Ask HN: Review my first MVP

[fhub]

Site: finishstart.com

Premise: Write funny stories with random strangers... one sentence at a time.

My Design Goals:

1. Be a true MVP - test the idea without wasting any time

2. Go from idea conception to deployment in 1 day (I nearly achieved that)

3. Try to develop something with some viral marketing potential

4. All content to be user generated

5. Moderation sessions should be fun

6. Try out heroku.com to see if it would be a good fit for another product

7. Do something silly and fun (I come from the enterprise software world)

You can follow my thinking through the process at http://twitter.com/finishstart

All feedback more than welcome. Especially in the areas of:

1. Conversion - I consider a conversion to be someone who adds some well thought out content and who submits their email address to get a copy of the story sent to them on completion

2. Viral Marketing approaches

Cheers

[zaidf]

Dude I had the very idea =) Except mine was one word at a time. It came from an exercise we did in improv101.

I think you can make the UI a lot tighter. Imagine just a WHITE screen with THE story...constantly refreshing. Along with an inputbox at the top to add your contribute to it. Perhaps integrate with twitter.

[fhub → zaidf]

The UI does need some work but I probably won't invest too much effort until I work out if the idea is viable.

One story is a bit hard for lots of people to concurrently work on unfortunately. Part of my strategy is to have short stories so that I can email it to the contributors when it is completed (hopefully within a day or two). Then I'm hoping they will forward the funny story to their friends (with a link of course).

[priv_acy]

A few thoughts:

1. You need a reason to keep people coming back - some sort of hook to keep people interested. Off the top of my head:

-private stories (restricted to a group)

-solo stories (one sentence a day for one user)

-stories limited to people with a certain birthday

-graduation class stories

-drama/english classes

-let people upvote/downvote/move sentences

-publish a blog of anything that turns out good

-allow combination of random sentences from different stories into new stories

2. The "Anything Goes" section could easily turn into porn/adult content. That can make advertising revenue difficult and make it unusable by schools, etc.

3. If you get a lot of traffic, this blows up and becomes hard to manage. A story could grow very rapidly if you're not careful. Although on the edge of "premature optimization" I would keep an eye ont his as you work.

Fun site. It will be interesting to see if you can take it from "interesting curiosity" to "something I check when I'm bored".

[fhub → priv_acy]

Great feedback! Thanks.

[resdirector]

Good work, esp idea-to-deployment in about a day. I found this to be pretty addictive. i.e. I started filling out stories rather than hammering HN, Google News when I've got time to kill.

Suggestion: email users once per week/fortnight with a partial story + embedded form so they can play via email, especially if they haven't played for a while. Increase/decrease frequency of email sending depending on how they respond to playing via email.

[fhub → resdirector]

Thanks for your feedback. I'll have a ponder about your email idea. Ta.

I think I'm up against a lot of tough competition in the time killing market on the web :)

[revorad]

I had the exact same idea a long time ago. I just kept toying with it in my mind. It's so awesome to see someone actually make it.

You've made a very good first version. Just get lots of people to use it to write at least one line and then publish and popularise the finished stories on social networks. You will get to see if the stories are actually any good and also might get ideas on improving the app itself.

[fhub → revorad]

Thanks. The idea is fun, but getting people back is tough. Let alone getting them to share the link with their friends. I had fun building it and iterating it over the last few days.

I'm going to give it a couple more days and if I don't see much traction I'll probably let it pass away quietly.

[revorad → fhub]

I wonder if this is better suited as a Facebook or twitter "game", at least for a start. For example, some friends dragged me into playing the name game on facebook and although I hardly check Facebook, that thing made me go back quite a lot. Once you get a good base of users you could get them to an independent site which is more usable and focussed.

[nailer]

What does mvp mean in this context?

[shrikant → nailer]

I had the same question, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_viable_product was quite helpful in this regard :)

[fhub → nailer]

Minimum Viable Product

[fhub]

Clickable: http://finishstart.com