Ryan Hoover, founder of Product Hunt, writes about startups, building communities, email-first products and founder habits.
HN commenters link it for advice on community building, early Product Hunt growth through Twitter, and email-first startups.
That really depends on what kind of MVP it is and what you're bringing to the table. Some startup ideas can be hacked together quite simply by reusing a few existing services, tools and a bit of programming. Others may require some prototyping and fund raising (e.g. hard tech). Whatever it may be, the MVP is a hack and experiment to prove product-market fit. It's the tiniest, minimal effort you can expend to build a test to prove that there are real people who desperately need something you could provide them.
An MVP is more marketing and sales than it is developing. Building your MVP should consume a fraction of your time and resources compared to the effort you'll spend trying to get people to see your hack and validate it. It's more market research than product development. You just want enough proof there's a business opportunity to continue spending time, money and energy on it.
For software startups, there's a few patterns you can employ to build an MVP. One of them is the Wizard of Oz test, where you provide a facade of a real product but do all the hard work behind the scenes manually (until you can automate the rest of it). Another is piggybacking on other existing services and solutions, modifying them to your specific business domain (e.g. form builders, communication services, integration services, open source, BaaS, etc). Then there's the launch page strategy, that attempts to lure sign ups or "beta subscriptions" to show demand without building anything more…
> Ryan may be "in the circle" now, but it's not like he had a rich VC uncle. It's not nepotism; he had no connections when he started out. Product Hunt didn't succeed because he's "in the circle", he's "in the circle" because Product Hunt succeeded.
No discredit to Ryan, but this isn't necessarily true. Prior to Product Hunt he hustled his way into the circle by interviewing individuals connected in the VC community:
http://ryanhoover.me/post/69599262875/product-hunt-began-as-an-email-list
Ash Bhoopathy, entrepreneur-in-action at Sequoia Capital.
partner at Union Square Ventures, Andrew Weissman:
Talton Figgins, product support lead, Disqus:
get a free copy of the upcoming book, Hooked, by habit-design researcher and blogger, Nir Eyal, in collaboration with myself
Sequioa, USV, Disqus, Nir Eyal...most people on HN can't even get any of these people to open an email from them, much less get a response about an app idea.
Some good reading on this topic:
http://moz.com/blog/sense-of-community
http://ryanhoover.me/post/77704756875/the-building-blocks-of-community
https://www.quora.com/How-did-Instagram-build-up-its-community-in-its-early-days
http://www.inboundpro.net/16-influential-bloggers-reveal-build-loyal-community
I was talking about early stage entrepreneurs. Working on multiple ideas once you are successful or have enough experience sounds logical but initially that might be a hurdle.
Check this article for examples. Really good one http://ryanhoover.me/post/98567029388/startup-side-projects
Good thoughts, Ivan. I wrote this relevant article, Pain = Validation, a while ago: http://ryanhoover.me/post/54951607013/pain-validation
Also, today's Startup Edition is on the very topic of how to validate a startup idea - http://t.co/E2D4IdODhe
Is this resuming http://ryanhoover.me/post/43986871442/email-first-startups ?
It's getting noisy in here.
Edit: Here's the discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5279590