7 ms·

How we launched our MVP in 3 weeks

48 points by adamthewan 6y ago

mwnivek 6y ago
MeetButter looks interesting! Are those chat bubbles based on any open-source CSS / inspired by others?
- adamthewan 6y ago
  Hey dude, Adam here (OP). It was built using CSS! I made a GitHub Gist of it, just for you: https://gist.github.com/adamthewan/11af76e766308c46b11b6203cfef33a4 https://gist.github.com/adamthewan/11af76e766308c46b11b6203c... The gist is using styled-components, but you can easily transfer it to a CSS class :)
georgewsinger 6y ago
> I’ve seen and worked on some projects where the founders take 2 - 3 months to launch the first version of their product. That’s too much time and effort sunk into a project that may not work. Is this meme the single greatest reason why the developed world has so few successful moonshots? Imagine if Elon Musk took this approach with Tesla/SpaceX/Boring/Neuralink, or Steve Jobs took it with the iPhone. The best class of startups is where the key risk is not "is there a market?" but "can this be technologically pulled off right now?" For example, if in 2002 you had asked a random smart person "suppose I build a reusable rocket at 1/100th the cost of a normal rocket; do you think there's a market for this?" The answer would be "of course, but could you really build that??" (With all due respect to the founder of MeetButter; some companies naturally fit the quick MVP approach, but they tend to not be technological moonshots).
- baxtr 6y ago
  > Is this meme the single greatest reason why the developed world has so few successful moonshots? Could you elaborate on that? I believe it is a very interesting hypothesis, but I don’t fully understand it
  - pletsch 6y ago
    I read it as the idea that a great company needs to have an MVP within a few weeks discourages people from taking moonshots.
    - baxtr 6y ago
      So, something like Magic Leap?
- codingdave 6y ago
  You are talking about markets that already exist - if you can build a cheap rocket, clearly there is already a market, because people use expensive rockets. Cell phones existed before iPhones. Cars existed before Tesla.... you get the point. In those cases, yes, the startups of interest are changing what is possible. But for many startups, it is something so new that you really do not know if people would pay for it because people are not already paying for a similar product.
  - georgewsinger 6y ago
    > You are talking about markets that already exist No I'm not. Suppose I told you my business idea was this: build a time machine. There's no time machine market right now. But do you think if I built one, people would be interested in it? Answer: hell to the yes. There is zero market risk in this idea. The problem, of course, is that I have no feasible way of building a time machine. But thinking along these dimensions is better for entrepreneurs/VCs/the world. It forces you to work on things that actually matter/will move the needle. When they work, the VCs will appreciate it quite a bit and the world will appreciate it quite a bit. You also get to transfer your time from working on marketing problems/science experiments to working on engineering problems/real science experiments. I think this is probably a more fulfilling way to live as an entrepreneur than otherwise.
    - Silhouette 6y ago
      There is zero market risk in this idea. Not necessarily. Interest alone does not create a market. You need potential customers who have the means to buy what you're offering under conditions that make it worth selling to them. For example, I might be interested in a time machine, but if it's going to cost you a trillion dollars to make one and I'd need 5kg of unobtainium to power each jump, I do not represent a (viable) market. Your premise in this discussion seems to be that the best startups (in some sense that isn't entirely clear yet) are the ones that are aiming to be game-changers. However, I expect that in practice that vast majority of successful startups are not doing something truly profound, but rather something much more mundane that either has not been done before or can be done significantly better in some way by the startup.
- rhizome 6y ago
  > The best class of startups is where the key risk is not "is there a market?" but "can this be technologically pulled off right now?" I worked for a group of assholes in 2011 or so who basically had Zoom'ish host-guest videochat working by 2012 and they wound up petering out. These were big-exit veterans making a kind of moonshot for the time, but for whatever reason ran out of gas (it certainly wasn't a money issue given the history of the founders). The market can't be counted on to rise to the occasion.
- allenu 6y ago
