For years the minimum viable product (MVP) was the default playbook. Ship the smallest thing that works, get it in front of users, learn fast. The trouble is that AI and no-code tools have collapsed the cost of building working software, and “viable” has stopped being a moat. The new bar is lovable.
This piece is for marketers who feel the pull of that shift. If your product is “fine” and your competitors’ products are “fine,” growth gets expensive. A minimum lovable product (MLP) gives marketing something compounding to work with: preference.
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What is a minimum lovable product?
A minimum lovable product is the smallest version of a product that users actively prefer, recommend, and would be upset to lose. It still has to work. It still has to be small. The difference: treat lovability as a launch requirement, not a phase two polish item.
The shift from MVP to MLP is not a rebrand. It is a response to a market where building is cheap and standing out is hard. As Wes Bush puts it, “Working software is table stakes.”
Why MVP thinking is running out of road
The original MVP idea, popularised by Eric Ries in The Lean Startup, was a reaction to teams overbuilding before learning anything. That problem has not gone away. But a second problem has caught up with it: too many products now ship a viable version of the same thing in the same week.
Three forces are pushing teams past viable:
- Build cost has collapsed. AI assistants and no-code tools mean a working clone of most categories is days, not quarters. Functional parity is no longer a finish line.
- Buyers compare faster. Free trials, video walkthroughs, and AI-generated comparisons mean a prospect can feel the difference between two products in minutes.
- Preference compounds. A product users love drives repeat usage, word of mouth, expansion, and switching resistance. A product users tolerate needs paid acquisition to keep moving.
For a deeper take on rapid validation in marketing itself, see The Minimum Viable Test (MVT): for marketing & growth and The Secret Weapon for Growth Marketers: Minimum Viable Experiment. Lovability sits one layer above those: it is what the experiments are aiming for.
The LOVE Stack: a framework for building a lovable product
Wes Bush frames lovability around four moves he calls the LOVE Stack:
- L: Land on the Emotional Outcome. Start from how a user wants to feel after using the product (in control, ahead, calm), not the feature list.
- O: Own One Moment. Identify a single moment in the experience that you will make unmistakably better than anyone else.
- V: Voice Your Opinion. Take a position. Default settings, naming, and onboarding should reflect a clear point of view rather than an average of every persona.
- E: Eliminate Everything Else. Cut features, options, and screens that dilute the moment you are owning.
For marketers, the LOVE Stack pushes the team to talk about preference before pipeline. If you cannot name the emotional outcome and the owned moment, your homepage and ads are probably speaking in feature parity.
The 60-second value threshold
A practical test inside the MLP idea is the 60-second value threshold. A new user should experience real value, not a tour, within roughly 60 seconds of arriving. In a world where the next tab is a competitor, anything slower bleeds intent.
For marketing, this reframes the activation conversation. The job is not just “get the signup.” It is “get the user to the value moment fast enough that they want to come back tomorrow.” That changes which signups are worth paying for and which onboarding flows are worth fixing first.
The lovability litmus test
Borrowed from the Sean Ellis product market fit test and sharpened: ask users how they would feel if they could no longer use the product. If the modal answer is “fine,” the product is viable. If a meaningful share say they would be “genuinely upset,” the product is on its way to lovable.
The two questions sit together. Product market fit asks whether a market exists. Lovability asks whether you have earned preference inside that market.
Examples worth studying
A few products people routinely call lovable rather than merely viable:
- Linear vs. Jira. Linear owns the moment of writing and triaging an issue. Speed, keyboard shortcuts, and opinionated defaults do the work that Jira tries to do with configuration.
- Slack vs. email. Slack landed on an emotional outcome (team feels in the loop) and made the first message moment delightful instead of administrative.
- Canva. Owns the moment a non-designer needs a usable graphic in minutes, with strong defaults rather than a blank canvas.
- Notion. Voiced a clear opinion that docs, wikis, and databases belong in one surface, and trimmed the alternative of stitching three tools together.
The pattern is consistent. Each product chose one moment, took a position, and cut everything that diluted it. As Wes Bush writes, “There are no boring categories. Only boring products.”
What this means for marketers
You probably cannot rewrite the product on your own. Four things move an MVP closer to an MLP from the marketing side:
- Name the emotional outcome on the homepage. Replace generic capability copy with the after-state a user is buying. If the product team has not agreed one, that conversation is your highest leverage meeting this quarter.
- Pick the owned moment in onboarding. Identify the single moment where users first feel the product was built for them, and rebuild the activation flow to reach it inside 60 seconds.
- Run a lovability survey alongside PMF. Add the “genuinely upset” question to your existing PMF survey. Track the share of users who clear that bar by segment. Use it to decide which segments deserve more acquisition spend.
- Stop selling parity. Audit your ads, comparison pages, and sales decks for feature checklists. Replace at least half with the moment, the position, and the outcome.
Related reading
- How growth marketers should use product market fit
- The Secret Weapon for Growth Marketers: Minimum Viable Experiment
- The Minimum Viable Test (MVT): for marketing & growth
- Lean marketing
The short version: viable gets you shipped. Lovable gets you chosen. In a market where shipping is cheap, that is where growth now lives.