[Day 10] Zero to MVP in 30 Days — What I Learned So Far

I definitely learned more than average in the last 10 days. I will now try to share what I haven’t written about so far.

In this series I’ll validate a new idea. Read about the concept here (Day 0) and the idea here (Day 1).

Talking validation

People really use Quora in a lot of different ways, even though all of the prospects I reached out to use Quora for marketing-related interests in some way. Keep in mind that the tool I want to create would help to find better questions / search and filter Quora for relevant questions.Some people actually do quite heavy research to find the right questions, while others don’t do that at all and just rely on Quora and others to ask them certain questions. That means that I have to contact many more people to find out whether the idea makes any sense. I don’t want this to be a mere guess. There certainly issome demand, but I want to make sure that it’s high enough.

People were quite helpful so far. Some really took the time to think about how their experience with Quora could be better.

Products & Services used

Landing Page Template

Since I wanted to be super fast with it, I bought an HTML Template on Themeforest. In hindsight I’m not happy with it. Next time I’ll just build everything on my own again. In the end it probably didn’t save me any time, yet still cost some money (only 10$) and worst of all, uses jQuery and a lot more unnecessary code. That’s how things are for MVP pre-launch sites.

Prospecting

• I mainly use hunter.io for finding email addresses
• Streak is a free “CRM for Gmail” which I use
• I also tried HubSpot CRM

The above tools helped me quite a bit, although their true potential probably comes in when you do this at a bigger scale. I only used Streak to delay emails, so they would arrive at a better time. The tool also lets you use templates and send emails in bulk right in Gmail (sadly not Inbox).

I also just set up HubSpot CRM. Seems like the best choice for a free solution. I also still have a spreadsheet which I used in the beginning. At the moment the information is a bit all over the place. I’ll have to sort things out …

I also used Segment, just to try it out, but I’ll move away from it, as I won’t spend too much time in analytics anyway, so I feel like the price is not worth it.

Marketing

The work I did so far definitely confirms my belief that marketing is about people and conversations. I hope that I don’t fall into other patterns when this scales, but that is still a long way I’m not even sure I’ll go.

I can’t tell you anything about using the analytics tools and other related tools, as I didn’t really use any.

Product

The landing page is statically hosted on Netlify. They also handle the forms. Sign ups are tracked client-side for analytics.

I did a lot of research on how to create the app itself. I first wanted to scrape Quora server-side, which doesn’t work since Quora gives you limited information when you’re not logged in. So I would do it client-side. That also has the advantage that Quora can’t just block me. The problem is that the site can’t be loaded in an iframe because of its cross origin policy. The solution is Electron, a combination of Chromium and Node.js. It creates desktop apps, so I can basically create a separate browser instance instead of an iframe and still talk to it.

The plan for tomorrow

I’ll code a bit. I already expected it from day 0, but I’m still surprised by how little code I’ve written in the last days.

I hope that I can share a screenshot of the app soon.

If you’re interested in the product, sign up for early access.

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→ Day 11 — Creating a Funnel