  I'm not sure that "can this be technologically pulled off right now?" is the right question to ask if you are trying to create a successful business. "Is there a market?" is way more important as it means you can actually actually make a profit one day. It also leaves you open to adjust what your business is to find a market. Focusing on technology may lead to a myopic viewpoint that never materializes anything of value to consumers.
- dgb23 6y ago
  > With all due respect to the founder of MeetButter; some companies naturally fit the quick MVP approach, but they tend to not be technological moonshots Both the technology and the market side of this project seems to be well-understood. This seems to be focused on design & UX innovation and uses a tech stack which is very front-end leaning. With this in mind it absolutely makes sense that they used a rapid-prototyping and MVP approach. UX heavy projects are very feedback and iteration oriented. I would say that both their tech and methodology choices are spot on.
- an_opabinia 6y ago
  If some startup wants to prove quickly that there is a market, only for some massively resourced competitor to eventually take notice and copy them, that’s their prerogative. Big companies are interested in high tech too. It’s not so black and white. But it is still all about defeating incumbents. Or another way to put it is, do what your competitors won’t do, not can’t do.
- hef19898 6y ago
  Regarding reusable rockets, according to an EASA study I lost since, the answer to that, actually asked, question was: Yes, we could build it, but the there are not enough launches to make it financially viable. The issue for the really tough things, as in "things that cannot be solved by VC-backed marketing", is to ask random smart people. There is a lot of domain knowledge and industry experience behind them. Still no guarantee tfor success, so. It also has the potential to block these experts from trying something "risky".
- tim58 6y ago
  > Is this meme the single greatest reason why the developed world has so few successful moonshots? I think you are experiencing a bias. The developed world takes a lot of moonshots. Very few succeed. Many last decades. Here are some currently active moonshots. * Novel Coronavirus vaccine * Self driving cars * Delivery drones * SETI * Commercial fusion * General Purpose AI * Quantum Computers * "Quiet" supersonic airplanes. * The search for a Theory of Everything
- jonas21 6y ago
  Moonshots are not an option for most founders because they require a massive amount of capital and many years to find out if they'll work or not. In a best-case scenario, you have something like SpaceX that was founded 18 years ago and raised $3.2B, including the first $100M from Elon Musk himself. Almost a decade in, they came very close to failing after the first three Falcon 1 launches didn't reach orbit. In a less good scenario, Magic Leap spent $3B and 10 years trying to make their technology work, but ultimately failed to deliver on their original technical promise. Most founders don't have $100M lying around or the option of walking into a VC firm and saying, "Hey, there's a market here. I don't know if I can do it, but if you give me a few billion, I'll try." As a result, the vast majority of founders have to take the MVP approach. There's nothing wrong with that. If founders insisted on only taking moonshots, the outcome wouldn't be more moonshots. There would just be fewer incremental improvements.
- vmception 6y ago
  No the approach is why successful moonshots come from certain markets and not others
- pbreit 6y ago
  He did, in a way, just on a much larger scale. First Tesla was a low volume Lotus with an electric engine. First SpaceX was a small single booster rocket launching from the Pacific Islands.
- eggsnbacon1 6y ago
  3 weeks is laughable. It takes a few days to get a project properly configured with linting, CI, version control, database on front and back. 3 weeks is the reason that innovative projects usually die on the vine at established companies. PM's and bean counters never want to spend more than a few weeks on a "sprint task" that might not work out. The exact opposite of the mindset you want in a startup
  - adamthewan 6y ago
    Hey, Adam from MeetButter (the OP) here! It took us 3 weeks in total from inception, prototyping, to setting up a full project like you said (linting, CI CD, AWS containers, database). To be more accurate, the breakdown is more like this: • 5 days of discussing, investigating the problem, and design thinking. We took our sweet time here :p • 2 days of creating a prototype (in the article I mentioned a weekend, using Firebase and React) • 5 days of reiterating prototype and design within a closed group of testers (family and friends) • 5 days of MVP design (landing page, branding, etc) and proper project and infra set up (migrating to AWS, database, CI CD, staging and production environments, etc). So that's about 3 weeks (minus two weekends). Hope that made sense!
- akrymski 6y ago
