Minimum Lovable Product (MLP) and how it is different from MVP

Brian de Haaff, the inventor of the term Minimum Lovable Product (MLP), is consumingly passionate about the concept. Even to the point of saying that, in his view, a Minimum Viable Product is so bad that it is almost irrelevant in today’s business environment. The author goes so far as to say there is no sense in creating an MVP these days because it is easily replaceable and lacks any incentive for a user to stick with it. 

However, to be more objective and fair, let’s compare MLP and MVP with the example of an average iPhone and Xiaomi phones. Xiaomi phones get the job done and have just enough functionality for what the phone is supposed to do these days. Plus, you know, the colors. Yet, of course, iPhone users would say they love their iPhones and they are quite emotionally involved with the product. They enjoy the simplicity and smoothness of the design, and they praise its reliability and extra performance. And so on. 

Yet, let’s look at the bigger picture. 

• Both iPhone and Xiaomi have their target audiences. 
• Yet, their competitive environments are different. Xiaomi has a ton of competitors, while the iPhone is the sole niche leader. 
• iPhone can afford 50-70% profit margins on their phones. At the same time, Xiaomi’s profit margins are around 37.1% to 40%.  

Thus, choosing MLP or MVP for your product means choosing your target audience, competitors, and business model in terms of profitability and value proposition. We’d say both approaches to launching your start – MVP and MLP – have their key benefits and use cases. Now let’s dive into the particulars and finer details of the app development for MLP vs MVP!

The Case for Minimum Lovable Product

There are two major reasons why Brian de Haff believes you should invest in MLP instead of MVP.

Reason #1 Don’t downgrade your vision

It is mostly true that when you start your business or if you are a Product Manager, you have an idea for an amazing product. The kind that will fascinate people. And the one that people will love. Why would you settle on making just a tolerable version of it with the MVP approach? And if the MVP approach becomes a go-to approach in your organization, doesn’t it make your business or work life uninspiring? MVP does focus on making something that will meet the basic needs of early adopters. It may turn out to be stifling for a creative, ambitious, and visionary kind of personality.

Reason #2 Evolved customer preferences

The technological landscape is varied and abundant. In this richness of choice, a simplistic product can quickly get lost and be forgotten. The customer can quickly move on to a competitor’s product. MVP’s approach is to validate rather than establish make a lasting impression and form the foundation of customer loyalty.  So, why sacrifice your first impression on mere validation when you can invest some more and go for customer loyalty with the MLP approach?

Verdict

1. Assess whether you can accept downgrading your business idea/vision. Often, businesses following the MVP approach have to mercilessly cut the functionality. It is reasonable and justified with the lean iterative MVP methodology. But it is what it is. Not every professional is ready to sacrifice the ‘perfect picture’ or any of the elements of the original idea.
2. Evaluate your competition in terms of how easy it is for a customer to switch to a similar product. Even the MVP approach relies on customer feedback that requires them to stay with the product over time. In fact, this point is so crucial that if the barrier to switching for customers is too low, the MVP approach simply won’t do. Thus, the MLP can be the only way to go in a highly competitive niche.

How is MLP different from MVP?

This part is largely based on the original book “Lovability: How to Build a Business That People Love and Be Happy Doing It” by Brian de Haaff from 2017. It discusses how MLP can be superior to the MVP approach, though, it takes a largely business view and not specifically development. 

The key difference from MVP is creating lovability according to Brian de Haaff. This is a 10-step process broken down into 3 stages. It is shown in the picture below. 

Source: “Lovability: How to Build a Business That People Love and Be Happy Doing It” by Brian de Haaff.

As you can see from the picture, you’ll need to tick a lot of boxes to build an MLP. So, it does translate into higher upfront costs and longer development time. Which is ok, when it is justified. MLP goes the extra mile to build an emotional connection and deliver user delight. So, analyzing it objectively, one can spot that iMLPis not for every industry or product. 

