Back in February 2023, I wrote about why minimum viable marketing is the perfect approach for B2B startups. The concept resonated then and I still believe in it strongly today. But a lot has changed in two years — AI has fundamentally shifted what’s possible for lean marketing teams, the content landscape has gotten dramatically noisier, and buyers are doing their research differently. So I’ve decided to revisit the post rather than just leave it sitting there.
The core argument hasn’t changed: startups with tight budgets and limited resources shouldn’t try to do everything. They should apply the same discipline to marketing that smart product teams apply to building. Do the minimum that generates real learning and real results, then build from there. What has changed is what that looks like in practice.
A refresher on the MVP concept
Eric Ries popularized the MVP concept in his book, The Lean Startup. He defines an MVP as:
…that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.
Ries championed the MVP, but it was Frank Robinson, co-founder and president of SyncDev, who introduced the term in 2001. I prefer his definition because it highlights the need to focus on helping your core customers:
“PROBLEM: Teams often brag, “We added 800 new features.” Some even consider feature count a badge of honor. Unfortunately adding features doesn’t necessarily improve the business case. It may take longer, make the product less usable, and carry more risk.
SOLUTION: The MVP is the right-sized product for your company and your customer. It is big enough to cause adoption, satisfaction, and sales, but not so big as to be bloated and risky. Technically, it is the product with maximum ROI divided by risk. The MVP is determined by revenue-weighting major features across your most relevant customers, not aggregating all requests for all features from all customers.
The goal of the MVP is not perfection or completeness but instead to develop the product to a point (“right-sized”) where it can be adopted by customers who provide feedback (“validated learnings”) that will help you expand and improve it going forward.
Those same attributes can be applied to your marketing efforts.
Adapting the MVP concept to marketing
The MVP approach is all about prioritizing what you do, who you target and what you learn from them — exactly what you need to be doing with your marketing in the early days. Engaging in scattershot tactics without a clear strategy is the marketing equivalent of Robinson’s “800 new features.” You don’t want to weaken your marketing efforts or go at them without a plan. Minimum viable marketing, like MVP, is about focusing on what really matters.
Here’s how that plays out across five key areas.
Messaging
It’s crucial to clearly communicate the problem your product solves and the value it will bring to prospective customers. This is not about features or how they work, but about the benefits the audience will realize when they adopt your solution. This is also an opportunity to test the messaging you develop and get feedback, so make sure to capture customer questions and comments for future refinements.
One thing that hasn’t changed: great messaging starts with talking to real buyers, not guessing from a boardroom. What has changed is that AI tools can help you move faster once you have those insights, such as drafting variants, refining language, testing different angles. Just make sure the human insight comes first. AI is a great editor. It’s a lousy starting point.
Audience
Your initial customers will be early adopters, so define who they are specifically rather than trying to target everyone. With a new product, you want prospects to see a chance to be ahead of the curve — not taking an undue risk.
You want to gather validated learnings from your early adopters and even get their help with future marketing efforts through testimonials and case studies. You don’t need hundreds of customers at this stage. You need a few quality ones who will help you evolve your product, validate your messaging and spread the word so you can grow.
Content
In the early stages, you’ll want to socialize your concept with potential customers and gather early feedback while building awareness. That requires content of high quality to set the right tone for your product and brand. For example, if your message is that your product will make your buyers’ lives simpler, the last thing you want to go out with is a complex and confusing website.
Spend time on a few key pieces of content to establish a solid marketing foundation: a website, a presentation, a solution sheet and a demo or trial. Other content pieces may be needed depending on your specific business context, but prioritize and only create the critical ones.
Here’s the important caveat that wasn’t true two years ago: AI tools have made it faster and cheaper to produce content, which means buyers are now swimming in mediocre AI-generated material. The bar for “good enough” has risen considerably but don’t just meet it, surpass it by a wide margin. Authentic voice and genuine insight matter more than ever, so resist the temptation to use AI to simply produce more. Use it to produce better.
Awareness
As much as some people don’t want to hear it, you can’t just build a product and expect customers to come. Ideally your company leadership will have a network you can leverage to find your first customers (if not, your job will be a lot harder). But whatever the case, you need to build awareness, and the key is to focus on one platform where your audience is most likely to look for information rather than trying to be everywhere at once.
For most B2B startups, that platform is LinkedIn. It’s where decision-makers spend time, where thought leadership earns real traction, and where you can get meaningful organic reach without a big paid budget. Build your presence there first. Get your founders and leadership posting consistently. Engage in conversations. Share genuine insights from what you’re learning in the market.
You can also focus on earned and owned media rather than paid to stretch a small budget even further. A contributed article in an industry publication or a mention in a relevant newsletter can do a lot of work for a startup with limited resources.
As you build traction, it’s worth knowing that B2B buyers are increasingly doing research through AI-powered tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity, as well as peer communities in niche Slack groups and forums. These aren’t immediate priorities for most startups, but being aware of where your buyers are heading next is part of thinking like a marketer from day one.
Feedback
Because validated learning is a main goal of launching an MVP, your organization should initially target prospects who are most likely to provide feedback — even over customers who might be more profitable in the short term. You want to be learning constantly from your marketing efforts, well past the startup stage. Data and optimization are crucial to getting better results, and you can learn a lot about your messaging, audience and content if you measure and track effectively.
Make sure it’s easy for customers to provide input into not only the product but also your messaging and marketing efforts. Work with them on reviews, testimonials, news releases and case studies that can be leveraged going forward.
One thing that has genuinely improved here is the tooling. AI tools now make it much easier to synthesize feedback patterns across customer conversations, sales call transcripts and reviews. Validated learning, which was Ries’s original goal, is faster and more accessible than it’s ever been for a lean startup team.
AI is a capability multiplier and a trap
This is the biggest thing that’s changed since I first wrote this post, so it deserves its own section.
For resource-constrained startups, AI is mostly good news. It can help you draft and test messaging variants, repurpose a single piece of content across formats, analyze feedback patterns and even build basic tools like ROI calculators that would have required significant development resources a few years ago. In short, AI makes the MVM approach more accessible than ever.
But there’s a trap. Because every startup now has access to the same AI tools, generic AI-generated content has become noise. Buyers spot it quickly and tune it out just as fast. The startups winning with AI are using it to accelerate their thinking, not replace it. Letting AI handle first drafts and optimization while keeping humans in charge of strategy, insight and authentic voice.
In a minimum viable marketing context, that means using AI to do your foundational work faster and smarter. Not to scale up volume before you’ve validated what actually resonates.
The principles haven’t changed but the execution has
So how is MVM different from a marketing strategy for a product at a later stage? The short answer is that the principles are the same for any well thought-out marketing strategy. Messaging, audience, content, awareness and feedback apply at all times, to any marketing strategy, and should never be skipped no matter what stage you’re at.
What changes is scope and resources. As you grow, you’ll have more options, more channels and more budget to work with. But if you start with this MVM discipline (focused, validated, revenue-connected), you’ll build better habits that will serve you well as you scale.
If you’re looking to build a lightweight, nimble “get off the ground” marketing strategy that generates both learning and early results, the MVM approach remains the right way to go about it. The tools have changed. The principles haven’t.
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