  Steve didn't start with the iPhone, and Elon didn't start with Tesla. 1976: Wozniak built Apple I in 16 months, but he actually started selling the schematics for the computer before that. 1981: Gates bought QDOS for $75k and hired Paterson to modify it into MS-DOS; that’s what he licensed to IBM within months. 1995: Musk built Zip2 in less than a year, selling it for $305M just 4 years later. 2004: Zuck built v1 of Facebook in 2 weeks.
garysahota93 6y ago
I love this article. Out of curiosity, how did you build this blog? Looking for a better way to do my own personal blog. Thanks!
- adamthewan 6y ago
  Hey, Adam here (OP)! Thanks! I built the blog over a weekend using Gatsby. It's super neat! Gatsby is pretty flexible, I'm even able to make things like filters and queries, add tags. SEO is super easy, and their image processing is top notch. Highly recommend it. I connected it to Netlify so that it auto-updates every time I make a git commit. If you're not familiar with the term Jamstack, you should explore it. There's so much cool stuff being done these days with static websites.
  - garysahota93 6y ago
    Thank you so much Adam! This is awesome!! I'm testing Hugo+Netlify right now, but I'll have to give this a try! Thank you so much!
ipnon 6y ago
Is there data for hours spent per MVP? It seems the authors were working full time on this. The amount of time to create an MVP must vary.
- realtalk_sp 6y ago
  Would also like to know the team size. Sounds like 3 people with a good amount of experience. But it's a very impressive accomplishment no matter how you look at it.
  - adamthewan 6y ago
    Hey, Adam here from MeetButter (OP). Thanks! The product team is pretty small. We have a UI UX product designer, myself (mid-level full stack developer), and a jr front end developer.
    - realtalk_sp 6y ago
      Very cool. Good luck with the project!
teh_klev 6y ago
I'll just come right out and say it without any passive aggressive bull, but your product name is terrible. The first thing I that popped into my mind was "Meat Butter", then Lard and then Last Tango in Paris. Revenue generating products live and die by their name/branding, this one for me would be dead in the water for professional use.
- ebg13 6y ago
  > The first thing I that popped into my mind was "Meat Butter", then Lard I also thought "Meat Butter", but my next associations after that are semen and lube. I often wonder whether more marketing departments should hire at least a couple of 13 year olds to pitch names to and then see if they laugh or not.
  - teh_klev 6y ago
    And I thought my mind was a sewer :)
- adamthewan 6y ago
  Hey, Adam from MeetButter here (OP). Oh no! Our branding was totally tongue-in-cheek, we felt that it was fun. But if it's conjuring negative images when you see it, that's totally bad! I'll feedback this to the rest of the team.
  - teh_klev 6y ago
    Hi Adam, hope you don't take it personally. If it was a FOSS project you'd probably get away with it (see: GIMP, Mastodon), and it'd be funny but might attract "the wrong crowd". For a commercial product I'd definitely think about a rename.
muhammadusman 6y ago
Two pieces of feedback: please don't make the background of your homepage a bright yellow, it's hard to look at for more than 5 seconds so I had to close the tab before I got through all of it. Second, the name is a bit weird, I can't imagine saying to my friends (let alone my co-workers) "I sent you a MeetButter link, join that". Slack, Hangouts, Skype, etc all sound mundane but they're not off-putting.
- adamthewan 6y ago
  Hey, Adam from MeetButter here (OP)! Thanks for the feedback! I'll send this over to the team. Branding is super important, and we'll fine tuning it to make sure we get it right.
opportune 6y ago
I also highly disagree with the assertion that 2-3 months is too long for an MVP. It entirely depends on what you’re doing, but even in terms of opportunity cost 2-3 months is not much at all. In fact if you only focus on very easy/simple MVPs I’d argue you’re both limiting yourself in terms of what you’re comfortable with making (what you already know how to implement) and ensuring you have little to no moat.
janeshmane 6y ago
I'd be curious to know how many "slapped it together in 3 weeks" products end up thriving. My experience has been that any time I've thought of something that could be done that readily, I've eventually found someone else that already tried it (usually unsuccessfully). The successes I've had have come from long, hard slogs. May MeetButter meet better fortune.
- adamthewan 6y ago
  Hey, Adam from MeetButter (the OP) here! I don't believe you can slap together something in 3 weeks and call it a day. We did it to gather market sentiment and feedback for an idea, any signals or signs to show that we were in the right direction. Your MVP is the start of a conversation with your users / target market. Reiteration and pivoting your initial MVP based on user feedback will slowly inch you towards product-market fit. That is the long, hard slog. In regards to building low-hanging fruits (hackathon timeframe ideas), some low-hanging fruits have deeper roots. You might find deeper problems that give you better insights on how to build something that people really want.
