What worked for me (oversimplified):
1. Find an interest you're excited about and/or spend a lot of money in (climbing). It'll be easier creating something of value for yourself.
2. Write down what could be improved there. Problems you run into. Solutions you use that suck, or chose not to use because they suck. Build your problem understanding. (developing climbing technique and staying hyped)
3. Find others who're interested in this space. (fellow climbers)
4. Build your problem understanding. Ask them what is challenging, frustrating or annoying for them as climbers. Ask them what they've tried or are trying and what they like/dislike.
5. Come up with a solution. Make something super small. A landing page that explains your idea. A brochure. Something ideally that you can make within a week. A day's even better.
6. Show your solution to people you'd consider customers. Ask them for feedback about how they think this could solve their problem. (for me I came up with an online program, designed a landing page with google sheets and showed it as if it was an actual website. Climbers gave me feedback that they wanted to know more about the practical way of learning - exercises, etc)
7. Repeat step 5&6 until you have confidence this is worth building. Then you've got your idea you're asking for. Congrats. You've ended up at the hardest point: figuring out how to execute on your idea and get all the parts right and figuring out how to sell and market it.
Writing from the Netherlands so advice might differ per country.
I've worked with about 5 startups who had at least a part of their product built externally. There are three outcomes from your MVP being built externally:
1. It works, which for the moment is great. So you ignore the product and focus on mkt & sales. Because you need revenue. 2 years down you realise you need to start improving stuff, but find yourself limited because you can't change the code and don't really understand how anything works. Then you need to spend couple months raising funds to rebuild the product OR finding a technical founder. Quite the momentum killer. Not so great.
2. The result from your MVP (assuming you're using it to test something) is meh - mediocre, maybe, perhaps. People like this but don't like that. This has the biggest odds of happening. The thing that sucks here is that the learnings are probably your own, because the agency would ask you to pay way more if they'd be involved in all the user testing etc, because that's how their business model works. Translating them to your agency again has the odds of miscommunication or misinterpretation, which is why YCs credo is 'talk to users, write code' - just because you probably need to run through this feedback loop 5-10 times before you get it right. So, outcome also not so great.
3. Your initial target customers tell you the MVP really doesn't do the job and you either end up abandoning the MVP or starting to look for another problem to solve with it. Also really not outcomes you're looking for.
So yes - experience with hiring agency - all negative.
Given you're asking for an MVP I'd suggest you make it smaller. There are tons of ways to learn about your customers' problem and whether you can solve it for them without writing code.
We've built landing pages using Keynote which we then tested with customers, ran entire processes that were supposed to be automated manually, and even prototyped a machine learning algorithm by manually coming up with our best guesses for a users' search query. Because the purpose wasn't scientific validation, the purpose was learning. All these three we built in a day.
For more:
https://hackernoon.com/the-mvp-is-dead-long-live-the-rat-233...http://paulgraham.com/ds.html
Few questions to understand the context. At what stage were the startup you worked with mostly?
Did you ever encountered a "proper" hand-off of the MVP? If so, what was it like or what would you suggest?
I guess the idea for me is to have the MVP developed based on getting angel investment and start looking for PMF together with already looking for seed and tech co-founder & inhouse tech team and then after you find the PMF rebuilding it completely anyway.
But you are right that finding PMF is continuous process and might take years and many iterations and the big question is what kind of answers you can get from 1 MVP/prototype built in 3 weeks or so (it should not take longer than that as I agree with what you say - make it as small as possible)
p.s. thanks for the articles, great reading. I agree that before MVP there should be prototypes that validates the hypothesis.
Sorry, totally missed this. In case it's still relevant:
Stages were all before 500k revenue. So maybe the very successful ones did have their mvp built by someone else, but I just didn't encounter them.
As far as proper hand-off concerns - yes, I've seen companies usually deal professionally with their hand-off. That's what their reputation depends on. But the idea of the MVP is not necessarily the product - it's more the first attempt at seeing if you can solve something. Next steps are usually hard to follow up. Seeing as you just do the minimal, you leave out so many things that later on it's just hard to improve on it.
I'd want my co-founder to be part of all the initial learning, and so would rather stay put in my job and find a passionate co-founder first before having someone build the mvp.
good luck!
My experience was in NL too and agree with all your points.
After the _second_ botched attempt I don't understand why building in-house was decided - instead the company inherited a super rushed barebones MVP with zero docs and spaghetti code...
