How did you build your MVP?
Wonder how long did it take to ship your first product and how did you end up building it. Did you hire someone to build, or just stack it up with available tools?
Also, did you consider nocode it or custom development?
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Hey! it took about 6-months before I felt it had enough substance to start inviting users and asking for feedback (I would call this a soft launch). This was a solo project and I did not hire anyone. Here is the project for reference: https://firetrack3-prod.web.app/home
Looking good. Thanks for sharing. 6 mo of dev is a bit long but makes sense for the solo.
I sketch out my ideas, which are often single functionalities within a few days.
That initial sketch shows me if i’m on to something. Recently an idea stuck, I felt the potential and i’m planning on building the Saas layer the following months.
This would probably take me 3 -6 months as a side project.
I reuse many code from previous projects. Think of user models, billing and other basic Saas functionalities.
So I was already working with restaurants as a freelancer. I got to know their pains and there was a specific thing they were needing. So I build a quick app with Appsheet and iterate on the right solution for them. I even sold it as a "Saas" and they were willing to pay. That's when I decided to fully build the actual product.
My favorite answer 'it depends'
I've had one saas platform be acquired and i've built many others.
To build a saas platform with web and mobile apps - I'd laugh at anyone that says 'less than 6 months'.
I just did it again for a new product in exactly 6 months, but barely... and i'm not ready to call it MVP yet or even let too many people see it until we get a few more things ironed out.
You need research.
You need wireframes.
You need a great designer.
You need infrastructure.
You need user feedback. ETc.
Back to the 'it depends'
If you want extremely basic app that doesnt do anything - sure 2-4 weeks :p
Make sense. In my experience, a decent MVP takes no less than 3 mo, production-grade - 6-9 mo, and that's for only one platform.
But that's if outsourced to a professional dev team. I see that folks here mostly stack the products by themselves.
I identify problems I have, and just start building experiments. Once it gets useful, I clean it up and release it.
just launched our first product https://criov.com/ we group of 4 devloppers took us 1 month to deliver the product dont lose too much time on MVP cause its an MVP .
Try to automate as much as possible. Make sure you can do fast deploys. Have a continuous integration system for fast feedback. And use microservices it makes it a lot easier to maintain complex systems.
Obviously the tools and how much time it takes will depend based on the product. I've been able to create decent applications in 2 weeks, 1 month or more ( which I would consider MVP viable ). I've used backend/db services online, free website templates, online authentication services to cut that time even more.
My biggest learning so far has been to not invest too much into it at the beginning ( I've done it ), just make it work as fast as possible. Until you have somebody pay attention to it, or pay you money for it, it's just time wasted if it doesn't launch off the ground.
You should value your time, work smart ;)
I have not made money yet from personal projects, so maybe take my advice with a grain of salt, somebody more experienced could probably shine some more light.
Non-technical hacker/co-founder here and learned a lot about what not to do...
We spent 5 months building our current MVP which is embarrassing in hindsight. We started with no-code and quickly ran into some limitations on what no-code can do for more niche applications.
We tried Bubble, Typeform, Airtable, etc. and eventually used an outsourced developer who built our initial vision in five weeks. It worked great at the start but making iterations unfortunately got super expensive. One issue was that it was built with fully custom code, which meant seemingly minor modifications were onerous.
We rebuilt it in-house using off-the-shelf form builders + some coding to handling processing and it's worked great as an MVP since.
Lesson learned is to do it scrappy from the start - use existing tools and only code when you're out of other alternatives.
Would echo other comments here to prioritize: getting clear on the audience with the problem, understand contexts in which the problem occurs, and then ship something fast and scrappy that starts to address it.
Our solution is nowhere near complete but we've learned far more from shipping something, asking people to try it, and getting feedback than we have from attempting to engineer the entire thing ourselves.
Thanks for sharing. As far as I know, outsourcing MVP to a professional software team takes around 3 months. Versus your 5 weeks - I guess, was a trade-off of quality over speed, which is fine sometimes but, in this case, ended up costing a lot of cash iterating the product. Would you hire a team to build an MVP in 3 mo if you knew it before?
I won't say it was a poor decision for us as it helped me ultimately find my co-founder and gave us all something to put in front of other people for feedback, which was exactly the goal.
That said, I probably would have started by 1) using a more sophisticated form builder (I didn't know enough about the alternatives out there) 2) handling the back-end in excel or using some other spreadsheet software, and 3) promising a response in 24 hours instead of immediately. I also would have put more emphasis into figuring out our go-to-market messaging and collateral first.
It would have been faster and cheaper. I'm only sharing my experiences - this is obviously all context-dependent and a tech-heavy product would have completely different needs.
I have built 3 products, first one took a year, second one took 6 months and last one took 1 day! What I suggest you, try nocode products like; typeform, unbounce, bubble or also airtable. Just build your MVP as simple as building lego.
-Audience with a problem
-Reach the community
-Clear value proposition
-Execution
My first product? Probably 6-8 months of coding and learning LAMP development. But it can be done much faster and better now thanks for no code. I built VCvsME.com my most recent product with no-code using Bubble. It took maybe a week or two of actual work, on and off - but it still took a long time due to long periods when I was doing other things.
With Astro js and Tailwind css
Is Tailwind getting a lot of popularity these days?
You can contact any organization directly who's having highly talented developers.
As a dev, I build it myself. My current MVP stack is Laravel as I don't have to think of tech at all, just focus on business. Slowly transitioning to Next.js for new projects though.
As a dev I always build it myself.
Usually takes few months as I get carried away with adding features.
Currently working on an app and want to finish and launch it in few weeks rather than developing it for months.
When building the MVP for https://www.vitaely.me:
Starting build to product hunt launch in around a month and a half
Hi,
we were working on ERA - The Markdown Note-Taking Tool For Developers for like 5-6 months before we released the first MVP.
We developed everything on our own - and still doing it the same way.
After the release we may look into hiring some additional developers.
MVP is a moving target. For the first version of my upcoming product (haven't decided on the name yet), I asked a few freelancers so that I could show something. The second version took a few hours over two days. I really hope I'll be able to get a customer with it. If this is not enough then my idea is just wrong and I should move forward. Can't afford to waste a few months on an MVP for a non-working idea.
I built my MVP within one month. I did not expect it to generate any revenue (and it didn't, except for my first earned $1 from the test run), but I've learned a bunch, which was the purpose of building the MVP in the first place.
Now I'm working on my second pilot project applying all the lessons learned in "phase 1". The complexity has increased, but the time spent on each step has dropped to a fraction of what is was in phase 1. And now I do expect to generate some revenue (still minimal).
I would suggest to try to come up with V-MVP= very minimal viable product to learn by doing, and to see outcomes within several weeks. And after that to embark on a real MVP.
However, it depends on the nature of your product, so this advice is to be taken with a grain of salt...
Good luck!