deltron3030 6y ago
Not solving your own problem first but someone else's seems to be the major source of complexity.
- adamthewan 6y ago
  I agree. We always overthink things we don't fully understand.
ebg13 6y ago
> MeetButter is an app that helps you with coordinating meetings Oh. So...not an app for buying butter or a dating site for people with unattractive faces?
carlosdp 6y ago
Random comment on the app: Using a 4-character room code is a really really bad idea. "Zoom-bombing" became a thing because 9 digit room codes without an additional passcode was fine, before millions of new people started using it and suddenly the probability of guessing a valid room code shot up. Nowhere near enough entropy with a 4 alphanumeric character room code to prevent this kind of attack if the app takes off.
- allzeros 6y ago
  But look how fast they released! /s
  - adamthewan 6y ago
    Ah man, we're only human. Mistakes happen. If we never launched and got feedback from you guys, we'd never see the potential downfalls of the tech we created!
- polysaturate 6y ago
  True, but this is something that can and will change after beta?
  - adamthewan 6y ago
    Hey, Adam from MeetButter here (OP)! Yup, we're listening to all the feedback. Working on a few ideas on how to fix any room-bombing issue.
- adamthewan 6y ago
  Hey, Adam from MeetButter here (OP)! We hear you! We're tinkering on a few ideas (room knocking, private rooms, password locked rooms) that should make this more secure.
preommr 6y ago
This is ironically good advice because its bad advice. These kind of general statements about how an mvp should take x weeks are pointless because each project is different. Which is an obvious statement. So is the suggestion that you should launch as fast as possible. Launching quickly, failing, is a really good way of understanding time management on a macro scale for an entire software project/startup. And its not just about pacing or knowing how long a feature should take to develop, but many many things like which feature to develop at which point because it might be much more difficult later on.
- polysaturate 6y ago
  This comment is spot on...every product is different, ever person/team is different and every market is different.
- adamthewan 6y ago
  Hey, Adam from MeetButter here (OP). I agree, every project is different. I don't believe that my experiences and advice should be a catch-all for all projects and teams everywhere, there are too many permutations. Without defining the variable X (for X amount of weeks) that you should take for an MVP, the general advice for MVP is to build as little as possible, launch fast, fail fast, and reiterate. There are industries where the barriers of building an MVP are much higher. For example, in ML you need to train your algo huge amounts of data. In the automotive industry, you need to meet a lot of minimum requirements to even enter the market.
ab_testing 6y ago
Surprisingly the author writes about the prototype of the app and the wireframes but does not mention the tech behind the actual video conferencing solution. Are they using an existing open source solution and packaging it into a website.
- NameDoesntExist 6y ago
  At the bottom they mention using Jitsi > We just launched video functionality powered by Jitsi! https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet
- adamthewan 6y ago
  Hey, Adam from MeetButter here (OP). We're using Jitsi (which is open source) but are also testing out various third party providers such as Daily.co and Agora.io We want to focus on improving the meeting flow experience and interactions, which is why we leverage open source or third party providers for the video conferencing tech.
pier25 6y ago
Low effort/low risk ideas are the lowest hanging fruit and we're way past that phase in mobile apps, SaaS, indie games, etc. I'm not saying it's impossible to launch a successful product by investing a couple of weeks, but it sounds as probable as winning the lottery.
- adamthewan 6y ago
  Hey, Adam from MeetButter here (OP)! I agree, I wouldn't invest a couple of weeks and just call it a day. An MVP is the start of a conversation with your target market. That's how we're approaching it. It'll take more than 3 weeks to reach product-market fit, we're just super excited to kickstart the journey!
  - pier25 6y ago
    Good luck to you!
TrackerFF 6y ago
Sounds a lot like the "Design Thinking" process.
- adamthewan 6y ago
  Hey, Adam from MeetButter here (OP)! Yes, I love the Design Thinking process. I ran my own dev agency before, and would always recommend clients to do a Design Thinking workshop with my team. It's really the best way to break down a big 6+ month project into bite-sized pieces.