Let’s go back to the example of Xiaomi vs iPhone. It is true to say that iPhone users usually experience delight from using the phone. They have a smile and enjoy ‘smooth performance’, ‘responsiveness’, and ‘loving the fact that they don’t feel annoyed when things take too long’. Yet, there are manufacturers who can create a more affordable product like a Xiaomi phone. It has its target users who prefer a sensible price and do not need the extras. There are a lot of companies prioritizing affordability and essential functionality for price-conscious users. MVP development is still a solid way to go about launching your startup in many cases.

Minimum Lovable Product Use Cases

So, here is the list where MLP focused on user delight is in order:

• Creative solutions or solutions that support user creativity. For example, think of Instagram with its filters or TikTok with video editing tools. It won’t be a stretch to imagine a user being delighted and smiling at a finished creation. In the B2B segment, creativity tools are also widespread. Think of B2B tools supporting marketing, strategy creation, content creation, and whatnot. The author of the MLP concept is the co-founder and CEO of Aha! Software that helps in road mapping and project management. 
• Gaming apps, or apps that rely on gamification. This type of product ultimately focuses on delivering user joy and keeping engagement levels. Therefore, the MVP concept won’t be able to adequately provide emotional hooks which is what ultimately needs to be measured and iterated upon. 
• Lifestyle/fitness apps. Peloton, Nike Training Club, Headspace, etc. These apps depend on evoking positive associations to keep users engaged. They are often rooted in habitual use and this can be achieved by keeping the user positively motivated, feeling empowered, and feeling cared for. These often have some sort of in-built reward system to connect with user psychology to instill a sense of progress and satisfaction. 

However, not all efforts to create an emotional connection can be strictly positive. For a moment, let’s talk about Duolingo’s Owl “Duo” with its passive-aggressive pop-ups. It might not make a person smile but it is a sort of “tough love”. It shows that Duo cares about you not losing your progress. So it does correspond to the Care step of the Minimum Lovable Product framework. And it certainly means to establish an emotional connection.

Minimum Lovable Product Stage 1 – Utility: Hope, Satisfaction, and Care

Completing these 3 steps of stage 1 results in the first version of yout Minimum Lovable Product for launch. It should meet three basic criteria: 

• Step 1 Hope: The information about your product should give the customer hope that this product will solve their problem. It concerns marketing, advertising, or simply a copy on your landing page.
• Step 2 Satisfaction: The product actually satisfies the above-mentioned hope when the customer tries it out. It is essential that solving a user problem puts a smile on the user’s face.
• Step 3 Care: The customer can receive support to utilize the product to their satisfaction. Here support also extends to the cases of dealing with the previous negative experiences in this product category, stereotypes, or inability to use the advanced functionality.

MLP-specific Development

In terms of development, hope for a solution, smile after each use and support – those are all items that require extra compared to the MVP approach. Particularly:

• User onboarding;
• Vibrant UI/UX;
• Gamification elements – reward system, animations, progress bars, accompanying sound effects;
• Guided walk-throughs, supporting icons and labels;

Additionally, UI/UX elements are more complex in testing, and since there are more of them required for the MLP product – that is likely to mean a significant difference in testing budgets and coverage. Considering this, it is best to choose lean Startup Services to ensure your MLP development does not go over budget or deadlines.

Minimum Lovable Product Stage 2 – Growth: Confidence, Trust, Scale, and Sustainability

As the user continues using the product beyond the ‘trial/test’ period, the lovability grows with:

• Step 4 Confidence: Growing confidence in the ability to deliver the promised value. This is more about robust performance, safety, and security issues. If there are technical issues, is there a helpline to sort things out? For sure, any product might experience issues. It is how you approach dealing with them that makes a difference. 
• Step 5 Trust: Strengthening trust between customers and People representing your product. Especially consider B2B solutions – the company often has a customer success manager to work with clients. And, of course, if they report an issue with the product or want an improvement or adjustment – the MLP approach is to consider, offer a solution, and give an update. It is vital for two reasons. One is to make your current client happy. The second is that for one client who reported the issues, there are dozens or a hundred more who didn’t.

