What does a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) look like when you’re not building software?
That was the question behind a session I led at [Equilibrium Zone]1 for a group of early-stage agricultural founders working across catfish farming, cocoa and plantain exports, livestock, cassava flour, and poultry.
I was invited to speak about MVPs, but there was one useful constraint: don't make it about building apps.
So I approached the session differently.
Instead of starting with software, I asked a simpler question: what is the smallest practical version of this idea that can reach a real customer without requiring a large budget or technical team?
For a catfish farmer, that could mean having a clear product catalogue and making the farm easier for nearby customers to find. For an exporter, it could be a simple traceability sheet that can be shared with potential buyers. For a poultry business, the first improvement might simply be making sure someone searching for poultry products nearby can actually find the business.
None of these required building software from scratch.
I also walked through tools the founders could start using immediately, from simple online storefronts to setting up their businesses on Google Maps.2
The AI demonstration produced one of my favourite moments from the session.
About half the room had mostly experienced AI as something you chat with. I showed them how a simple prompt could be used to create a promotional video for a product.3
The questions changed almost immediately.
Instead of asking whether something like that would be expensive to produce, people started asking whether they could do the same thing for their other products.
For me, that was the useful part of the session.
An MVP doesn't have to begin with software. Sometimes the first useful version is simply making an existing product easier to find, understand, and buy.
Footnotes
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Equilibrium Zone — Learn more about the organisation and its work with entrepreneurs and businesses. ↩
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Google Maps Setup Guide — A step-by-step guide I shared for creating and improving a business listing on Google Maps. ↩
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AI Product Video Demo — The product video I generated during the session as a practical example of using AI for simple marketing content. ↩