Minimum Lovable Product Ladder
Replace the MVP with a three-rung ladder: minimum lovable, lovable, absolutely lovable.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 3
- Confidence
- 85%
A reframing of the MVP that swaps 'viable' for 'lovable' as the bar, then treats product quality as a deliberate progression through three stages. Use it to set the quality target when building a new product so that you never ship something merely functional-but-forgettable.
Origin
Anton Osika built the entire company identity around this jargon, naming the company Lovable after it. He argues the best word for a great product is that it is 'lovable' and carried the phrasing into how the team talks about what they are striving for.
Core principles
- 01The bar is 'lovable', not 'viable' — people must love it, not merely tolerate it
- 02Love is what drives organic growth, so it is the metric that matters
- 03Quality is a ladder you climb deliberately, not a binary you ship once
How to run it
- 1
Build the minimum lovable product
Ship the smallest version that people genuinely love rather than the smallest version that technically works. The floor is emotional resonance, not feature completeness.
Pro tip If early users are indifferent, you have an MVP not an MLP — keep going.
- 2
Build the lovable product
Deepen the core experience so the affection is consistent, not just a first-impression novelty.
Watch out Novelty products get used once then forgotten — durability of love is the test.
- 3
Build the absolutely lovable product
Obsessively refine taste, simplicity and the right abstractions until the product is exceptional, not just good.
Pro tip Anton credits taste and the obsession to make it 'better and better and better' as the core team differentiator.
In the wild
The team first shipped 'GPT engineer app' under a waitlist, gathered feedback and iterated on the AI, and only relabelled it as launched once 'we thought the product was really good' — i.e. once it crossed from viable to lovable.
→ Post-relaunch on 21st November they hit ~$1M ARR in a week and kept accelerating.
Common mistakes
Shipping viable and calling it done
Treating 'it works' as the finish line produces forgettable software that no one loves and therefore no one shares.
Is it for you?
Best for
Founders and product leaders setting the quality bar for a new consumer or prosumer product
Not ideal for
Regulated or infrastructure products where correctness and compliance outrank delight
From the transcript
“a lot of jargon that I like to use to like emphasize what we should be striving for is building a minimum lovable product and…”
“the best word for a great product is that it's lovable”
From the episode
Building Lovable: $10M ARR in 60 days with 15 people
Anton Osika (co-founder and CEO)