, and the opportunity for larger exposure helps you receive more diverse feedback and insights. You aren’t just validating a concept or idea, you are discovering who your audience is, where they are, and how they responded or reacted to your proposition.
For example, before launching Harry’s, the men’s grooming brand, the founders did a full marketing campaign to validate demand. They made a professional landing page, ran targeted ads, solicited email sign-ups using an amicable referral system, and within a week had over 100,000 email addresses all before a single product existed! They needed some method of validating there was demand, and that overwhelming response validated it! It allowed them to have confidence (and data) to manufacture and formally launch the product.
Limitation
MVP’s of marketing campaigns are generally very resource intensive. Ad spend, copywriting, design and research can all add up pretty fast especially if you’re testing multiple messages or platforms. The risk is that if it goes badly, you’ve just burnt an entire calendar month on what essentially might be a budget-busting failure, with no real meaningful insights, especially if the targeting or message at the outset missed the mark.
Due to the resources, marketing campaign MVP’s are typically better suited for bigger companies, that have deeper pockets, established resource capabilities, and can run three different multi-channel campaigns at the same time without burning out the team that executes it.
They are great to use in situations where having a deep understanding of your audience is critical to your app’s success. If the product you are testing or launching has strong competition, temporarily testing marketing campaign MVP will provide you with insights about who to compete against.
Pre-order MVP
A pre-order MVP is yet another variant of an MVP marketing campaign (although, perhaps one that takes things a little bit further), because it actually has a user pay money in advance for the product.
This model is often set up through crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter or GoFundMe. The idea is pretty simple, you share the concept you are working on, tell people what you are building and have them support the project by pre-ordering.
The benefits are powerful in this situation, since the money you raise can be put towards developing your app - which could save you time or allow you additional features you may not have otherwise had available to you.
You are also not just raising money, you are creating a committed user base. The group of backers will be paying customers, which generally means a higher chance that they give you quality feedback and are willing to stick with you long term.
As an example, one of the most famous examples is Pebble, the watch company. Before they built their product, they ran a Kickstarter campaign, where they articulated their vision and showed some early designs of the product. The response was overwhelming they raised over $10 million from backers, who pre-ordered the watch. The money was able to turn the idea into a real, workable product that they could launch to an existing user base.
Limitations:-
Of all types of MVPs, pre-orders have the greatest risk. You are accepting money for something that does not exist yet if it does not become a reality, you risk disappointing your backers, but also your reputation. In some cases, you may have refund/legality issues, or long-term mistrust of your brand. For that reason, it would be prudent to validate your idea with an easier MVP - fake door or landing page - and not ask them to pay first.
Therefore, the pre-order MVP is not for everyone, but when done in the right time - or especially with a validated idea it can assess future demand, provide funding and kick start your development in one hit.
Till now, we’ve discussed low-fidelity MVPs that allow you to determine interest without
Single-feature App MVP
A single-feature MVP is constructed by focusing on one main feature , the primary intention of your app. The whole purpose of this approach is to take out everything else so users can focus exclusively on that one main feature and provide concentrated and clear feedback.
This is the classic MVP. This is what people picture when they think of a “minimum viable product”.
In the end, most of the world’s largest tech companies began with MVPs like this. Take Facebook for example; it was a simple social platform only for Harvard students to connect with each other, no news feed and the ability to make video calls or join groups wasn’t included just basic profiles and adding friends. And Uber was a single-feature MVP with just that one intention of letting users book a black car with a tap. That’s it.
The common thread? These products did one job, and they did it well. Over time, as demand and user feedback grew, they evolved into the feature-rich platforms we know today.
Single-feature MVPs are effective by offering clarity. Development is sped up, testing is straight-forward, and user feedback is often more valuable to you. If your core idea resonates with users, you gain a great starting point to build your product and iterate based on meaningful user feedback on additional features.
Instagram is a great example. When Instagram launched, it was not the multi-functional social app that we think of as Instagram today. It was a photo-sharing app that allowed users to take a square image, apply a filter, and share it, and that was it. Instagram’s simplicity offered users a narrow experience and helped it break through the noise in a crowded social app market. Instagram was able to attract a loyal user base early, by offering just one product.
Limitation:-
The main drawback to a single-feature MVP is that you need to make sure that whatever you are offering is valuable enough on it own. If the feature feels incomplete or is not worth doing on its own, then users will lose interest after a short period. By launching a single-feature MVP you may also face a challenge of competitors copying your feature fast, if it is easy to replicate, while you are not yet committed to building a full ecosystem.
In summary, single-feature MVP allows you to cut through the noise, maintain focus and test out your core idea with real users creating a sense of excitement or possibility for what is to come next.
Piecemeal MVP
A piecemeal MVP takes a different route rather than build everything from the ground-up, you build a product using third-party tools and services.
What’s the primary upside? Faster to develop - and far cheaper. In this case, you are using tools that already exist and have been validated, which reduces the development time and increases the stability of your solution much earlier.
Piecemeal MVPs are also helpful when you have complex or advanced features in mind for your idea, but just don’t have the time, team, or budget to build everything yourself. For example, you can plug FileMaker into an automatic PDF generator for your purchases, and then use a script in Apple Mail to actually send all of these out to your users; all without writing one line of your own back-end code.
Moreover, this model doesn’t just apply to new companies. Established businesses may also benefit from piecemeal MVPs when validating a pivot, or when launching a completely new product. One great example is BetterSpaces, a wellness platform. When they needed to transition to virtual services, they didn’t need to build any more software. They leveraged Mailchimp for marketing, Zoom for hosting virtual events, and other third-party applications to deliver the value they needed without heavy investment.