Maintaining The Emotional Connection

Completing steps 1 through 5 means you’ve established an emotional connection. From there on, steps 6 to 10 aimed at maintaining and growing the lovability.

• Step 6 Scale: Scale is more about the number of features. It is generally true that customers do not use all the available functionality at once. Yet, as time goes by, their needs evolve. MLP should foresee the new things customers might want to do with the product. This contributes to the wow factor of your MLP solution. 
• Step 7 Sustainability. It means showing that your company is here to stay. Point 3 Care mentioned already working with customers’ negative experiences at the start of customer relationships. However, a bigger negative trend is that tech startups appear to jump on a bandwagon, exploit the opportunity, and disappear. For instance, Oberlo was one of the most used tools for drop shippers to import listings from AliExpress to Shopify. Then, Shopify acquired that tool and integrated it even more heavily into their services. A couple of years later, Shopify discontinued it. That move left a ton of users having to find an alternative and go through the learning curve again. Operations were disrupted, and business time was lost. In addition, to create an image of sustainability, you should prefer improving the product rather than introducing a breaking change requiring users to re-learn and re-setup/re-install and such. 

MLP-specific Development

Here, the MLP approach spans beyond simply development. 

Achieving MLP kind of confidence is possible through more thorough testing coverage, testing with real users, and also prioritizing dealing with customer feedback. If your development team has a backlog of items with assigned scoring, scores for bugs and customer issues will be a higher priority than in the MVP approach. 

Trust is more about people-to-people relationships. It is whether your representative followed up with the client, inquired about feedback, and gave a response within a reasonable time. It can be supported with the internal CRM system that will help keep track of customer tickets and queries. 

Scale is the point where MVP and MLP development go the opposite directions. In the MVP approach, you focus on satisfying core existing needs. You often dismiss ‘nice-to-have’ features. In the MLP approach, you do more to delight customers. It might be something like a new design feature, a UX functionality, or simply a new ability in the app. 

In terms of sustainability in development, it is shown in finer detail. 

• How often does the app experience bugs? MLP products must have fewer of those than MVP ones.
• What measures does the company take to ensure clients in quickly fixing the services? Customers are notified about service restoration times. 
• How drastic are the changes? MVP might feel like an experiment roller-coaster, but MLP should not feel like that. The smaller the changes (more iterative), the better.
• Are there performance improvements? Even if customers don’t complain, the app can still be more responsive and work faster. 

Minimum Lovable Product Stage 3 – Inspiration: Motivation, Fun, and Halo

This stage is all about going above and beyond for your customers to create products that touch the hearts of millions of users.

• Step 8 Motivation is built by showing users how they have become better by using your app. 
• Step 9 Fun is not simply by grabbing the attention with a 15-second reel, but by actively engaging users in a meaningfully fun activity.
• Step 10 Halo is when using your product makes the customer image better in the eyes of others.

MLP-specific Development

All of these are tricky elements to get right, and sometimes they might have nothing to do with the development. These factors are achieved through the content and mission you put behind the product. So, development is mostly playing the supporting role. 

For instance, Audible allows you to share your achievements on social media. But Halo will be achieved if a user selects a meaningful and “worthy” title. But development can certainly help with that by improving recommendation algorithms. In addition, Audible has personal badges that motivate people to read more and become more avid readers. It contributes to the motivation step. Active fun is about also joining the conversation, connecting with the people, and sharing the fun. It can surely be supported with particular development features. For instance, AI offers a lot of possibilities in this direction. However, sometimes it is simply about the skilfully implemented comment section. The one that pops up on the page and makes it easy to contribute.  

FAQ: Minimum Lovable Product (MLP) vs Minimum Viable Product (MVP)