Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What are some great examples of a Minimum Viable Product?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 66 posts

Re: Ask HN: What are some great examples of a Minimum Viable Product?

#31

Post by MattBearman »

dools wrote: post #28
MattBearman wrote: post #12

As we seem to be allowing a personal bias, I'll submit my MVP - http://bugmuncher.com I've built the minimum in order to get it live in 2 weeks. I've got a HUGE list of features to add in future, including customisation, multiple highlights, automate the subscription process, API, etc.

Have you checked out the interview with Jerome Breche on Mixergy? Your product sounds a lot like what he started off building (Snap-a-Bug) and then he pivoted to start snapengage.com It's a great story, you should check out the interview.

Sounds cool, I'll check that out

Re: Ask HN: What are some great examples of a Minimum Viable Product?

#34

Post by hundredwatt »

dools wrote: post #25
hundredwatt wrote: post #22

A friend of mine sent this to me a few years ago: """My favorite video on bootstrapping/minimum viable product: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zv17lF60OHY It's well worth watching the whole thing."""

"U-2 Reconnaissance Aircraft at Osan" Some sort of airforce RickRoll?

I said the same thing when I first had the link forwarded to me, but watch the video. The U2 spy plane serves a very important role for the airforce, but can't land or take off on its own.

This is a great example of designing something with an extreme focus on achieving its purpose while ensuring any necessary, but non-core functions are only minimally included.

Re: Ask HN: What are some great examples of a Minimum Viable Product?

#35

Post by MattBearman »

Ade_Lack wrote: post #16
MattBearman wrote: post #12

As we seem to be allowing a personal bias, I'll submit my MVP - http://bugmuncher.com I've built the minimum in order to get it live in 2 weeks. I've got a HUGE list of features to add in future, including customisation, multiple highlights, automate the subscription process, API, etc.

Hey no problem with sharing your own as far as I'm concerened. Looks like a great MVP and I'll be interested to see how your own feedback leads the direction of any future features you have planned. What tools, frameworks, languages did you use?

The front end tool is built in JavaScript with jQuery (but it's safe to use with other JS frameworks). The website and processing side was built in PHP/CodeIgniter, running on a linode VPS.

Re: Ask HN: What are some great examples of a Minimum Viable Product?

#36

Post by DanielBMarkham »

dools wrote: post #24
Ade_Lack wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice work. What language, platform, framework did you use?

For cueyoutube - there's no backend! It's just a static page with some JavaScript on it (mostly jQuery but totally hacked together because I can't stand JavaScript :) I actually copied and pasted most of it from other sources (which I've listed on the page). The playlists are "saved" by sharing them - each playlist exists only as a URL containing a comma separated list of video IDs. I've been sharing on Twitter using…

I love this design strategy -- used the same one for http://hn-books.com

Why code a back-end if you don't need one? You can get away with a lot more than you think you can just with a static page and the browser. With hn-books the book list exists as a static JSON file. I can put my entire site on any kind of web server -- even run it easily offline.

Re: Ask HN: What are some great examples of a Minimum Viable Product?

#37

Post by illdave »

MattBearman wrote: post #30
leftnode wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please hire a professional designer to redesign your website as soon as possible and ditch this ThemeForest theme. I see it everywhere now and it looks forced. For the record, I used the exact same theme when I launched my product, but quickly ditched it.

I've got an awesome designer lined up to do a complete redesign/re-brand when I have the time/money to see it through. Having said that, I've had a lot of compliments on the theme, and for $20, I've got no complaints :)

I actually think that design looks really good - don't forget, people that read HackerNews may be more inclined to see these sorts of themes around (as they're usually used by people just launching a product to see if there's any interest). Most users might not see the same theme that often, if at all.

Re: Ask HN: What are some great examples of a Minimum Viable Product?

#38

Post by csexton »

I think my lil mac screen capture app is actually a pretty good example, originally in v1 it only uploaded to imgur and had no UI except for the menu. V2 I added advanced features like a preferences window and history.

http://captured.codeography.com

While building this I did try hard to focus on what I could do to ship right away, and nothing more. Even for v2 I had to concentrate on limiting the features, which was quite the challenge. At this point, I cant even remember half the things that I needed to implement.

Re: Ask HN: What are some great examples of a Minimum Viable Product?

#39

Post by MattBearman »

illdave wrote: post #37
MattBearman wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've got an awesome designer lined up to do a complete redesign/re-brand when I have the time/money to see it through. Having said that, I've had a lot of compliments on the theme, and for $20, I've got no complaints :)

I actually think that design looks really good - don't forget, people that read HackerNews may be more inclined to see these sorts of themes around (as they're usually used by people just launching a product to see if there's any interest). Most users might not see the same theme that often, if at all.

That's kind of what I was relying on :)
Post reply on HN