Twitter is one of the examples I use. Their first interface sketch is here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jac... And here's a description of them at initial launch: http://techcrunch.com/2006/07/15... It makes a good example because their initial product was a) minimal, and b) kinda different than where they ended up.

Historically, I think Google and Facebook make good examples, too, in that both had very basic live products before the companies even existed. Wikipedia started out very minimally as well. And I'll often tell the story of Myst. The original version of that was sketches on paper, which the Miller brothers tested and revised by talking members of their church group through it to see what they'd do.

I don't think most of the examples above fit into Eric Ries' definition of MVP:
"the minimum viable product is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort."

The confusion arises because the examples given demonstrate some aspects  of the LeanStartup methodology, but that doesn't make them examples of MVPs.

Sure, Yahoo was a manually created directory, but that wasn't because Jerry Yang wanted to create a "concierge MVP" to test demand. It was done manually because there was no other way to do it at the time.

Likewise Google when it started - it was minimal, sure, but it wasn't created to test the hypothesis "do people want a better search engine" - it was created as part of Larry & Sergey's PhD research thesis.

So, an MVP isn't just a "basic" version of a product that later becomes more complex. It's not something designed to test technical feasibility, it's not designed to see if the team can create a solution. It's a product that only exists in order to help the team learn something about customers and their behaviour. Valuable things you can learn from an MVP include: is there any demand for this product?, what price should we charge? will customers find our product? does this ad copy work? etc.

From this list, probably the most useful question that an MVP can answer is "Before I invest tons of money in developing this product, how can I test if there is enough demand to make the investment worthwhile?"

A well designed MVP will do just this - it will focus on presenting customers with a solution to the pain that you have identified in your Customer Development interviews and seeing if they act in a way that shows intent to buy.

Think about Kickstarter - it's practically as a warehouse full of MVPs. People put up their ideas for interesting products, before they build them, and other people demonstrate their desire by supporting them.

It's important therefore to remember is that an MVP can be really, really "minimal". In fact it doesn't actually have to be a "product" at all. Many of the best examples aren't. Check out Dropbox's MVP story for a great example: http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/19...)

By contrast, most of the examples given above are far from MVP. I very much doubt that the only way that Virgin Airlines could test demand for a new transatlantic service was to actually buy a plane and go through all the regulatory procedures required to start an airline.

Likewise craiglist. The fact that it has minimal features and styling doesn't make it an MVP. The goal of it was to provide "an email distribution list of friends, featuring local events in the San Francisco area", not to help Craig learn about whether people wanted a listings site. It's true that he learned just such a thing - but that was a byproduct, not the purpose.

Groupon, given that it was originally just a simple Wordpress blog that embedded a widget from ThePoint and used AppleScript to send the PDFs coupons via Mail.app.

Virgin Air started in 1984 with a single Boeing 747 flying a single route (Gatwick to Newark and back).

As they got the Virgin magic working and debugged, they added more planes and more routes.

They are now one of the largest and most profitable airlines in the world.

Here are a few of my favorites:

Yipit

Yipit aggregates all the daily deals being sold by different companies. To test that this was something that people wanted, they delivered on this value proposition by doing a lot of manual work.

They first built an email capture, sign-up flow to collect preferences and a script that would send people an email with the deals that matched their preference.

Aggregating all the deals into their database and categorizing them correctly would have required building a crawler to parse the deals from HTML from various sites and write a classification algorithm.

Instead of building a crawler, the cofounders would crawl out of bed at 3 am and manually enter the deals into the database.

Virgin Air

Virgin Air started with just one plane flying between two locations. It delivered on it’s most core value proposition. After testing the concept and improving the offering they expanded their fleet.

Angellist

Angellist is a marketplace that connects startups and investors. The problem they're solving is that it's hard for both sides of the marketplace to find each other.

The way they solved this core problem initially, their MVP, was by making email introductions. They made email intros connecting a startup they knew looking for funding and investor they knew looking for investments.

It delivered on the core value proposition that Angellist still offers today.

Zappos

Zappos is an ecommerce site where people can buy shoes online. To test that value proposition, they took pictures of shoes at local stores, posted the pictures online, put them up for sale on their site, and when customers purchased the shoes, the company would by them from the stores at full price and ship them to their customers.

Dropbox still remains the best example of a great MVP, Buffer is also a fantastic one and here is how they did it http://bufferapp.tumblr.com/post...

How about Instapaper ?

So this would not count as an example per se, but here is a description (by Lawrence Lee) of how PARC adapts the strategy of MVP for open innovation. In a nutshell, the risk isn't just about overinvesting, but about underinvesting --
http://blogs.parc.com/blog/2011/...

If your end product is a web-based site or application, your MVP is a whiteboard or a piece of paper and pen. In fact, if you're in ideation, your MVP is more like an idea that you can talk to people about, or a problem they can talk to you about.

In my last several teams, including at eBay, our MVP was always a paper mockup at best. We would put together some ideas, then get real customers to come in and talk to us. A common tactic was to post a cool, exciting summary of the project on craigslist, the type of people we were looking for, and offer them a very token piece of compensation ($10 or $20 gift cards were always sufficient for 1-2 hours time unless we needed people who were wealthy. This surprised me.) Then we'd get them to talk about their problems, discuss our ideas for a solution, and get them to "use" the product by talking through a few pieces of paper with very rough mockups and pretending they were at a computer. Iterate on that anywhere from 1-20 times depending on timeline and budget, moving to more and more real mockups and prototypes.