A neat example is Groupon, which started as a piecemeal MVP. Early on, the team used WordPress to manage the website; in the background they manually created a pdf coupon and used Apple Mail to send it to customers. Not scalable by any means but good enough to validate the idea before they built their own system.
Limitation:-
The drawback of a piecemeal MVP is that they don’t lend themselves easily for long-term scalability. As your user base increases, accumulatively adding tools, and relying on their different APIs to stitch together, your product can bog down and become messy, hard to update, and maintain. Eventually, you’ll probably have to rebuild everything from scratch and move to custom solutions which takes time. A missed opportunity for growth by not baking the ability to (insert reason for the growth delay here into your product to begin with, can mean a lost opportunity.
A piecemeal MVP can disguise your app making it feel polished and functional on the outside, even though much of the machinery behind the scenes is borrowed. It is a clever way to test out big ideas without the heavy upfront investment.
Concierge MVP
A concierge MVP is quite high touch instead of automating the workings of the back-end of your app, you are now executing that manually behind the scenes. To the user, it feels like a functioning application, yet it’s actually just flesh and blood people working to deliver the same ends that software would one day deliver to them.
The primary benefit of this is that you can provide a personalized user experience and product without having built any complicated technology yet. Plus, you may be able to test your idea and learn in detail what your users need as well as iterate quickly - all without making a large upfront investment in development.
This approach is especially valuable when your product requires complex decision-making, personalization, or “service” that is fundamentally difficult to automate in the early stages.
A meal planning app called Food on the Table began life as a concierge MVP. Rather than rely on an algorithm for meal plans, the founder created a weekly menu for each user based on their preferences for each week. He would go through the grocery store manually to match recipes to deals in store to add immense value for his users. It was a beautiful way to really understand user behavior and iterate before any automation was done.
Drawback:-
Although a concierge MVP allows for rich insights and a fantastic user experience, it’s simply not scalable. You can only operate a concierge model for a small group of early users (assuming you have backend ops in place). As demand grows, it can become untenable - unless moving towards automated systems. Also, if everything is tech driven, there can be pushback if you over-promise, so transparency and setting expectations is important.
Wizard of Oz MVP
A Wizard of Oz MVP works a lot like a concierge MVP the backend is still handled manually by humans. The key difference? The user has no idea.
From the outside, everything looks fully automated. The interface behaves like a polished, working app, and users believe they’re interacting with software. But behind the curtain, it’s real people doing the work just like the “wizard” pulling levers in the classic story. This approach is great when you want to test how users interact with your product, or whether they’ll pay for certain features, before you build any of the actual tech. It lets you validate both usability and demand all while giving the illusion of a fully developed product. Before launching their AI-powered shoe recommendation platform, the founders of Zappos wanted to test a simple idea: would people actually buy shoes online?
But instead of investing in warehouses or tech, they went the Wizard of Oz route. The founder, Nick Swinmurn, visited local shoe stores, took photos of shoes, and posted them on a basic website. When someone placed an order, he’d go buy the shoes himself and ship them directly to the customer no inventory, no backend, no automation.
From the customer’s perspective, it looked like a real e-commerce operation. But behind the scenes, it was all manual. That scrappy experiment validated the demand for online shoe shopping — and laid the foundation for what became a billion-dollar company.
Limitation:-
The biggest challenge with a Wizard of Oz MVP is that it can be deceptively time- and labor-intensive. Because users believe they’re interacting with a real system, they expect speed, consistency, and reliability all of which you’re manually trying to replicate behind the scenes. If demand scales quickly, it can become overwhelming to keep up, and any slip-ups can hurt user trust. It’s a powerful testing method, but best used with a small group of early adopters.
Which MVP Do You Need?
If there’s one point to take away from everything that we have covered, it’s that an MVP does not need to be shiny, complex, or even built.
In fact, some of the most effective MVPs such as landing pages or email campaigns - don’t even involve an actual product. The most important part is that it helps you validate your idea before investing more time and money into the development.
Of course, a standard MVP which is an actual working version of your app- is still very much needed. It is still arguably the best way to offer users something to try.
However, for you to do that you will need more than an idea, you will need to have the right team behind you.
That is where DECODE comes into the equation.
We have helped startups and more established businesses turn MVPs into products market ready and we are more than happy to do that again for you. Be it testing a new concept or building your first app completely from scratch, our team is here to help.
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Schedule a consultation with us today so we can help you bring your minimum viable product (MVP) to market one smart step at a time.
When most people think of a minimum viable product (MVP), they think of some simple, basic app that just does the job; a handful of features, anything but fancy.
And while that definition isn’t wrong, it is only half the story.
The truth is that an MVP can come in many forms. Some are very simple, while some don’t even require a working product just a smart way to confirm the idea is worth building.
Downsides:-
MVP’s of marketing campaigns are generally very resource intensive. Ad spend, copywriting, design and research can all add up pretty fast especially if you’re testing multiple messages or platforms. The risk is that if it goes badly, you’ve just burnt an entire calendar month on what essentially might be a budget-busting failure, with no real meaningful insights, especially if the targeting or message at the outset missed the mark.
Due to the resources, marketing campaign MVP’s are typically better suited for bigger companies, that have deeper pockets, established resource capabilities, and can run three different multi-channel campaigns at the same time without burning out the team that executes it.
But, they are great to use in situations where having a deep understanding of your audience is critical to your app’s success. If the product you are testing or launching has strong competition, temporarily testing marketing campaign MVP will provide you with insights about who to compete against.
