Bootstrap / Start simple / create a minimum-viable-product (MVP)

• What an MVP should look like

General advice

• Limit yourself to one month.
  • Rec'd by:
    • levelsio
    • Michael Seibel
• Startup Stash
  
  • rec'd by Pieter Levels

• 2008.01.01 - Joel Spolsky - The Four Pillars of Organic Growth
  • Revenue, head count, PR, and quality--if one gets ahead of the others, you're screwed.
• 2013.10.21 - OnStartups - How To Launch A Startup Without Writing Code
• 2016.10.06 - NYT - MailChimp and the Un-Silicon Valley Way to Make It as a Start-Up
  
  • Mr. Chestnut and Mr. Kurzius founded the company in 2000, at the crest of the dot-com bubble, after they had gotten laid off from corporate web design jobs. They used their small severance checks to start a firm they called the Rocket Science Group, which offered design consulting for large and small businesses in Atlanta.
    
    Late in 2000, some of those customers started asking for ways to reach their customers by email. Mr. Chestnut thought he could repurpose some old code he had used to create a failed online greeting card business. One of his old greeting cards featured a drawing of a chimp, so he thought he would call the new email service ChimpMail, but the domain name was taken. So he went with MailChimp.
    

    For years, the pair ran the email service as a side project to the main web design gig. Around 2006, they began to grow wary of web design; the business was growing, but not very quickly, and they weren’t passionate about it.

    What Mr. Chestnut and Mr. Kurzius were passionate about was helping small businesses grow. They had both been raised in entrepreneurial families — Mr. Chestnut’s mother ran a salon out of her kitchen, and Mr. Kurzius’s father was a baker whose business was forced to close after Wonder Bread moved into town — and they thought that maligned as it was, email presented a low-cost marketing channel for companies on small budgets. In 2007, they stopped doing web design and focused exclusively on MailChimp.

    At the time, MailChimp faced a host of larger and better-capitalized rivals, including Constant Contact, which went public late in 2007. But Mr. Chestnut said MailChimp had a proximity to its customers that its competitors lacked. Because MailChimp was itself a small business, it understood what those businesses wanted out of their marketing tools. Its offerings were cheaper, it added features more quickly, and it allowed greater customizations to fit customers’ needs.

Tech to use

• levelsio avoids frameworks because they take more time. Instead he just uses PHP.
• The easiest UI to create is one in which people are sent some kind of emailed notification.
  • Try to do something like that for your craigslistautorespond idea. Don't worry about making a fancy UI.

Articles about how people created their MVP

• ActionWins.co
  
  • Get Sales Before You Build Your Product By Building A Service First
• Facebook
• Pieter Levels
  
  • 2014.07.29 - TechInAsia - 12 startups in 12 months: here’s how this digital nomad is f**king doing it

  • “I’ve always had serious difficulties finishing the ideas I started,” he explains. “I would work on stuff for ages to make it perfect, then when it’d almost be finished, I would scrap it and start on the next big idea. But in the end I was left with only unfinished projects, many of which had quite some potential.” This is apparently a huge problem among creative people, who have a seemingly boundless number of ideas bouncing around in their heads.

    He thought to himself, “How can I battle this?”, and came up with this solution:

    If I could develop and launch faster, I wouldn’t fall into the trap of polishing something forever. So I set the goal to develop, market and launch one startup from start to finish, every single month, for a year.

  • 2014.09.02 - Levels.io - How I build my minimum viable products
  • 2015.04.02 - Levels.io - How I built Remote | OK and launched it to #1 on Product Hunt
  • Book: MAKE
  • From web dev to 3d: Learning 3d modeling in a month
    
    • The main takeaway I got from this was the importance of making incremental progress, and not being overwhelmed by the enormity of the task you've set for yourself.
• Zapier
  • Put the links to the Zapier interviews in here
• Misc
  • 2014.05.22 - Levels.io - Run through ideas quickly
  • 2014.05.29 - Levels.io - How Go Fucking Do It raised $30,000+ in pledges in less than a month
  • 2014.08.07 - Medium - Johnny Lin - How I Got from Idea to Product Hunt in 4 Hours
    

    • But what to build?
      I opened up my ideas notepad. The last entry I wrote:
      "- rate peoples twitters by grade level. justin bieber"
      Sounds good to me.

    • But I needed a name.
      “Hey Mason, give me a name. Something cool.”
      “Uh, I’m gonna need something more specific than that.”
      “Something bird related.” — I didn’t want to reveal my idea yet. Surprises are awesome.
      “Hmm…” he clicked around on his Macbook, “How about Beak?”
      “Beautiful. Thanks.” (Lesson: He picked quickly!)

    • Opened up a text document, quickly jotted down the specs:
      COMPONENTS are technicals unique to this project.
      FEATURES are the bare minimum for launch. Focus like a laser on these. With limited time, this list had to be specific and short.
      LATER is all the features you think of that are not the bare minimum. This also includes crazy moonshot visions in case of ridiculous success (“A smarter internet”).

    • Beak, as I visualized it, would be simple:
      Click “Log In with Twitter”
      Enter a Twitter ID
      [Magical Grade Level Formula on the Tweets]
      “You’re a 3rd Grade Tweeter! Your smartest tweet: woof. Your dumbest tweet: meow. Your followed accounts’ average grade level: 5th grade.”

    • Google: “wiki grade level algorithm”
      First result was a jargon-laden Wiki entry called “Flesch-Kincaid readability tests”. I skipped the jargon to get to the only sentence that mattered right now:
      These readability tests are used extensively in the field of education. The “Flesch–Kincaid Grade Level Formula” translates […] to a U.S. grade level […]
      If it’s good enough for most educators, then it’s good enough for me. There was no way I was going to code this formula on my own in such limited time, so I looked for a plugin (“gem”) that would do the calculation:
      Google: “rails flesch-kincaid gem”

    • after some trial and error, I settled on using the SMOG index.
      “Blah blah yay meow” was now a 1.8, while “Cosmic ray spallation is a form of naturally occurring nuclear fission and nucleosynthesis” was an 11.8. Good enough.

    • I had some functionality now, but it was plain and ugly. Having no design training, I began crafting buttons and text using a patented technique called Design Whack-A-Mole (DWAM™):
      “this text should be bigger” → increase font size
      “now it’s too low” → move up 20 pixels
      “too high, and the font sucks” → move down 10 pixels, change font
      “crap, this font is shorter than the old one” → increase font size
      “too low…”

    • An hour later, it was still ugly…but it was good enough. Next task.
    • I was satisfied with it, so I shot Product Hunt a quick email