I thought they were advocating for creating and testing marketing material before the product itself.<p>But then I read they noticed traction because people started submitting pull requests and trying out the code. At that point, they already had some product.<p>So what are they advocating for? Is it just a different way to look at an MVP? Where you focus on creating something that can test traction instead of creating something that can deliver value?
This disappointingly reminds me of that post a while ago from the guy who finally got into YC after 8 tries or something, not because he found a great problem to solve with a great solution but because he <i>really wanted to get into YC</i> and found a formula that would at least open that door (small business CRM).<p>If you want to find traction without a product, I strongly recommend reading "The Mom Test" and following the advice in there - it's going to get you much farther than what this team did. If you don't want to do that, at least follow the often-repeated advice of YC itself for startups:<p>- Scratch your own itch<p>- Be in love with the problem<p>- Talk to potential customers to find what they <i>need</i>, not what they want<p><i>Then</i> you can iterate on an MVP like this team did, but hopefully with less wandering and head scratching in the beginning. If your starting goal is "I want to start a startup" and you then go looking for a product to shoehorn into a market, I think you're doing it wrong and you should probably stick with working a day job.
It's like API indexing, I like it. I started M3O (<a href="https://m3o.com" rel="nofollow">https://m3o.com</a>) with this idea of API aggregation for absolutely everything but not specifically indexing, more so providing a uniform access layer to all things with one API token. The programmability of Nango will definitely a be a selling point. For the founders, focus on that, double down on that. The ability to program the APIs and the data retrieved is really key.
Huh. It feels like their overall goal was "to start a start-up".<p>I'll admit, I'm used to stories of "I saw problem X, so I founded Y".<p>But I like their approach of iterating on problems to offer a solution for.<p>Especially, as the author of WinRAR is no doubt very aware of, people do prefer their problems solved for free, so if you're getting paid, you've found that gap, nice :)
Note, that their description of traction is:<p>"...Strangers would star our GitHub repo. One Saturday, whilst I was hiking, my phone started vibrating: Pull requests and issue comments from people trying Nango started flowing in.."<p>The writing and appearance apart from that would suggest they want to build a startup not just an open source project so i would be hesitant to write a headline like that without even a pricing page.