48 points by adamthewan 6y ago

mwnivek 6y ago

MeetButter looks interesting! Are those chat bubbles based on any open-source CSS / inspired by others?

adamthewan 6y ago
Hey dude, Adam here (OP). It was built using CSS! I made a GitHub Gist of it, just for you: https://gist.github.com/adamthewan/11af76e766308c46b11b6203cfef33a4 https://gist.github.com/adamthewan/11af76e766308c46b11b6203c... The gist is using styled-components, but you can easily transfer it to a CSS class :)

georgewsinger 6y ago

> I’ve seen and worked on some projects where the founders take 2 - 3 months to launch the first version of their product. That’s too much time and effort sunk into a project that may not work. Is this meme the single greatest reason why the developed world has so few successful moonshots? Imagine if Elon Musk took this approach with Tesla/SpaceX/Boring/Neuralink, or Steve Jobs took it with the iPhone. The best class of startups is where the key risk is not "is there a market?" but "can this be technologically pulled off right now?" For example, if in 2002 you had asked a random smart person "suppose I build a reusable rocket at 1/100th the cost of a normal rocket; do you think there's a market for this?" The answer would be "of course, but could you really build that??" (With all due respect to the founder of MeetButter; some companies naturally fit the quick MVP approach, but they tend to not be technological moonshots).