Interesting overlap between crisis management & startups:
You need to react quickly. (…) You need to engage with communities deeply - community acceptance is important. You need to be coordinated. You need to be coherent. You need to look at the other sectoral impacts. (…) The lessons I’ve learned are: be fast, have no regrets. You must be the first mover. (…) One of the great things in emergency response is (…) if you need to be right before you move, you will never win. Perfection is the enemy of the good (…). Speed trumps perfection. And the problem (…) is that everyone is afraid of making a mistake, everyone is afraid of the consequence of error. But the greatest error is not to move. The greatest error is to be paralysed by the fear of failure. That’s the single biggest lesson I’ve learned in Ebola responses in the past.
Some people have given solid advice here on financial restrictions, so will focus on the 'fire for building' part.
Recently listened to a podcast of Tim Ferris, where he interviewed Tony Fadell - who built the iPod, iPhone and Nest. In it, he makes a serious case for getting bored. He explains how he uses it to drive new ideas, such as how it helped him get the clarity of mind to get the idea of Nest, and how afterwards he's done the research for his current problem - one of plastics.
"Get the time to get bored. Spend three, six months if you can, or at least two or three weeks outside of that. Get bored. Just put away all of your things. Maybe go clean up the garage or whatever it is. Right? Through that, you’re going to start to think differently. You’re going to act slightly differently and your mind might open up to other sources of inspiration, other problems, other things where you start to go, “Oh, now I see differently.” I’m not just going to go run to the competitor because I understand the space and run to the competitor and go work for them because they’re going to give me a better job. But I want to go do a whole different thing that I want to learn about that’s going to challenge me so I’m not just checking in every day and doing my work, but I’m actually growing through that."
Playing a game or watching a movie feels good — but at the same time, you're living someone elses' dreams. All this dopamine, all this adrenaline will feel so good and make you tired just enough to conveniently forget about your own.
the distinguishing benefit of reading, particularly more challenging works (of any genre), is improved reading comprehension and likely improved written ability as well, skills that have immense value in day-to-day life. Arguably video games and movies don’t have the same trickle over benefits. That being said I have an immense respect for the value of film and I imagine video games have certain benefits as well.
Netflix gives me little gratification. And so, it's a great source of relaxation for me. Whereas social media is addictive for me.
Keep in mind, dopamine isn't a "pleasure hormone". It's a reward anticipation hormone, one that drives you to do painful things for a reward that might not happen. It mixes both excitement and anxiety... excitement to get you started, anxiety to force you to finish.
It doesn't trigger in things that are actually relaxing. That's why people who are actually having fun 'procrastinate' less on some sites.
Good to read they're doing what they can. In the meantime, there's business like ours (in travel, 70-ish people, not profitable) that are fighting to survive this crisis. Would've liked to see an extension of the deadline for the apple sign-up requirement. I know we're late, but this means we need to spend valuable time redesigning our sign-up whereas what we currently need to do is redesign our entire business model to stay alive. Curious how others in the market feel about this
Bit of background - last January I read Marcus Aurelius' Meditations for the first time. There haven't been many books that I'd say changed by life, but this one certainly did. It resonated so strongly with struggles I was having (and still have), that it inspired me to dig as deep as I could into the topic. So that's what I did. I think I spent the last 8 months reading everything I could from Marcus, Epictetus and Seneca, and dissected their works into quotes that I then mapped to certain struggles I have. That resulted in a series of essays, of which this one is the first.
I doubted whether I should publish this, as I primarily wrote this for myself. But then a couple of people read it, and convinced me to share it with others. So, that's what I'm doing here.
The reason I wanted to share it here is because Stoicism has as its fundamental principles very similar ones to the ones I think many of us here at HN adhere to, which are 1) When in doubt, apply rationality, and 2) Life is about contributing to your community's well-being.
Hope it helps you then same way it helps me.
B
Thanks a lot to the person who decided to share this here. It taught me a lot. HN really hosts a group of experts. The comments here have been super nuanced, showing actual mastery of the content. Really helps me sharpen my writing, so thanks to all for commenting.
Hey, FYI: I'm the author.
Thanks for the feedback. And you're right, for most part. That's why I mentioned it's with input from 50 entrepreneurs who shared their mistakes and failures. Thanks for keeping others sharp about it, though.
