[HN Gopher] How I helped build a profitable MVP over a weekend
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How I helped build a profitable MVP over a weekend
Author : jeremylevy
Score : 272 points
Date : 2021-11-15 18:12 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (mzrn.sh)
(TXT) w3m dump (mzrn.sh)
| spzb wrote:
| "At the end of the day the couriers would bring in the cash,
| minus their cut. At the end of the month, my friend would wire
| the money to the restaurants, minus his cut."
|
| Clearly these guys had a huge amount of trust amongst each other.
| mzrnsh wrote:
| Yes, but it shouldn't be surprising. This trust is not based on
| belief in human decency, it's based on belief that people want
| to make money. You can never go wrong with that.
|
| That's one of the hidden advantages of B2B, and recurring
| business models in general.
| e12e wrote:
| Fundamental. Make it easy (or at least possible) for honest
| people to be honest. Worrying about theft from your partners...
| Well, at least you should think about why your business
| interests aren't aligned...
| traeregan wrote:
| Fun read. You're a good friend.
|
| I assume there was some additional context about the order in the
| form that the restaurant filled out, to assist in the end-of-
| month bookkeeping?
|
| And unless you built reporting into the MVP, I bet your friend
| got to learn how to use some kind of database GUI (e.g.
| phpMyAdmin) and/or basic queries?
|
| >The app would assign the order to a free courier, triggering an
| email. Their Gmail was our mobile app!
|
| >The courier would then pick it up, deliver, take cash on
| delivery, and mark themselves as "free" again.
|
| This tripped me up for a second. In this context, "free"
| indicates that the courier was available to pick up an order and
| make the delivery.
| toyg wrote:
| _> I assume there was some additional context about the order
| in the form that the restaurant filled out, to assist in the
| end-of-month bookkeeping?_
|
| You assume that bookkeeping in restaurants is diligent. Which,
| er...
|
| I reckon they were more than happy to just take the cash and
| apply some creative skills later on.
| mzrnsh wrote:
| > I assume there was some additional context about the order in
| the form that the restaurant filled out, to assist in the end-
| of-month bookkeeping?
|
| Sure, there were a couple extra fields.
|
| > And unless you built reporting into the MVP, I bet your
| friend got to learn how to use some kind of database GUI (e.g.
| phpMyAdmin) and/or basic queries?
|
| I don't really remember, but I bet we'd include an option to
| export to Excel. This project was built on Rails, and there are
| readily available gems to export data. Also, I believe we had a
| dashboard powered by https://github.com/ankane/chartkick.
| Setting it up may have taken 50% of time. Was it necessary? No.
| Did I mention this in my post, saying we could have done it in
| a day? Also no :D
|
| > This tripped me up for a second. In this context, "free"
| indicates that the courier was available..
|
| Thanks for catching this, changed it to "available" for clarity
| wenbin wrote:
| Awesome story!
| davyAdewoyin wrote:
| Very nice, being limited or constrained with resources is not
| necessary a bad thing rather it empowers the mind to work with
| what's available and see options that won't be seen before.
| bob1029 wrote:
| I have adopted an extremely strong affinity for constraints
| after seeing what they can provide in return for being
| handcuffed in particular ways.
|
| One of the biggest examples of a constraint that I feel has
| benefited my organization & product is a requirement that
| everything must start out using SQLite. To this day, ~6 years
| after this one directive, we have not yet found any actual need
| to move off this approach. The amount of time we were able to
| spend focusing elsewhere has actually made us viable as a
| business.
|
| There was a period where our organization was essentially
| unconstrained on tech (think microservices, tons of repos,
| mapping/API hell, etc). These were very fun times for the
| novice engineer. For everyone else it was a living nightmare to
| watch the weeks slip by without an ounce of additional business
| value being added to the product.
| macintux wrote:
| > One of the biggest examples of a constraint that I feel has
| benefited my organization & product is a requirement that
| everything must start out using SQLite.
|
| I really, really like this idea. After experimenting with
| SQLite recently I was quite impressed, and I can easily see
| how using it to abstract away the database layer for another
| day makes a world of sense.
