How we launched our MVP in 3 weeks

&gt; I’ve seen and worked on some projects where the founders take 2 - 3 months to launch the first version of their product. That’s too much time and effort sunk into a project that may not work.<p>Is this meme the single greatest reason why the developed world has so few successful moonshots? Imagine if Elon Musk took this approach with Tesla&#x2F;SpaceX&#x2F;Boring&#x2F;Neuralink, or Steve Jobs took it with the iPhone.<p>The best class of startups is where the key risk is not &quot;is there a market?&quot; but &quot;can this be technologically pulled off right now?&quot; For example, if in 2002 you had asked a random smart person &quot;suppose I build a reusable rocket at 1&#x2F;100th the cost of a normal rocket; do you think there&#x27;s a market for this?&quot; The answer would be &quot;of course, but could you <i>really</i> build that??&quot;<p>(With all due respect to the founder of MeetButter; some companies naturally fit the quick MVP approach, but they tend to not be technological moonshots).

I&#x27;ll just come right out and say it without any passive aggressive bull, but your product name is terrible. The first thing I that popped into my mind was &quot;Meat Butter&quot;, then Lard and then Last Tango in Paris.<p>Revenue generating products live and die by their name&#x2F;branding, this one for me would be dead in the water for professional use.

I&#x27;d be curious to know how many &quot;slapped it together in 3 weeks&quot; products end up thriving. My experience has been that any time I&#x27;ve thought of something that could be done that readily, I&#x27;ve eventually found someone else that already tried it (usually unsuccessfully). The successes I&#x27;ve had have come from long, hard slogs. May MeetButter meet better fortune.

This is ironically good advice because its bad advice.<p>These kind of general statements about how an mvp should take x weeks are pointless because each project is different. Which is an obvious statement. So is the suggestion that you should launch as fast as possible.<p>Launching quickly, failing, is a really good way of understanding time management on a macro scale for an entire software project&#x2F;startup.<p>And its not just about pacing or knowing how long a feature should take to develop, but many many things like which feature to develop at which point because it might be much more difficult later on.

Two pieces of feedback: please don&#x27;t make the background of your homepage a bright yellow, it&#x27;s hard to look at for more than 5 seconds so I had to close the tab before I got through all of it. Second, the name is a bit weird, I can&#x27;t imagine saying to my friends (let alone my co-workers) &quot;I sent you a MeetButter link, join that&quot;. Slack, Hangouts, Skype, etc all sound mundane but they&#x27;re not off-putting.

Random comment on the app: Using a 4-character room code is a really really bad idea.<p>&quot;Zoom-bombing&quot; became a thing because 9 digit room codes without an additional passcode was fine, before millions of new people started using it and suddenly the probability of guessing a valid room code shot up.<p>Nowhere near enough entropy with a 4 alphanumeric character room code to prevent this kind of attack if the app takes off.

I also highly disagree with the assertion that 2-3 months is too long for an MVP. It entirely depends on what you’re doing, but even in terms of opportunity cost 2-3 months is not much at all. In fact if you only focus on very easy&#x2F;simple MVPs I’d argue you’re both limiting yourself in terms of what you’re comfortable with making (what you already know how to implement) and ensuring you have little to no moat.

I love this article. Out of curiosity, how did you build this blog? Looking for a better way to do my own personal blog.<p>Thanks!

Low effort&#x2F;low risk ideas are the lowest hanging fruit and we&#x27;re way past that phase in mobile apps, SaaS, indie games, etc.<p>I&#x27;m not saying it&#x27;s impossible to launch a successful product by investing a couple of weeks, but it sounds as probable as winning the lottery.

&gt; <i>MeetButter is an app that helps you with coordinating meetings</i><p>Oh. So...not an app for buying butter or a dating site for people with unattractive faces?

Is there data for hours spent per MVP? It seems the authors were working full time on this. The amount of time to create an MVP must vary.

Surprisingly the author writes about the prototype of the app and the wireframes but does not mention the tech behind the actual video conferencing solution. Are they using an existing open source solution and packaging it into a website.

Not solving your own problem first but someone else&#x27;s seems to be the major source of complexity.

MeetButter looks interesting!<p>Are those chat bubbles based on any open-source CSS &#x2F; inspired by others?

Sounds a lot like the &quot;Design Thinking&quot; process.