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Comment by daliwali | Hacker News Reader

I started doing this recently by quitting my job, and I currently have no income.

There is this assumption that one must build a minimum viable product that has to be released as quickly as possible, so much that it's become startup mantra. It's no surprise that a lot of these products seem to be technically shallow, everyone is reaching for low hanging fruit.

I feel rather alone trying to do something that I think hasn't been done before, or if it had, wasn't executed well. I don't think I could possibly commit to it without having strong motivation, which I struggled with while having a full-time job.

The biggest technical/social challenge I have is to make something that a non-technical user could easily get right away and make something with it. I think the automation of web dev is an inevitability, and frameworks were just a historical blip on this path. The same thing is happening to web design. http://hypereum.com

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I think the whole point of an MVP is to validate the hypotesis you make about your users.

In your case for example, do you know who your users are? Are they entrepreneurs? Current software developers? Anyhow, who is going to use your service?

I'm not trying here to undermine your project since it indeed sounds pretty awesome, but to reinstate why the whole mvp movement has a reason to be.

For marketing-tech, sure it's a great model, but getting out an MVP as fast as possible doesn't always make sense. Sometimes it takes an order of magnitude more effort to get to "minimum" or "viable" depending on the product. On the contrary, a lot of developer's side projects just feel like things that any reasonably skilled developer could build given a few days.

The question of finding customers, is exactly the same as finding who is demanding software to solve business problems (i.e. not current software devs).

I agree with you about the complexity of a mvp. It indeed may vary. However a mvp is about testing an hypothesis, not building a simple version of a product.

Maybe an mvp for a complex product is just a landing page explaining features with a buy button, built in under 2 hours using optimizely.

Again, it depends on the hypothesis. So, in this way, I differ with you when you say getting out a mvp asap doesn't make sense. Because validating you hypothesis is what you want to make as fast as possible. But then, launching as fast as possible doesn't imply necessarily launching fast.

Getting an MVP out as fast as possible doesn't contradict an MVP that takes an order of magnitude more effort to build. It's just that the ASAP for the latter case is whatever amount of time that it takes to build it.

I don't use Mail on my Mac, and I know of many others who don't either. You should try using MailChimp for the marketing sign-up at the bottom of your page!

Thanks for the suggestion, but for a good reason, I couldn't be bothered to use some external service to do it, since it will be replaced with the actual product. Replacing that stupid mailto link is just another motivation to ship something :)

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