You seem to be painting yourself in a corner here.

I don't see why a product can't be minimally viable within weeks (if not days, for example see hackathons) instead of months. It depends on the product and the market and who you are shipping to, and for what purpose.

1. What do you mean by "minimally viable"? Does it need to be polished? If so, how would it be minimally viable? In many cases I've seen products never becoming minimally viable because "no one would buy them". But that's not what minimally viable means. A product you can't sell, you can demo or trial, for example. Or you can give away a minimal version without all the bells and whistles for free to build user base before you introduce new features.

Keeping the product under wraps until it's "ready" (big-bang release) it's the opposite of MVP. :-)

2. By definition, each iteration will deliver value in form of potentially shippable increments. Since iterations iterations do deliver value, why isn't the product minimally viable? I agree it won't be great, though, initially and probably not sell-worthy.

3. "Viable" doesn't mean anything by itself: for what purpose it should be viable?

4. Who are we shipping to? Not all users have the same requirements. You can often ship to a subset of users much earlier.

A personal anecdote. At Stack Exchange we are always shipping. Let's take our own mobile apps: as soon as we had the build system created, we started using them internally. There was a build going out to interested internal employees within weeks, and an alpha/beta program for selected users. Most of these users did not see a polished, complete, bug-free app, but the feedback we got was invaluable. We are now shipping our first app "for real", openly, to the public, but there's absolutely no doubt that our earlier "potentially shippable" increments were super-valuable for feedback and field testing.

You seem to be painting yourself in a corner here.

I don't see why a product can't be minimally viable within weeks (if not days, for example see hackathons) instead of months. It depends on the product and the market and who you are shipping to, and for what purpose.

1. What do you mean by "minimally viable"? Does it need to be polished? If so, how would it be minimally viable? In many cases I've seen products never becoming minimally viable because "no one would buy them". But that's not what minimally viable means. A product you can't sell, you can demo or trial, for example. Or you can give away a minimal version without all the bells and whistles for free to build user base before you introduce new features.

   Keeping the product under wraps until it's "ready" (big-bang release) it's the opposite of MVP. :-)

2. By definition, each iteration will deliver value in form of potentially shippable increments. Since iterations iterations do deliver value, why isn't the product minimally viable? I agree it won't be great, though, initially and probably not sell-worthy.

3. "Viable" doesn't mean anything by itself: for what purpose it should be viable?

4. Who are we shipping to? Not all users have the same requirements. You can often ship to a subset of users much earlier.

A personal anecdote. At Stack Exchange we are always shipping. Let's take our own mobile apps: as soon as we had the build system created, we started using them internally. There was a build going out to interested internal employees within weeks, and an alpha/beta program for selected users. Most of these users did not see a polished, complete, bug-free app, but the feedback we got was invaluable. We are now shipping our first app "for real", openly, to the public, but there's absolutely no doubt that our earlier "potentially shippable" increments were super-valuable for feedback and field testing.