Deliver value incidentally or accidentally as a side-effect of doing something else.

This is a particularly common approach with companies that employ content marketing or information based products. Copyblogger is a great example of this, where the founder Brian Clarke first built up an audience by delivering great content, one post at a time. And then he launched several products on the back of that and built a multi-million dollar business.

37signals is also another great example where they've printed a dozen or so different products that all came out as byproducts of something else they were doing at the time.

This kind of MVP also drives me home for me personally (Ash Maurya) with a lot of products that I have launched. All my products, from my book to lean canvas to Leanstack, can all be traced back to a few blog posts where I first socialized the idea with my readers and then followed up with higher fidelity versions of that solution.

Lean canvas for instance, can be traced back to a blog post after which a number of people even built online versions of the tool and put it up for free use. Coming from a software background myself, while I was tempted to build my own online tool back then, I didn't want to start there. Anyone who has worked with software knows that things always take longer and cost more than you originally anticipate. I didn't want to go this route for a yet untested solution. So my next step was to create a printable PDF poster which I used in my workshops and only after several workshops worth of learning and refinement I built the first online tool, which we built in two weeks.

The only problem, if I can call it, is that with this approach it's sometimes hard to identify the MVP from the finished product and sometimes you end up with multiple products.

The way a reconcile what I do is by defining my product as building a better entrepeneur. That's my true product and everything else is a manifestation of solutions that will come and go and evolve with time.