baxtr 6y ago
> Is this meme the single greatest reason why the developed world has so few successful moonshots? Could you elaborate on that? I believe it is a very interesting hypothesis, but I don’t fully understand it
- pletsch 6y ago
  I read it as the idea that a great company needs to have an MVP within a few weeks discourages people from taking moonshots.
  - baxtr 6y ago
    So, something like Magic Leap?
codingdave 6y ago
You are talking about markets that already exist - if you can build a cheap rocket, clearly there is already a market, because people use expensive rockets. Cell phones existed before iPhones. Cars existed before Tesla.... you get the point. In those cases, yes, the startups of interest are changing what is possible. But for many startups, it is something so new that you really do not know if people would pay for it because people are not already paying for a similar product.
- georgewsinger 6y ago
  > You are talking about markets that already exist No I'm not. Suppose I told you my business idea was this: build a time machine. There's no time machine market right now. But do you think if I built one, people would be interested in it? Answer: hell to the yes. There is zero market risk in this idea. The problem, of course, is that I have no feasible way of building a time machine. But thinking along these dimensions is better for entrepreneurs/VCs/the world. It forces you to work on things that actually matter/will move the needle. When they work, the VCs will appreciate it quite a bit and the world will appreciate it quite a bit. You also get to transfer your time from working on marketing problems/science experiments to working on engineering problems/real science experiments. I think this is probably a more fulfilling way to live as an entrepreneur than otherwise.
  - Silhouette 6y ago
    There is zero market risk in this idea. Not necessarily. Interest alone does not create a market. You need potential customers who have the means to buy what you're offering under conditions that make it worth selling to them. For example, I might be interested in a time machine, but if it's going to cost you a trillion dollars to make one and I'd need 5kg of unobtainium to power each jump, I do not represent a (viable) market. Your premise in this discussion seems to be that the best startups (in some sense that isn't entirely clear yet) are the ones that are aiming to be game-changers. However, I expect that in practice that vast majority of successful startups are not doing something truly profound, but rather something much more mundane that either has not been done before or can be done significantly better in some way by the startup.
rhizome 6y ago
> The best class of startups is where the key risk is not "is there a market?" but "can this be technologically pulled off right now?" I worked for a group of assholes in 2011 or so who basically had Zoom'ish host-guest videochat working by 2012 and they wound up petering out. These were big-exit veterans making a kind of moonshot for the time, but for whatever reason ran out of gas (it certainly wasn't a money issue given the history of the founders). The market can't be counted on to rise to the occasion.
allenu 6y ago
I'm not sure that "can this be technologically pulled off right now?" is the right question to ask if you are trying to create a successful business. "Is there a market?" is way more important as it means you can actually actually make a profit one day. It also leaves you open to adjust what your business is to find a market. Focusing on technology may lead to a myopic viewpoint that never materializes anything of value to consumers.
dgb23 6y ago
> With all due respect to the founder of MeetButter; some companies naturally fit the quick MVP approach, but they tend to not be technological moonshots Both the technology and the market side of this project seems to be well-understood. This seems to be focused on design & UX innovation and uses a tech stack which is very front-end leaning. With this in mind it absolutely makes sense that they used a rapid-prototyping and MVP approach. UX heavy projects are very feedback and iteration oriented. I would say that both their tech and methodology choices are spot on.
an_opabinia 6y ago
If some startup wants to prove quickly that there is a market, only for some massively resourced competitor to eventually take notice and copy them, that’s their prerogative. Big companies are interested in high tech too. It’s not so black and white. But it is still all about defeating incumbents. Or another way to put it is, do what your competitors won’t do, not can’t do.
hef19898 6y ago
Regarding reusable rockets, according to an EASA study I lost since, the answer to that, actually asked, question was: Yes, we could build it, but the there are not enough launches to make it financially viable. The issue for the really tough things, as in "things that cannot be solved by VC-backed marketing", is to ask random smart people. There is a lot of domain knowledge and industry experience behind them. Still no guarantee tfor success, so. It also has the potential to block these experts from trying something "risky".
tim58 6y ago
> Is this meme the single greatest reason why the developed world has so few successful moonshots? I think you are experiencing a bias. The developed world takes a lot of moonshots. Very few succeed. Many last decades. Here are some currently active moonshots. * Novel Coronavirus vaccine * Self driving cars * Delivery drones * SETI * Commercial fusion * General Purpose AI * Quantum Computers * "Quiet" supersonic airplanes. * The search for a Theory of Everything
jonas21 6y ago
Moonshots are not an option for most founders because they require a massive amount of capital and many years to find out if they'll work or not. In a best-case scenario, you have something like SpaceX that was founded 18 years ago and raised $3.2B, including the first $100M from Elon Musk himself. Almost a decade in, they came very close to failing after the first three Falcon 1 launches didn't reach orbit. In a less good scenario, Magic Leap spent $3B and 10 years trying to make their technology work, but ultimately failed to deliver on their original technical promise. Most founders don't have $100M lying around or the option of walking into a VC firm and saying, "Hey, there's a market here. I don't know if I can do it, but if you give me a few billion, I'll try." As a result, the vast majority of founders have to take the MVP approach. There's nothing wrong with that. If founders insisted on only taking moonshots, the outcome wouldn't be more moonshots. There would just be fewer incremental improvements.
vmception 6y ago
No the approach is why successful moonshots come from certain markets and not others
pbreit 6y ago
He did, in a way, just on a much larger scale. First Tesla was a low volume Lotus with an electric engine. First SpaceX was a small single booster rocket launching from the Pacific Islands.
eggsnbacon1 6y ago
3 weeks is laughable. It takes a few days to get a project properly configured with linting, CI, version control, database on front and back. 3 weeks is the reason that innovative projects usually die on the vine at established companies. PM's and bean counters never want to spend more than a few weeks on a "sprint task" that might not work out. The exact opposite of the mindset you want in a startup
- adamthewan 6y ago
  Hey, Adam from MeetButter (the OP) here! It took us 3 weeks in total from inception, prototyping, to setting up a full project like you said (linting, CI CD, AWS containers, database). To be more accurate, the breakdown is more like this: • 5 days of discussing, investigating the problem, and design thinking. We took our sweet time here :p • 2 days of creating a prototype (in the article I mentioned a weekend, using Firebase and React) • 5 days of reiterating prototype and design within a closed group of testers (family and friends) • 5 days of MVP design (landing page, branding, etc) and proper project and infra set up (migrating to AWS, database, CI CD, staging and production environments, etc). So that's about 3 weeks (minus two weekends). Hope that made sense!
akrymski 6y ago
Steve didn't start with the iPhone, and Elon didn't start with Tesla. 1976: Wozniak built Apple I in 16 months, but he actually started selling the schematics for the computer before that. 1981: Gates bought QDOS for $75k and hired Paterson to modify it into MS-DOS; that’s what he licensed to IBM within months. 1995: Musk built Zip2 in less than a year, selling it for $305M just 4 years later. 2004: Zuck built v1 of Facebook in 2 weeks.

