
How we launched our MVP in 3 weeks - adamthewan
https://adamthewan.com/blog/meetbutter/how-we-built-meetbutter-three-weeks/
======
georgewsinger
> 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).

~~~
codingdave
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
> 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.

~~~
dumbfoundded
How I built my time machine MVP in 3 weeks.

First I developed a box. I used existing box designs as inspiration. No frills
on the first go, just a normal cubic shape. I started with cardboard but plan
to iterate further on the material selection. Currently the time machine only
goes forward at 1x speed but that's the challenge of being first to market. I
tested with users and they said the box is uncomfortable so I made a bigger
box and put a cushion in there. Now, users report a more comfortable
experience. You have to understand as a founder, any new technology is going
to have some rough edges.

After this 3 week period, I learned a lot about time machine prototyping and
the desired user experience. My next steps are to take this to VCs, funded by
pensions of dock workers, and raise a $100M round to further development. I'm
confident with this funding, we'll be able to disrupt the time machine market
entirely.

~~~
codetrotter
How I built my time machine MVP in 10 seconds flat.

First I spent my whole life building the time machine.

After this life long period, when I finally finished it at a really really old
age, I went back in time, to 10 seconds after I had decided to build a time
machine, and I handed the time machine to my past self and then I died, but
the past me lived on, with a time machine that from his point of view was
built by him in 10 seconds flat. It was a great success and all rejoiced,
including past me, future me and present me.

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teh_klev
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
> _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
And I thought my mind was a sewer :)

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janeshmane
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
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.

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preommr
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.

~~~
adamthewan
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.

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muhammadusman
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
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.

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carlosdp
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.

~~~
polysaturate
True, but this is something that can and will change after beta?

~~~
adamthewan
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.

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opportune
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.

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garysahota93
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
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
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!

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pier25
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
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
Good luck to you!

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ebg13
> _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?

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ipnon
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
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
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
Very cool. Good luck with the project!

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ab_testing
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.

~~~
adamthewan
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.

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deltron3030
Not solving your own problem first but someone else's seems to be the major
source of complexity.

~~~
adamthewan
I agree. We always overthink things we don't fully understand.

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mwnivek
MeetButter looks interesting!

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

~~~
adamthewan
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/11af76e766308c46b11b6203c...](https://gist.github.com/adamthewan/11af76e766308c46b11b6203cfef33a4)

The gist is using styled-components, but you can easily transfer it to a CSS
class :)

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TrackerFF
Sounds a lot like the "Design Thinking" process.

~~~
adamthewan
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.

