Day 34 -Unlocking the Power of MVP Validation, Next Steps & Exciting Updates on Project X! ?? #Startup #Entrepreneurship #ProductDevelopment #MVP

Section A - 'How To Start Your Startup' - Phase II (Step 2)

Hey Everyone, hope you've all begun working on your MVP!!

Usually, this step should take a few days to set up and one should let it run for at least a month across a respectable number of 'beta users' for you to get accurate sample information. I know you want to jump into building the product and that doing this is hard but I promise you it's worth the wait.

For the sake of this series, however, I am going to assume that a month has now passed and you have validated certain assumptions you had initially made and tweaked your plan according to other assumptions that failed. So what's next?

In my recommendation two steps:

1. A Basic Business Plan - Don't be daunted, it's not as scary as it seems. Just think about this step as putting your vision down in terms of numbers. By no means should you at this point think about making full-fledged projections with 15 different pages on one Excel workbook. This is an exercise for you to break down your business into its components and assess at a unit economic level whether it makes sense and what you need to do. A basic Google sheet should suffice.
2. Prototyping - We will cover this more tomorrow but as a first step just create another Google sheet and according to all the knowledge you have gathered till now and the beta information collected, start jotting down features in order of priority. Stack rank and bifurcate essentials from a need to have to good to-have basis.

Finally, you will soon have a lot of sheets, thoughts, and information floating around which is why this is the time to sign up to a project management software. I suggest Notion. It's free for one user and is incredibly versatile. Use it as your data dump for everything you come across. Pick one of the templates from the bottom left so that you can store this information in a structured way.

Project X

Began our post-work day by getting 403 (forbidden errors) from platforms we were trying to scrape information from : P

Eventually had to change the IP address we were operating from to run our script which is now beautifully populating our database. Just a few more fields to add here and I think we should be good.

Wanted a change of pace so worked next on a bookmarking feature. The components for which we took from Tailwind and the icons we took from Hero Icons.

Luckily at the backend, this isn't too dissimilar from the upvoting feature we had implemented a few days ago and we were thus able to make some good progress.

Aaand, that all for today folks.

#startup?#startingup?#entrepreneurship?#20secondsofcourage?#projectx?#bootstrapping #mvp #prototyping #businessplan #datascraping #bookmarking