The "Safe" Way to Build a Product
With Minimal Viable Stack, Natalie and I are building only what's necessary to validate the next important thing. This saves us time and money, and reduces risk.
Welcome to That Dude Denis, a newsletter about a dude who left the Bay Area and moved to Paris. I openly share the highs and lows of my indiehacker journey with you, in the hopes that you find something valuable in my experiences.
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The mission of Minimal Viable Stack is to help build 10 million more MVPs by 2025. That’s all, just a cool 10 million.
But what’s a MVP?
A minimum viable product, or MVP, is a product with enough features to attract early-adopter customers and validate a product idea early in the product development cycle. In industries such as software, the MVP can help the product team receive user feedback as quickly as possible to iterate and improve the product.
My cofounder Natalie and I started only a few weeks ago so we’re not close yet, but we’ve already validated a number of key assumptions. More importantly, we’ve established a product development approach that’s centered around validation.
Validate first, then build
Why is that important? Because it prevents us from building stuff that our audience doesn’t care about. It prevents us from wasting time and money on things that don’t bring value to our users.
Let’s face it. When we’re passionate about something, it’s only natural to get a bit ahead of ourselves, to start our engines and take off prematurely. That energy, that passion, that motivation, is super important. But it’s also good to check frequently that we’re still headed in the right direction.
We don’t want to forget to check the GPS, and then realize an hour later that we took a wrong turn. That’s the worst.
So here’s how we’ve been trying to stay on the right track.
We identify what we want to validate.
We ask ourselves: what’s the the easiest and simplest way to validate that?
And finally, my favorite part - we get our hands dirty and build the minimum required thing to get the results we want. I say minimum required thing, because it’s not necessarily a product. In fact, we’ve used tweets and a simple landing page to validate the interest in our product from the maker community.
Validation by Tweet
Take a look at this tweet. What’s amazing about this tweet is that it has such a low investment of time and effort, yet it perfectly validates the demand and need for our product.
This tweet ended up getting 85 comments! If it hadn’t gotten at least 20, you’d be reading about something else right now. We would have re-evaluated our idea, and probably would have gone back to the drawing board.
The engagement and positive reaction to this tweet gave us confidence that we were on the right path. Time to take the next small step.
Email please?
The tweet hype gave us a great first read, but let’s be honest, a like or a comment is super low commitment. We wanted to step that commitment up a notch. We wanted to build on this momentum and see if people cared enough about the concept to give us their email. Still not asking for a lot, but definitely a step up.
Using nocode tools, of course, Natalie quickly created a nice logo for us in Canva and whipped up a simple landing page in Mailerlite. In literally a day or two, we had a live page that we could then share not only to everyone on Twitter, but directly to everyone who had commented on our tweet thread!!
These people had already shown their interest by engaging with the concept, and so they were the perfect audience to share this sign-up page with. Very clever.
The result? A whopping 48 sign-ups in the first hour and 100 sign-ups in less than 12 hours! (in total I think we got more than 150+ makers who signed up).
OK, so we got a shit ton of emails, from makers who should be pretty interested in joining MVS. What’s next?
Who wants to create their profile!
Through our sign-up page, we only collected people’s emails. That’s it. We still wanted to keep the commitment level relatively low, and to lower the barriers to conversion.
Our next step was to see how many of these people would really be willing to spend the time to create their maker profiles and add their projects.
With these emails in our pocket, we could directly share with people information and updates about Minimal Viable Stack. More importantly, we could guide them through our application process, which would require a higher level of commitment.
We created a new landing page, this time with another nocode tool called Softr. Softr plays really nicely with our Airtable database, and allowed us to create two amazing looking forms that add rows directly to our Airtable when submitted:
A form for makers to add their profile information
A form for makers to add a project to their profile
With these forms, we’ve already had almost 70 experts fill out their profile information, and they’ve added almost 50 projects! Pretty cool.
What’s next
OK, so I think you get the idea now.
We’re taking things step by step and making sure to not build too far ahead, but just enough to validate the next most important thing and to keep the momentum going.
We’ve now chosen a few of those experts to work closely with as we build out the profile and project pages. These experts will be able to start sharing their profiles publicly and actually use them to book paid consulting sessions with clients.
We’re currently in the process of adding a project search page as well. Everything in this post has been about the supply side of the marketplace equation, but we need to start validating the demand side as well. This page will allow us to start doing so, as we share it with entrepreneurs and businesses to get their feedback.
That’s it for today. Back to whatever you were doing.
Just a couple quick things to finish this off.
If you think my writing has improved, it’s thanks to my new friends in the Public Lab community. I’m one of the first 20 members of my friend Kevon’s new community around building in public, and I’ve received some great tips on how to improve my writing to make things more readable. Hoping this is a step in the right direction. 🤞
If you’re a nocode maker and you want to learn more about our vision and our future plans for Minimal Viable Stack, check out our first Minimal Viable Stack blog post! You can spare another 5 minutes, right? 😜
And of course, thanks for reading! 🙏 If you enjoyed this, subscribe below if you haven’t already, take a peek at my other posts, and check me out on Twitter.
Talk soon,
That Dude Denis
Thank you for the mention Denis! Your landing page is looking great.
- Lay
Online Reputation Manager, MailerLite