Everything you know about building an MVP is wrong - Live-building a SaaS in public, day 9

MEGA UPDATE: That was unexpected but everything was incredibly smooth and the very first version of the page is out. https://landingpagewizard.co/

First time I had a new project deploying first try, I think this is a good sign for the future

Back to the original article

I'm building a SaaS in public, posting progress every day. At the bottom of this post, you'll find a progress update with the EXACT actions I took to get here. You can also binge-read all the past updates in my newsletter https://welldoitlive.beehiiv.com/

Everything you know about building an MVP is wrong. I know because I used all the best practices in creating an MVP and it was way too slow and didn't help me get customers.

Most of the advice looks like this:

- build quickly. spend weeks, not months on it

- get initial customers

- talk to customers and get feedback

- iterate

- rinse and repeat

There is nothing wrong with the list above, but is not the best it can be.

The reality is that in 2024, the vast majority of the technical problems have been solved. Abstracted away so we don't have to think about them

Everything hard to build, is now one npm install away. Even when is not, there is probably a SaaS with a free tier that can help you out.

If you're a technical person you will be tempted to use "the right technology" for your new startup.

Maybe you want to check a different data fetching layer and figure out if GraphQL should be used over REST. Mongo or Postgres? What about queues and cache?

This is a massive waste of your time. You do not have to choose your technology upfront right now. In fact, I'd say that choosing your tech for the long run now is one of the worst things you can do.

I'll tell you another day a tale about a distributed monolith with GraphQL for service-to-service communication.

Build your MVP with whatever technology makes you move the fastest.

Not the best. Not the one somebody recommends to you. The one you're the FASTEST with.

Don't try to figure out the right tool for the job. You have a hammer and at this point of your journey, EVERYTHING is a nail.

Build your MVP with this in mind: You will burn it to the ground and re-build it once you have customers.

Until you're solving a problem and you have customers, your MVP is worth nothing. why invest effort in something worth nothing?

The final part I want to cover is the speed of iteration.

If you have done customer interviews, chances are that these people would want to know about your progress. This is your most powerful weapon.

Structure your work so you can send them a meaningful daily update.

Meaningful the keyword "I have updated the color of the button" is not meaningful.

"The product now allows you to log in with Google or Apple". That is better progress.

You can couple this way of thinking with the "ONE big thing" technique that I discussed on day 7. That will make you unstoppable.

Theory is great but how am I using this information?

Here's my tech stack.

NextJS hosted on Cloudflare. I don't need anything else.

NextJS is in the news lately for becoming too complex and hard to understand. I disagree.

Next has finally made a leap forward that is making hard problems a thing of the past.

You don't have to worry about stuff like efficient data loading, Server Side Rendering, or bundle size.

It's all figured out for you. On top of that, you don't even have to figure out how to structure your business logic or worry about your separation of concern. You will be burning the MVP to the ground and doing it properly once you have customers.

Cloudflare is under fire too these days, there was a big story about them and their sales team. Don't care about that, I only care about what they have to offer.

Cloudflare offering is AMAZING. The free tier is very generous but for as little as 5$ a month you can get:

• queues
• cache
• ai
• databases
• object storage
• CDN

You can reach for those tools as and when you need it, very convenient to move fast!

I'm not sponsored by either Cloudflare or Vercel, I wish I was, but they just have fantastic products

As for the meaningful progress I'm making today. I didn't have one as my ONE big thing today was to do customer interviews and start writing about the learnings.

But after this post, I would be a hypocrite if I didn't have something done today.

So by the end of the day, I'll have the next app running on Cloudflare serving a simple landing page. That landing page will ink out to Calendly for people to book a customer interview with me.

On day 1 I'll have a page that can convert visitors into potential customer interviews. Doesn't get better than that!

I have some questions for you now:

How do you go about building an MVP?

Is this a strategy you would use?

Do you know a better way?

Leave a comment!

Progress update

I'm currently validating the hypothesis

"People are willing to pay for a product that makes it easy to create high-converting landing pages."

I have recruited 8 people to do a user interview, I've interviewed 5 people so far.

I will post a full breakdown of a list of learning from the interview once I've done all of them.

To get to that number of interviews I have:

- asked friends and old colleagues directly: landed 2 interviews

- added a request to my posts for people to take part: landed 2 interviews

- I message 16 people on Reddit, people who were asking the community to roast their landing pages: Landed 4 interviews

By far the best channel was to reach out to people directly.

The downside is that I got throttled by Reddit and I cannot DM people for another 36 hours.

I want to get to 10 interviews and I'm turning to Linkedin next. LinkedIn is pushing their premium really hard and there is a limit on the amount of DM I can send. I'll start adding people to my network and see how far I can get there.

Celebrations

This train has no intention of stopping!

- I have 13 subscribers to the newsletter where I centralize all my posts https://welldoitlive.beehiiv.com/

- My LinkedIn newsletter https://www.dhirubhai.net/newsletters/we-ll-do-it-live-7214929451111903232/ has 105 subscribers at the time of writing

I cannot thank you all enough for your help and support.

You are all legends!