A Minimum Viable Solution (MVS), is the minimum you can invest to reveal and demonstrate what a solution is and is capable of. As Ash Maurya wrote in Scaling Lean, “[a]n MV[S] is the smallest solution that creates and captures monetizable value from [customers].”
For a website, the MVS may be a landing page with dropdown lists, but without fully functioning buttons, the backend program, a backend database, or credit card facilities yet. If you’re thinking of starting a restaurant, maybe the MVS is walking down the high street in themed costume with a platter of giveaway samples. If you are successful in giving away free food, you can extend the experiment by repeating what you did previously another day but then try to sell the samples.
In all cases, the MVS is used to solicit interest, feedback, and hopefully sales, or at least cash-up-front pre-orders. You achieve this by showing prospects what the MVS looks like and how it functions, within the limits of the MVS since it is not by definition complete, or fully functional. You use the feedback received to improve the MVS, and you repeat, either until you have a very high confidence that your MVS is ready for launch, or that no one is interested, or there will not be enough Customers or Customers will unlikely pay you what you need, in which case you either pivot or abandon.
The term Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is similar to Minimum Viable Solution (MVS), but with its definition and scope being a subset of MVS, its use is deprecated on our websites.
Also see Minimum Viable Distinctive Value Proposition (MVDVP).