|
| Also at the language layer, constraints are a big win to me.
| I used to love Perl, don't get me wrong, but Erlang with its
| opinionated architecture (async, immutability, assertions
| everywhere) seems like a much saner way to develop a serious
| program.
| LewisVerstappen wrote:
| Parkinson's Law is real
| revskill wrote:
| With help of some admin form builder/boilerplate, yes, this is
| absolutely possible with high quality.
|
| Thanks for the story from real experience.
| elwell wrote:
| If anyone needs a similar app/system you can try your luck with
| this defunct startup's code I open sourced a few years ago:
| https://github.com/Purple-Services (on-demand gas delivery app)
| cryptos wrote:
| I like the KISS principle applied here. I'm guilty of over-
| engineering. Once I worked on a project where we processed a lot
| of very large XML files ... and we set up a distributed
| application with Akka! We spent a couple of days to figure out
| the most clever way to listen for file system changes at the OS
| level. It was just crazy to read and process a bunch of XML
| files. A story like the one told here is a good reminder that in
| many cases a simple solution is enough (at least for a start).
| akhilpotla wrote:
| This reminds me of a podcast Ben Orenstein was on where he talks
| about something similar. Made a big difference in how I
| build/think about side projects.
|
| https://fullstackradio.com/101
| romero-jk wrote:
| _So we "scaled down" all the way to B2B. Turns out, more than a
| few restaurants in town would gladly handle the sales and
| marketing themselves and keep 100% of the order value minus fixed
| delivery fees._
|
| What value does this MVP offered, bookkeeping orders? Couldn't
| the restaurants just contact the courier directly too? Looks like
| the restaurants were already doing it.
|
| I'm assuming the burden of filling up the web form would be the
| same as contacting the courier. In many places couriers will use
| their own cash to pay for the order, so the restaurant gets the
| payment immediately.
| paxys wrote:
| The problem is the same as what all of the delivery apps solve.
| There are many restaurants, many customers and many delivery
| drivers. Someone needs to match all of them together.
| romero-jk wrote:
| I'm sure you sound very smart saying that but in this case,
| there were no restaurant listings nor customer portals.
| necovek wrote:
| Restaurants with no delivery service were taking orders via
| Facebook, email, phone... and then forwarding those to this
| app for delivery.
|
| Basically, this was food delivery as a service for
| restaurants.
| skeeks wrote:
| > The app would assign the order to a free courier, triggering
| an email. Their Gmail was our mobile app!
|
| I guess, the MVP tracked which couriers are free and also would
| automatically assign a courier to a new order, depending on who
| was free.
|
| If you have to send out an e-mail, you have to pick a
| recipient, therefore you have to know by yourself / look up
| manually which ones are free...
| romero-jk wrote:
| If finding couriers is the bottleneck for the restaurants
| then sure. I can see that as the sales pitch.
| jmkjaer wrote:
| The author of this article, mzrnsh, responds to comments here,
| but they are "dead" and can't be viewed without being logged in
| and activating "showdead" in profile settings, which is
| unfortunate. I don't have enough karma to vouch for them to be
| unflagged.
| dang wrote:
| It's best when someone lets us know at hn@ycombinator.com so we
| can take care of it. I only saw this randomly.
|
| That account was caught in a software filter; those are tuned
| more strictly for new accounts. I've marked it legit so this
| won't happen again. In the meantime, users vouched for all the
| comments--that's good. (More info on vouching:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#cvouch.)
| detaro wrote:
| vouched.
| mzrnsh wrote:
| Thank you both
| lormayna wrote:
| This is a perfect use case for no-code platform like Airtable or
| MS PowerApps.
| CogitoCogito wrote:
| > This is a perfect use case for no-code platform like Airtable
| or MS PowerApps.
|
| After reading the original blog post, it seems like their
| solution was pretty close to no code already. It very well
| could have taken longer to learn how to use airtable or
| powerapps than it did to hack this together.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| I like the article. I am the kind of person who thinks things
| hundreds times before acting, so it would probably taken me weeks
| just to settle for an architecture which would probably been
| overkill for an MVP.
