If this is your first time reading, I recommend you start with my 6-month challenge and table of contents of weekly posts for the past 9 weeks.
tl;dr Just been working on MVP v3. I want to finish by end of this week and start user testing it next week. I’ve found a coworking space to work out of and am working on simplifying the product while being diligent at the same time.
I don’t want to hype up this pre-launch, since it will still be a very private soft launch to still help me determine if it is meeting user demand. But it will be a polished and refined product that people can still use without me needing to majorly tweak it behind doors (at least, not at this stage).
A lot of people may think the MVP may be the end goal, since so much time and effort is spent pre-launch building the product, doing customer interviews, potentially pitching it, user testing it, etc — and then they sit back and say “Whew, that was a lot of work! I finally finished building the prototype — I’m done.”
In fact, your work is just beginning.
You may end up having to scrap the entire thing and rebuild another one after you put your baby out in the wild and people calling it ugly, but — that just comes with the territory. It happens and you shouldn’t be disappointed if it does. Or… people may love it, but still request features here and there.
Remember, take each step as a learning experience, not a failure. Never stop moving and never succumb to inertia.
Take breaks every once in a while, but don’t lose focus — achieving product/market fit — and stay motivated towards your goals.
I. Coworking and office space
II. Importance of a support system
III. Simplify, but be diligent
IV. Next week and key lessons learned
2. Launch fast.
The reason to launch fast is not so much that it’s critical to get your product to market early, but that you haven’t really started working on it till you’ve launched. Launching teaches you what you should have been building. Till you know that you’re wasting your time. So the main value of whatever you launch with is as a pretext for engaging users.
3. Let your idea evolve.
This is the second half of launching fast. Launch fast and iterate. It’s a big mistake to treat a startup as if it were merely a matter of implementing some brilliant initial idea. As in an essay, most of the ideas appear in the implementing.
– Paul Graham, Startups in 13 Sentences
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