Do founders misunderstand what MVP really means?

I'm now reading The Lean Startup, as we're going to add a Content Marketing software tool to what we offer.

The software will make it both easier to learn how to do Content Marketing effectively and make it easier to do in terms of day to day activities.

It will be better and cheaper than HubSpot.

So we need to validate our assumptions about what problems people are having and what tools they want to solve their problems.

As we want to learn this with a minimum of effort on our part, we're adopting The Lean Startup methodology. Hence, I'm reading the book.

In this post I'm sharing something I learned a few days ago.

In the early days of Dropbox, their MVP was a screen cast video.

I image they needed to write enough software so it looked like a real software product, but it wasn't. It looked good in the video, but it didn't actually do anything.

The founder and CEO (Drew Houston) was working with the assumption that people would adopt cloud storage that made their files available to them across all their devices when that cloud storage software worked seamlessly on all their platforms and was easy to use.

To test that assumption they created and shared a screen cast video. Their call to action was to sign up for their beta program.

When 75,000 people signed up for their beta program in one day, they realized they were working with a sound assumption.

The rest as you know is history.

What assumptions are you making about your prospects, your customers, their needs, your markets, etc?

How are you going to test those assumptions?