A few days ago we silently launched Tinkery in beta, aka private release, a version of the product which is compelling and that also aims to delight, despite not being fully complete from a functionality and UI standpoint. With a few pilots ongoing, we are getting it ready for public launch.
Throughout, we’ve been guided by the idea of starting Tinkery’s journey with a Minimum Lovable Product (MLP), rather than the more traditional Minimum Viable Product (MVP). We decided that sticking to the famous essay from Paul Graham, Y Combinator’s co-founder, was not enough. Do things that don’t scale, they wrote. But we needed something enjoyable and effective – a platform that’s closer to its final form than just a scarecrow made of sticks that barely holds itself together.
A minimum viable product is not “selling the least effort product you can get away with”, it’s spending the least amount of time you can to build something that you can use to gather more data than you can use to focus your product on what the customer wants rather than what you think they want. Building what you think the customer wants will very likely be wrong – customers lie, they’re deluded, they don’t understand their own problems, and they can’t see value in solutions. But they do start to understand the problem when they see a solution to it, even if it’s the minimum viable solution. And then they start having ideas about what else they can pay for to make it better.
But “MLP?”, some of you might be asking yourselves. In the beginning, there was the Minimum Viable Product. It was a tool designed for speed, for testing ideas with just enough effort to see if they might fly. Like early prototypes of the Wright brothers’ plane, it wasn’t built to dazzle but to answer a single question: Can this thing get off the ground? And for a long time, this approach worked. The MVP was celebrated as a hallmark of lean ingenuity.
Minimum viable vs Minimum marketable vs Minimum lovable
Times change, and so do expectations. The world has moved on from wanting things that merely work. Now, we crave things that work beautifully. Things that feel as though they were made just for us. The MVP, once a sign of progress, now feels a little hollow, like a gift hastily wrapped in newspaper. As such, the MLP is not just useful, but delightful. Not just functional, but meaningful.
At Tinkery, we’ve made this shift. We’re not just building something that works; we’re building something that makes people feel like they’ve found an old friend in a new tool.
Earlier in my career, driving the digitalization of a Big Pharma, I encountered many situations in which a vendor or system integrator would come to the room with an amazing concept of a platform, something that really resonated. That was the hook, yet the reality was that there was little more than a slide deck in place. Often there wasn’t even a basic MVP in place. Their intention was always for us to sign and invest in its development, despite the fact they always promised that such or such platform was ready for production. Nonsense.
A Tale of Two Products
Let’s “sweep home”, as we would say in Spanish, bring it closer to us: A RevOps manager sits at her desk, surrounded by the digital detritus of her trade. CRMs that don’t talk to spreadsheets. Marketing dashboards that promise everything but deliver little. She cobbles together insights like a modern-day alchemist, turning leaden data into something that might, just might, gleam.
This is the world of the MVP—a tool that does the job, but never quite makes life easier. It demands effort, skill, and a little magic to make it sing. The MLP, however, changes the story entirely.
The MLP is the pen that doesn’t run out of ink, the lamp that casts the perfect glow. It’s the partner that takes your hand and whispers, I’ve got this. It doesn’t just solve problems; it transforms them into something new, something better.
Why Lovable Matters
At Tinkery, we realized that building a tool for operations teams couldn’t just be about cleaning data or spitting out charts. That’s table stakes. What we wanted was something deeper—a platform that feels intuitive, adaptive, and dare we say, alive.
We are building Tinkery to be the kind of tool that pros can rely on, not just to do their jobs but to redefine how they work altogether. In a nutshell, we aim to empower anyone without demanding expertise, building foresight rather than just providing insights.
Technology has always been a mirror of human ambition. The printing press democratized knowledge. The telephone collapsed distances. And in the world of data, tools like Excel or more recently Salesforce paved the way for efficiency. But these tools, for all their brilliance, demanded users meet them halfway. They were (are!) intricate, finicky, and often inaccessible to all but the most patient or skilled.
AI has changed that. With machine learning, natural language processing, and predictive analytics, we now have the tools to bring technology closer to people, not the other way around. But many platforms still fall short. They’re an evolution of MVPs in MLP clothing—functional, but not lovable.
Tinkery is different – or so we hope. We’ve taken the latest advances in AI and applied them to solve real problems in ways that are seamless, intuitive, and yes, even a little enchanting. Based on initial results, we believe we can reduce the time spent on low value tasks by up to 80% and bring down the use (and cost) of other visualization and data tools that become redundant once you have Tinkery in place. That’s what we are aiming to demonstrate now through its current pilots.
What it Means for the Future
Creating an MLP isn’t just about delighting users; it’s about redefining industries. We believe that when tools are intuitive and empowering, they don’t just solve problems—they inspire entirely new ways of working.
For Tinkery, that means building a platform that feels like magic but works like clockwork. It’s a product that doesn’t just earn a place in the toolbox—it becomes the toolbox.
We’re not just building a tool for today. We’re crafting the future of how commercial teams work, think, and grow.
The journey hasn’t been too long, so far, but we are extremely excited to continue moving further and farther. Let’s make something extraordinary together.