garysahota93 6y ago

I love this article. Out of curiosity, how did you build this blog? Looking for a better way to do my own personal blog. Thanks!

adamthewan 6y ago
Hey, Adam here (OP)! Thanks! I built the blog over a weekend using Gatsby. It's super neat! Gatsby is pretty flexible, I'm even able to make things like filters and queries, add tags. SEO is super easy, and their image processing is top notch. Highly recommend it. I connected it to Netlify so that it auto-updates every time I make a git commit. If you're not familiar with the term Jamstack, you should explore it. There's so much cool stuff being done these days with static websites.
- garysahota93 6y ago
  Thank you so much Adam! This is awesome!! I'm testing Hugo+Netlify right now, but I'll have to give this a try! Thank you so much!

ipnon 6y ago

Is there data for hours spent per MVP? It seems the authors were working full time on this. The amount of time to create an MVP must vary.

realtalk_sp 6y ago
Would also like to know the team size. Sounds like 3 people with a good amount of experience. But it's a very impressive accomplishment no matter how you look at it.
- adamthewan 6y ago
  Hey, Adam here from MeetButter (OP). Thanks! The product team is pretty small. We have a UI UX product designer, myself (mid-level full stack developer), and a jr front end developer.
  - realtalk_sp 6y ago
    Very cool. Good luck with the project!

teh_klev 6y ago

I'll just come right out and say it without any passive aggressive bull, but your product name is terrible. The first thing I that popped into my mind was "Meat Butter", then Lard and then Last Tango in Paris. Revenue generating products live and die by their name/branding, this one for me would be dead in the water for professional use.

ebg13 6y ago
> The first thing I that popped into my mind was "Meat Butter", then Lard I also thought "Meat Butter", but my next associations after that are semen and lube. I often wonder whether more marketing departments should hire at least a couple of 13 year olds to pitch names to and then see if they laugh or not.
- teh_klev 6y ago
  And I thought my mind was a sewer :)
adamthewan 6y ago
Hey, Adam from MeetButter here (OP). Oh no! Our branding was totally tongue-in-cheek, we felt that it was fun. But if it's conjuring negative images when you see it, that's totally bad! I'll feedback this to the rest of the team.
- teh_klev 6y ago
  Hi Adam, hope you don't take it personally. If it was a FOSS project you'd probably get away with it (see: GIMP, Mastodon), and it'd be funny but might attract "the wrong crowd". For a commercial product I'd definitely think about a rename.

muhammadusman 6y ago

Two pieces of feedback: please don't make the background of your homepage a bright yellow, it's hard to look at for more than 5 seconds so I had to close the tab before I got through all of it. Second, the name is a bit weird, I can't imagine saying to my friends (let alone my co-workers) "I sent you a MeetButter link, join that". Slack, Hangouts, Skype, etc all sound mundane but they're not off-putting.

adamthewan 6y ago
Hey, Adam from MeetButter here (OP)! Thanks for the feedback! I'll send this over to the team. Branding is super important, and we'll fine tuning it to make sure we get it right.

opportune 6y ago

I also highly disagree with the assertion that 2-3 months is too long for an MVP. It entirely depends on what you’re doing, but even in terms of opportunity cost 2-3 months is not much at all. In fact if you only focus on very easy/simple MVPs I’d argue you’re both limiting yourself in terms of what you’re comfortable with making (what you already know how to implement) and ensuring you have little to no moat.

janeshmane 6y ago

I'd be curious to know how many "slapped it together in 3 weeks" products end up thriving. My experience has been that any time I've thought of something that could be done that readily, I've eventually found someone else that already tried it (usually unsuccessfully). The successes I've had have come from long, hard slogs. May MeetButter meet better fortune.

adamthewan 6y ago
Hey, Adam from MeetButter (the OP) here! I don't believe you can slap together something in 3 weeks and call it a day. We did it to gather market sentiment and feedback for an idea, any signals or signs to show that we were in the right direction. Your MVP is the start of a conversation with your users / target market. Reiteration and pivoting your initial MVP based on user feedback will slowly inch you towards product-market fit. That is the long, hard slog. In regards to building low-hanging fruits (hackathon timeframe ideas), some low-hanging fruits have deeper roots. You might find deeper problems that give you better insights on how to build something that people really want.

