Minimum Viable (X)

Capturing what's essential for transformation.

Topics:

#mvp
#founderproductfit
#designthinking
#startup
#venturedesign

April 17, 2026

2

min read

The hardest part of productizing expertise isn’t figuring out what to add.

It’s deciding what you can remove.

Experts and founders usually have the opposite problem of a startup with no ideas: they know too much.

They see all the nuance, edge cases, tools, frameworks and possibilities.

So when they finally package what they know, they build a feature monster. ("It does this, and this, and this...and then this...")

Six offers. Twelve modules. Five audiences. Three channels. A community. A certification. An AI layer.

Before they’ve proven the one thing that matters: does the core idea create value?

Does this create a transformation in my client?

‍

This is why I think “minimum viable” matters just as much for expertise as it does for products.

Your first job isn’t to build the entire ecosystem.

It’s to find the smallest expression of your expertise that produces a meaningful result.

Once you find the “minimum viable expression” (MVX) - then testing it rigorously on:

One avatar. One problem. One transformation. One offer. One product. One channel. One flywheel. (etc etc...go to the good marketing gurus for this one!)

Then make that exceptionally good.

Once it works, you can expand it into a methodology, product suite, licensing model, certification, platform – around your story, scope, scale, and strategy.

That’s how you keep things razor-sharp.Scale doesn’t come from having more things: it comes from identifying the one thing worth scaling.

(In my diagram below it's about going deep, not wide).

‍

Maybe the real work of productizing expertise isn’t turning everything you know into something tangible.

‍

😉 It’s figuring out what’s essential enough to keep.

say hello@untappedlab.co

Would love to hear what you’re working on, struggling with, thinking about, wishing for...