

Ask HN: Do they really build an MVP in a weekend? - ajaxguy

Having bitten this hacker bug for couple of days with me, I am just wondering how much knowledge/workout does it take to build a product and say it as a weekend project. What are the best tools/materials to consider before building a mobile app or web app?
How do you choose which tool/api for backend and frontend?<p>I am just curious whether that would really took only one weekend. Honestly, I believe when you say it as weekend product, it would definitely lower the user expectations on the product and it is my sole opinion. But when I see couple of apps, at least they look good architectures and different api integrations and still they are able to do that completely in a weekend.<p>I am open to your suggestions and no hard feelings these kind of posts.
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jdg
I built the first version of Boxcar (<http://boxcar.io>) in a weekend --
because I was bored. Started on a Friday, submitted to Apple the following
Sunday evening.

Since then we've grown to 1M+ users and have delivered 2B+ push notifications.
We're a team of 4 now.

For mobile apps, your tools are basically decided for you already. Eclipse for
Android, Xcode for iOS. The goal of an MVP is to keep things as stupidly
simple as possible. Use external APIs if they already exist, use services like
Parse, etc, to give you a leg up.

MVP is less about code and more about results. If you can get away with no
coding at all, that's the ideal situation. :-)

~~~
ajaxguy
Seems to be an impressive app. So, when you say a weekend, you got that MVP
from inception to live app? Normally, ideas are spontaneous and it will take
some time to get the right feel of it. So how did that happen with your
boxcar?

Yes, you are right for the basic tools like Eclipse and XCode. But to
integrate different product apis, like Parse/Nodejs it would already need a
groundup knowledge to use them in your app. This is where I am lagging behind.
I want to know how do you manage these kind of situations.

I belive this process is more of a progressive manner than a complete solution
at one go.

Sincerely, it would really inspire me to read such kind of posts here and
believe I am way too far from the fellow hn'ers.

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MattBearman
I built the MVP of BugMuncher (<http://bugmuncher.com>) In 2 weeks worth of
evenings (I was still working for 'the man' at the time).

Total time was 30 - 40 hours, so I _could_ have done it in a weekend, but it
would have been a hell of a weekend :)

I tend to take the term 'weekend project' with a pinch of salt, and usually
interpret it as meaning something just built fast, and usually in spare time.

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sim0n
We built prompt.im (doesn't really work anymore unfortunately) in less than a
day and the first interstateapp.com in around 2 days.

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knes
we build the MVP of Dropdock (<http://getdropdock.com>) in a weekend. We are
now in the process of refactoring the code and should ship the new beta
version to everyone soon :)

