
Ask HN: On a scale from 1-10, how ugly was your MVP? - sifer
1 being “it barely got finished and barely works”, and 10 being “I had a very polished product”
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jasonkester
Judge for yourself:

[http://web.archive.org/web/20071115235344/http://www.s3stat....](http://web.archive.org/web/20071115235344/http://www.s3stat.com/)

I'd call that a solid 1.

\- 99designs logo

\- $10 template

\- Handmade graphics (from screenshots of Webalizer, no less)

The product itself was literally Webalizer reports, along with some quick and
dirty forms to input enough information so that we could generate those
reports (running directly on the webserver, of course), and a list view to
link back to them.

Note the $1/month pricing, and no mechanism to actually charge credit cards to
collect said dollar.

But a lot of people signed up, and some of them are still around 13 years
later.

~~~
obayesshelton
That is really cool, out of interest did it ever make money?

~~~
jasonkester
Yes. It replaced my developer salary several years back, and I've been living
off of it ever since.

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kirubakaran
I saved the screenshots
[https://histre.com/blog/history/](https://histre.com/blog/history/) ;)

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derrick_jensen
I'm about to release something I've been working on as an MVP.

Backend currently is a 6 and frontend is a 2. A lot of what it does revolves
around automated analysis and various optimization problems, so the backend is
minimal but it has plenty of validation and testing (integration testing and
fuzz testing)

Frontend is very basic at this stage since I don't want to bother with CSS at
this time (I'm the only person who mechanically knows how things work at this
stage, do I'm trying to leave styling and polishing to somebody else on the
team).

Will probably take a landing page approach and have a sign up for some sort of
private beta

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shoo
Arguably a MVP for a new product or service could just be a sign up / payment
page for a non existent offering. If not enough people try to sign up there's
no point building anything.

Would this be 0 or -5 on the scale?

~~~
sifer
Eh in that case I guess the MVP would be just a landing/signup page (as you
mentioned), which could still be totally polished and cleaned up - so could
still totally be a 10 :)

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ian0
0 - We didn't have one. Just a landing page. Signed our first 50 clients with
just a fancy powerpoint and door to door sales. It was a double sided
marketplace so then had to bring those 50 clients to persuade our first
"supplier" on the other side to integrate.

We lost a most of these initial clients before we could actually build what we
wanted to. But then once complete a lot of them came back. In this phase id
rate our MVP as a 7. We already had enough feedback to build something quite
useful.

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mlejva
Just a landing page, made in ~30 minutes -
[https://codelines.dev](https://codelines.dev)

I'd call it 0 because it isn't even available yet.

It's hella simple but it works. It actually works great. People understand
what we're building right away and are signing up, giving us feedback.

One really doesn't need fancy stuff. Just launch fast.

------
muzani
2.

Crashed three times a day per user. Images were cropped off blogs (with
permission), inconsistent branding. It was in the food vertical but the logo
was poop brown. But it got 1200 users on the first day, organically.

3 months and about 10k users before we fixed most of the crashes. It was about
5 months before a professional logo and color scheme (though the free logo my
friend built for us was much appreciated).

~~~
superdeeda
Wow! Care to share what site this was?

~~~
muzani
It was a Malaysian low carb recipe app. Malaysian food is high carb in general
and there were several blogs on it, but few united the info in one place. We
made money off selling low carb ingredients, e.g. konjac noodles, stevia.

I sold the whole company though, together with the app, IP, content, etc. They
decided not to maintain it, so it's shut down now.

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garysahota93
I'd say about a 5. We cared about getting it out there and getting as much
feedback as possible from customers. We decided we didn't want to focus on
perfecting the UI/UX or even features if it wasn't going to be valuable to our
customers. So we'd rather get something janky out there and iterate than spend
extra few weeks/months in a bubble.

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codegeek
MVP was like a 2 when it started making real money but even 5 years into it, I
would say we are at like a 7 in my opinion. Not sure if we ever will hit a 10
or even a 9 in terms of shine and polish:)

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mapster
2-3, but I really think the voiceover was worth it!
[https://commutestudy.com](https://commutestudy.com)

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jason2323
It was about a 4.5 for me. We had a product that was very barebones but it did
what it promised

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mavster
easily a 4 - Co-Founder felt embarrassed trying to show it to clients but it
worked and people could give us money. knocked it out in like 2 months. - now
we're 2 years in, still here.

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bjourne
3.5

