Ask HN: Do they really build an MVP in a weekend?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3919701

by ajaxguy • 14 years ago

11 7 14 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Having bitten this hacker bug for couple of days with me, I am just wondering how much knowledge/workout does it take to build a product and say it as a weekend project. What are the best tools/materials to consider before building a mobile app or web app? How do you choose which tool/api for backend and frontend?

I am just curious whether that would really took only one weekend. Honestly, I believe when you say it as weekend product, it would definitely lower the user expectations on the product and it is my sole opinion. But when I see couple of apps, at least they look good architectures and different api integrations and still they are able to do that completely in a weekend.

I am open to your suggestions and no hard feelings these kind of posts.

jdg• 14 years ago

I built the first version of Boxcar (http://boxcar.io) in a weekend -- because I was bored. Started on a Friday, submitted to Apple the following Sunday evening.

Since then we've grown to 1M+ users and have delivered 2B+ push notifications. We're a team of 4 now.

For mobile apps, your tools are basically decided for you already. Eclipse for Android, Xcode for iOS. The goal of an MVP is to keep things as stupidly simple as possible. Use external APIs if they already exist, use services like Parse, etc, to give you a leg up.

MVP is less about code and more about results. If you can get away with no coding at all, that's the ideal situation. :-)

dotpavan• 14 years ago

Nice advice! One finds 2 paths I guess- to focus on the medium (code, framework, etc) or on the results for a MVP.. once the MVP gets enough traction, then even rewriting the whole app is not bad as long as we know the idea has potential.

ajaxguy• 14 years ago

Seems to be an impressive app. So, when you say a weekend, you got that MVP from inception to live app? Normally, ideas are spontaneous and it will take some time to get the right feel of it. So how did that happen with your boxcar?

Yes, you are right for the basic tools like Eclipse and XCode. But to integrate different product apis, like Parse/Nodejs it would already need a groundup knowledge to use them in your app. This is where I am lagging behind. I want to know how do you manage these kind of situations.

I belive this process is more of a progressive manner than a complete solution at one go.

Sincerely, it would really inspire me to read such kind of posts here and believe I am way too far from the fellow hn'ers.

vijayr• 14 years ago

upvoted for "If you can get away with no coding at all, that's the ideal situation. :-)"

MattBearman• 14 years ago

I built the MVP of BugMuncher (http://bugmuncher.com) In 2 weeks worth of evenings (I was still working for 'the man' at the time).

Total time was 30 - 40 hours, so I could have done it in a weekend, but it would have been a hell of a weekend :)

I tend to take the term 'weekend project' with a pinch of salt, and usually interpret it as meaning something just built fast, and usually in spare time.

sim0n• 14 years ago

We built prompt.im (doesn't really work anymore unfortunately) in less than a day and the first interstateapp.com in around 2 days.

knes• 14 years ago

we build the MVP of Dropdock (http://getdropdock.com) in a weekend. We are now in the process of refactoring the code and should ship the new beta version to everyone soon :)

Ask HN: Do they really build an MVP in a weekend?

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