  Software startups have emerged as an interesting multiperspective research
area. Inspired by Lean Startup, a startup journey can be viewed as a series of
experiments that validate a set of business hypotheses an entrepreneurial team
make explicitly or inexplicitly about their startup. It is little known about
how startups evolve through business hypothesis testing. This study proposes a
novel approach to look at the startup evolution as a Minimum Viable
Product(MVP) creat- ing process. We identified relationships among business
hypotheses and MVPs via ethnography and post-mortem analysis in two software
star- tups. We observe that the relationship between hypotheses and MVPs is
incomplete and non-linear in these two startups. We also find that
entrepreneurs do learn from testing their hypotheses. However, there are
hypotheses not tested by MVPs and vice versa, MVPs not related to any business
hypothesis. The approach we proposed visualizes the flow of entrepreneurial
knowledge across pivots via MVPs.