It's pretty astounding the level of usability and product feedback you can get even for complex web applications by just a sketch on a piece of paper.

I know this doesn't directly answer your question about a concrete example. But I think good historical examples are irrelevant, because if you are a lean startup you should be gathering actual customer feedback no later than when you can sketch one page of an idea. Preferably earlier. The earliest conversations with potential customers should start by discussing their pains, not your already-ideated solution.

By design MVP's should be 'unsuccessful' the whole point of it is to test your idea, see what people like about it and iterate/tweak it fast into something they like even more.

I just wrote an article on this here MVP - Minimum Viable Product explained

The product implements just one visible feature

For example, the Vostimonial app currently has a single input field. That's it. Here is the actual app as shown to customers today: Vostimonial

That is already useful enough to have people pay to use it today.

I have many features in mind to improve on the basic product (my next feature is integrating the device camera), but they are optional.

The backend is where the magic happens, but no users see it.

I disagree that a mockup or a landing page is an MVP

MVP is a functioning product, not a proof of concept mockup that looks functional but doesn't do anything. My first proof of concept was to use SMS. I had no UI. It took a long time to explain to people how it worked. After that, I made an actual app.

Another example: my new product tentatively called VIP Offers.

It's a product that lets you track in-person interactions and create highly personalized websites. I created it because I got frustrated on not following up with people whom I meet everywhere. That cost me too much in lost business.

This product has one killer feature: as soon as the prospect enters that invite code, which takes them to a highly personalized landing page, I send you an SMS and link it to the image of that prospect's business card. Now you can contact them while you are still on their mind and close the deal.

Right now, all it does is generate a code and accepts codes entered by the end user. Again, the app has a single entry field on the UI.

The backend of this product is quite impressive. :)

An MVP creates the impression that processes are automated

For example, Vostimonials are processed manually. Associated photos, which are relatively easy to automate, are also processed manually. We read the EXIF and figure out to which audio file that image corresponds.

They magically appear in your account. I don't even have oAuth figured out for handling the customers' accounts. To prepare them for publishing, a human accesses the audio file and manually edits them.

Many MVP products do the same because the volume does not necessitate the expense of setting up truly automated processes.

What about Yahoo - when they launched wasn't the product just a listing of websites assembled by hand? That's about as MVP as you can get for a search results page

Lean Startup isn't such a extreme curriculum where some people follow it and some people don't. Most startups nowdays follow the lean startup movement. It's shouldn't even be called lean. It's THE way to build your startup. It's telling you to focus on building your MVP, which has the key feature that your target audience needs to solve their problem. It also tells you to talk to your customers, and really understand what they need, and if your service does just that.

In fact, if you look at companies like Facebook and Pinterest, and many others, they all followed the Lean Startup, it's just that it wasn't called it that. It's kind of like this thing people were doing, but nobody called it anything, and suddenly someone gave it a name (Eric Ries).

Mark Zuckerberg built a MVP with limited functions, and he had a very niche target audience. He then validated that, and kept building piece by piece.

Ben Silbermann of Pinterest also built a MVP and had a very niche target audience. He validated from there and kept going.

The opposite of running lean are companies that get a shit load of money, and then hire a bunch of engineers, and then build a product that is only a vision of the creator, without ever validating the idea. So if you think about it that way, there aren't that many companies that are doing it the traditional way nowadays...except for big corporations like HP, Dell, Microsoft, etc.

Therefore, to answer your question, I think most successful startups nowadays somehow follow the lean startup methodology. YCombinator and Techstars both use similar curriculum, and companies that came out of the incubators like Dropbox and Airbnb both used pretty lean startup methodologies. Dropbox for example, had no code at all when they launched. They made a demo video and got 75000 users to sign up, which validated their idea. They then built out a MVP and had it released bit by bit to a small portion of the 75000 potential users. After they had made sure there weren't that many bugs, and they had a working prototype, they started distributing their product to more people. So Dropbox did "Lean Startup" too.

Hope that answers your question :)

Check out StartitUp - Start a Startup, they have a pretty cool step-by-step guide based on lean startup.

Twitter 1st prototype, Instapaper, SimpleNote, Basecamp (and most of 37signals products), and the list goes on.

Almost all hugely successful products and apps started off in a minimal form and as an experiments or side-projects.

craigslist deserves a mention too.

I remember Pandora for example in their first days, bare minimum, a music player with 'like' 'dislike'. A real MVP.
One nice tip I found to be useful is to ask -
Can I REMOVE any more features, rather then what more features are missing.

I would include Salesforce.com in this list. Anyone else with me on that?

My site describes over 50 examples of lean startups.  When possible I described their MVPs, listed their pivots, and indicated where one can obtain more info. I think it is the most comprehensive list available. Please visit to get information or to add your own examples. 

All lean startup resources are at:
http://thebalancedentrepreneur.c...


Or the examples are at

http://thebalancedentrepreneur.c...
It is an excel file.

Jason Fried of 37Signals (Basecamp) talks about an MVP approach extensively in his books. He also advocates "better half a product than a half-assed one." I agree!