Is the concept of using an MVP to test your entrepreneurial ideas fundamentally flawed?

As a business model consultant and coach I receive this question quite often from my clients:

What if the majority of your test subjects rejected our product idea because the MVP is really minimal and not fully built to be as awesome as we envisioned?

This is a very good and valid question! Because it opens up the discussion about what an MVP and its purpose are!

The purpose of an MVP is not to wow customers about a product! On the contraryyou should expect to scare off customers with your MVPs! If you try to please them, you will not gain any benefits from the Lean Startup and Customer Development approach.

An MVP is NOT a prototype or beta version of your product (see Matthias Orgler’s answer to What is the difference, in a continuum, between MVP (minimum viable product), “working prototype”, and “beta version”?). An MVP is an experiment you run to validate (or invalidate) important hypotheses about your business model. So a rejected MVP is still a successful experiment, because it invalidates one of your assumptions before you have to build the full product and business.