|
| Lesson to learn: not everything should be planned as a complex
| enterprise app.
| robbyking wrote:
| As a songwriter I really suffer from analysis paralysis, and
| what _kinda_ helped me was to write a song a day for a month. I
| 'm still not a prolific song writer by any means, but it helped
| me learn that perfect is the enemy of good enough, and that
| iteration is a lot easier than trying to perfect something the
| first time.
| tekstar wrote:
| Yes!! With music I used to debate whether I should do A or B,
| and spend a long time debating whether I wanted an album of
| genre A or genre B.. and then not write anything. Now I write
| both, one (or both!) will sound how I wanted, and then move
| on
| swalsh wrote:
| They key here, he started with the customer relationship, and
| built software to support it.
|
| Most engineers try to start with software, and build a customer
| relationship from what they've built. Most of the time they
| find they built the wrong thing.
| mzrnsh wrote:
| This, sir, is 100% true. This was never a software company,
| but a food delivery company that happened to run on software.
|
| The customers and the delivery guys willing to jump on right
| away were the true assets and no, you can't build those
| relationships on a single weekend.
| laurent92 wrote:
| I wish we would stop focussing on MVP. This is the easy part.
| Sure it needs to be nailed, but the hardest part is finding
| engineers for the last 5 years if bugfixing at the end of the
| product's lifecycle...
| avgDev wrote:
| Awesome story. I should start working on some of my ideas.
|
| I have paralysis outside of work. At work I get done whatever
| needs doing, but on my own project I get stuck at picking stack
| and debating architecture.......when in reality none of that
| matters if the projects goes nowhere at all.
|
| Thanks to your story I'm going to try scaling my ideas down to
| bare minimum and building from there as needed, however, getting
| an app even if it involves making spaghetti.
| mzrnsh wrote:
| Okay folks! Jumping in to thank everyone for reading my story. I
| really didn't expect it to resonate with so many and I am so
| happy (and slightly terrified) that it did. Wow!
|
| Main reason I wrote it was to keep reminding myself that
| resources, and especially time, are limited. As a developer, it's
| easy to spend all your time on your pet project and think it's
| free and there's no harm. I fall for that all the time. But it's
| never free and yes, there is actual harm. Think of all the other
| projects you never launched. All the moments with loved ones you
| never had.
|
| Using creativity instead of all your time is just like using an
| elegant algorithm* instead of brute-forcing it.
|
| Notes:
|
| * I am a (primarily) front-end developer, don't know a single
| algorithm
|
| ** Thanks @jeremylevy for sharing my story here, I would never
| dare to
| maaaaattttt wrote:
| Your story was great! I also really enjoyed the mobile version
| of your site (haven't had the chance to check desktop yet).
| Font style and size, line height, colors all made for truly
| enjoyable reading experience.
|
| Congrats on both fronts!
| mromanuk wrote:
| Yes, basically the friend had an audience
| cortesoft wrote:
| Your story was interesting, but I think this statement needs
| some qualifiers:
|
| > It's not about making friends with the right people
|
| It clearly WAS about that, because having friends in the
| restaurant industry is what allowed your friend to succeed. If
| he had no restaurant connections, he could have never signed up
| any customers.
| sequoia wrote:
| I like this story but I must say it leaves me with more questions
| than answers. How did he get restaurants to sign on and trust him
| enough to prepare food for 1 month without payout? Assuming
| "based on existing relationships" I have to wonder his former
| employer didn't care about taking his rolodex and directly
| poaching customers? What about couriers? How did they handle "no
| couriers available" or a spike in demand? If someone places a
| delivery order and it turns out there's no one to deliver it in
| the next hour, that's a problem. What about disputes, refunds,
| missing items, "this isn't what I ordered" etc.? The all-cash
| nature of the business makes clear this was not a US based
| business where that would likely have been a non-starter.
|
| Very cool story but it's hard for me to really understand it
| without knowing how the business actually worked and made money.
