The Minimum Viable Product proved a thing could work. Minimum Viable Value asks whether anyone will care. The new diagnostic returns a score in about four minutes and requires no account or email address.
-- Libor Zezulka, M.A., an author who writes on the psychology of business and branding, released the Minimum Viable Value Scorecard, a web-based diagnostic that scores any product on four questions in roughly four minutes and returns the result without requiring a signup, an account or an email address. It is available without charge at mvv.zezulka.life. The tool measures a framework Zezulka argues has become necessary for a simple reason: when almost anyone can build software, the fact that it works stopped being the point.
The numbers behind that claim are not subtle. Retool's 2026 Build vs. Buy report found that 35 percent of enterprises have already replaced software they purchased with software they built themselves, and that the cost of building a useful internal business tool has fallen from between $50,000 and $500,000 to between $500 and $20,000, with timelines collapsing from eighteen months to days. Developer surveys published across 2025 and 2026 put artificial intelligence coding tool adoption at roughly 84 percent of developers, with those tools writing about 41 percent of all code.
Building became easy. Distribution did not. Founders now consistently report that reaching an audience, rather than shipping a product, is the constraint that decides whether a launch succeeds.
“The constraint did not disappear. It moved,” said Libor Zezulka, author and founder of the publishing company All Day Media. “Most founders are still solving the old one — brilliantly, at speed, into silence.”
The twenty-year-old psychology paper explains it
Zezulka’s framework rests on research published two decades before artificial intelligence made building cheap. In Harvard Business Review in 2006, Harvard Business School professor John Gourville described what he called the 9x problem: founders overvalue what they have built by roughly a factor of three, a consequence of the endowment effect, while customers overvalue what they already use by roughly the same factor, a consequence of loss aversion. The two distortions do not cancel out. They compound.
A product which is genuinely twice as good therefore feels, to the buyer, like a downgrade.
“Your customer is not comparing you to your competitor,” Zezulka said. “They are comparing changing to not changing. And not changing is free, safe and already working.”
A second gate, not a replacement
Zezulka is deliberate about what the framework is not. Minimum Viable Value does not retire the Minimum Viable Product, a concept he argues has been widely misread. Eric Ries, who popularised it, defined it as the version producing the most validated learning for the least effort, and wrote explicitly that it is “not about creating minimal products.”
“Ries was not wrong. He was answering a different question at a different moment,” Zezulka said. “In 2010, shipping something that worked was itself remarkable. Today it is the entry fee.”
The two run in sequence. The Minimum Viable Product is a learning gate, used before market entry, asking the founder whether an assumption holds. Minimum Viable Value is an attention gate, used at market entry, asking a stranger whether the outcome is worth the cost of changing what they already do. Most products now clear the first and fail the second.
Four gates, multiplied
Minimum Viable Value defines the smallest complete outcome whose benefit is obvious, believable, and fast enough to be worth a stranger’s attention. It scores four conditions from one to five: whether the customer can see the value before committing, whether they believe it applies to them specifically, whether the payoff arrives before attention expires, and whether the product delivers a whole outcome rather than a fragment.
The scores are multiplied rather than added, producing a figure between 1 and 625. The arithmetic is the argument. A product scoring five, five, five and one lands at 125. A product scoring four across the board — unremarkable on every dimension — lands at 256, beating it by more than double. Added together, both total sixteen.
“Adding lets a strength cover a weakness. That is exactly how founders talk themselves into launching,” Zezulka said. “Multiplying is honest, because these are not features; they are gates. A customer who cannot see the value never reaches the part where it is complete.”
The Scorecard returns a result before requesting any contact details, a decision Zezulka calls non-negotiable: a framework arguing that value must arrive before any request cannot open by demanding an email address. Anonymized scores will be aggregated into a published benchmark of where products most often fail, with no individual result made public. A workshop version for teams will follow at allday.media/vip.
About Libor Zezulka
Libor Zezulka, M.A., is an author, entrepreneur and investor who writes at the intersection of psychology, business and branding, with one aim behind everything he makes: difficult ideas should be usable by anyone. He is the founder of All Day Media, a publishing company that turns books into working tools, and of Brand Engine, a brand identity layer currently onboarding its first companies. Minimum Viable Value is his framework for why capable products get ignored.
Social
Contact Info:
Name: Libor Zezulka, M.A.
Email: Send Email
Organization: All Day Digital s.r.o.
Phone: +420 734 159 002
Website: https://www.zezulka.life
Release ID: 89200438
In case of identifying any problems, concerns, or inaccuracies in the content shared in this press release, or if a press release needs to be taken down, we urge you to notify us immediately by contacting error@releasecontact.com (it is important to note that this email is the authorized channel for such matters, sending multiple emails to multiple addresses does not necessarily help expedite your request). Our dedicated team will be readily accessible to address your concerns and take swift action within 8 hours to rectify any issues identified or assist with the removal process. We are committed to delivering high-quality content and ensuring accuracy for our valued readers.