deltron3030 6y ago

Not solving your own problem first but someone else's seems to be the major source of complexity.

adamthewan 6y ago
I agree. We always overthink things we don't fully understand.

ebg13 6y ago

> MeetButter is an app that helps you with coordinating meetings Oh. So...not an app for buying butter or a dating site for people with unattractive faces?

carlosdp 6y ago

Random comment on the app: Using a 4-character room code is a really really bad idea. "Zoom-bombing" became a thing because 9 digit room codes without an additional passcode was fine, before millions of new people started using it and suddenly the probability of guessing a valid room code shot up. Nowhere near enough entropy with a 4 alphanumeric character room code to prevent this kind of attack if the app takes off.

allzeros 6y ago
But look how fast they released! /s
- adamthewan 6y ago
  Ah man, we're only human. Mistakes happen. If we never launched and got feedback from you guys, we'd never see the potential downfalls of the tech we created!
polysaturate 6y ago
True, but this is something that can and will change after beta?
- adamthewan 6y ago
  Hey, Adam from MeetButter here (OP)! Yup, we're listening to all the feedback. Working on a few ideas on how to fix any room-bombing issue.
adamthewan 6y ago
Hey, Adam from MeetButter here (OP)! We hear you! We're tinkering on a few ideas (room knocking, private rooms, password locked rooms) that should make this more secure.

preommr 6y ago

This is ironically good advice because its bad advice. These kind of general statements about how an mvp should take x weeks are pointless because each project is different. Which is an obvious statement. So is the suggestion that you should launch as fast as possible. Launching quickly, failing, is a really good way of understanding time management on a macro scale for an entire software project/startup. And its not just about pacing or knowing how long a feature should take to develop, but many many things like which feature to develop at which point because it might be much more difficult later on.

polysaturate 6y ago
This comment is spot on...every product is different, ever person/team is different and every market is different.
adamthewan 6y ago
Hey, Adam from MeetButter here (OP). I agree, every project is different. I don't believe that my experiences and advice should be a catch-all for all projects and teams everywhere, there are too many permutations. Without defining the variable X (for X amount of weeks) that you should take for an MVP, the general advice for MVP is to build as little as possible, launch fast, fail fast, and reiterate. There are industries where the barriers of building an MVP are much higher. For example, in ML you need to train your algo huge amounts of data. In the automotive industry, you need to meet a lot of minimum requirements to even enter the market.

ab_testing 6y ago

Surprisingly the author writes about the prototype of the app and the wireframes but does not mention the tech behind the actual video conferencing solution. Are they using an existing open source solution and packaging it into a website.

NameDoesntExist 6y ago
At the bottom they mention using Jitsi > We just launched video functionality powered by Jitsi! https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet
adamthewan 6y ago
Hey, Adam from MeetButter here (OP). We're using Jitsi (which is open source) but are also testing out various third party providers such as Daily.co and Agora.io We want to focus on improving the meeting flow experience and interactions, which is why we leverage open source or third party providers for the video conferencing tech.

pier25 6y ago

Low effort/low risk ideas are the lowest hanging fruit and we're way past that phase in mobile apps, SaaS, indie games, etc. I'm not saying it's impossible to launch a successful product by investing a couple of weeks, but it sounds as probable as winning the lottery.

adamthewan 6y ago
Hey, Adam from MeetButter here (OP)! I agree, I wouldn't invest a couple of weeks and just call it a day. An MVP is the start of a conversation with your target market. That's how we're approaching it. It'll take more than 3 weeks to reach product-market fit, we're just super excited to kickstart the journey!
- pier25 6y ago
  Good luck to you!

TrackerFF 6y ago

Sounds a lot like the "Design Thinking" process.

adamthewan 6y ago
Hey, Adam from MeetButter here (OP)! Yes, I love the Design Thinking process. I ran my own dev agency before, and would always recommend clients to do a Design Thinking workshop with my team. It's really the best way to break down a big 6+ month project into bite-sized pieces.