| I assume it was a very different market from USA and so economics
| are very different (cheaper labor, less regulation etc.). Would
| love to know the name of the business to see the outcome.
| necovek wrote:
| I love this story, but for somewhat different reasons than most.
|
| It highlights that the true business driver is that personal
| interconnectedness: author's friend had good relationships with
| both restaurant managers and drivers. _This_ is what has allowed
| an MVP to be successful, not the kludgy "product".
|
| Sure, this product still needed to be built for people to be
| willing to continue to work together, but businesses of the sort
| have survived for years on spreadsheets and similar
| "implementations".
|
| Some of these constraints do not hold on the internet, but you
| still need to catch the attention of the right folk to get that
| word-of-mouth moving (which is why we see so many "Show HN" posts
| here: there're plenty of people here who can do that for others).
| cacois wrote:
| > It highlights that the true business driver is that personal
| interconnectedness: author's friend had good relationships with
| both restaurant managers and drivers. This is what has allowed
| an MVP to be successful, not the kludgy "product".
|
| Exactly! It feels like the article draws exactly the wrong
| conclusion. They were able to succeed _in spite_ of having a
| crude application because the relationships trumped. Know your
| customer, have an audience, all that stuff that you hear all
| the time.
| cortesoft wrote:
| Yeah, I did a double take when I saw this line in the story:
|
| > It's not about making friends with the right people
|
| Because my takeaway was the opposite... if you have good
| connections, your actual product isn't as important.
| rhizome wrote:
| Same. It's not about making friends with the right
| people...except for the part where he had already done so.
|
| It's a tremendous blind spot, where "the right people" are
| defined as people his friend would have to pay for some
| business thing, rather than the people who have the money to
| give him.
|
| Coincidentally I'm helping someone in this way right now. She
| has a good business idea because she has the talent and
| potential clients already (as well as being a good people-
| person), but the fact that she has me to make a website for
| her and advise on her technological needs for free isn't the
| thing that makes it a good business idea. Don't get me wrong,
| it can be extremely valuable and thrifty to have someone who
| knows enough to know where and when to say "no," or YAGNI,
| but those are cashflow and time questions, not a fundamental
| viability one.
| jmkjaer wrote:
| I really like this story!
|
| > I said I could build it over the weekend. It was Friday.
|
| I wonder how long the ideation phase took. I know a fair number
| of people, myself included, are bad at defining "true" MVPs, and
| it takes time to cut an idea down to the bare minimum. I would
| definitely not be able to do that AND implement it in a weekend.
| mzrnsh wrote:
| Glad you like it!
|
| I think the key here was that there was no "ideation" phase. We
| just got to business right away. And we were really, strictly
| limited with time.
|
| I have worked on a dozen, maybe more other MVPs (where I got
| paid, as that's what I do for a living). And I don't think I
| have any other MVP story worth writing about.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| This is a great example of a real mvp and targeting work towards
| solving problems first and foremost. It would be a boon for the
| world if our industry in general worked more like this.
| guai888 wrote:
| This is a great story! Make do with what you have and focus on
| the essential.
| tailspin2019 wrote:
| Agreed. It's good to have an inspiring reminder of the power of
| a true MVP.
|
| The momentum gained by getting something so simple, live so
| quickly, is not to be underestimated!
| philipswood wrote:
| The idea that we often over-engineer based on our training
| was first brought home to me by this piece about situated
| software:
|
| https://www.gwern.net/docs/technology/2004-03-30-shirky-
| situ...
|
| Basically: fit for purpose can be simple.
| robertwt7 wrote:
| > But when all you have is your creativity, you might end up with
| something much better, something you would never expect.
|
| I love it, I just love it
| silexia wrote:
| I hate that the goal of all the entrepreneurs here is an exit. No
| one is better suited to run your company than you, no matter what
| BS financiers tell you.
| lubujackson wrote:
| Always important to remember the code is only ever the
| implementation of an idea.
|
| Instead of thinking of MVPs to prove an idea, startups should be
| ideas that are Known To Work and the MVP more like this - the
| actual minimum needed to connect a knowledgeable user to a well-
| trodden business action.
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