I built an MVP in 36 hours over the past 5 days. Here's how.
Hey guys and gals,
I've been lurking this community for a while now and must thank all of your for the constant inspiration to do whatever it takes to build ideas.
I just wanted to quickly share my approach to pulling off Turn (https://www.turn.audio), an app I was inspired to build 5 days ago. As it turns out, I had already given myself two weeks off of freelancing to build software, so the moment the idea came, I got started. In that time, I only allowed myself to take two client calls. It doesn't hurt that two of those days also fell on a weekend.
I wasn't sure how long it was going to take but I challenged myself to only work on this concept until I had an MVP quality product ready to launch. In addition, I made sure to spend 8 hours a day (no more no less) on building. I also did not allow myself to work longer than 3 hours in any given session to prevent any burnout.
I knew I would be tackling several new topics so that's where I started. Anything foreign, such as infrastructure, designing, and general "thinking" was worked on within the first 3 hours of the day. On a fresh 🧠. I used the last 3 hours of each day for maintenance and preparing the the following day.
I like to develop and design in bite sized pieces using a combination of Codepen and Figma. This allows me to have small victories throughout the day. Only once I'm confident that I have enough of these small solutions figured out do I attempt to develop the actual app. That happened this morning.
If I feel like I'm getting bogged down by design, I switch to development. If I'm tired of coding, I'll do some testing. If I don't want to do anything, I'll start writing meta data. Anytime I had a feature idea, I just wrote it down on a sticky note and removed it from my workspace. I simply would not allow feature creep to interfere with what I imagined was a simple MVP.
Finally, I just kept telling myself that it would be amazing if I actually finished the MVP. 😅 It's very hard for me to prevent distraction so I imagined the goal as something I should be really proud of. And, you know what, I am proud. It's a simple app but it makes me feel so much better about tackling the next idea.
I'm happy to answer any questions or receive any feedback about Turn.
Good luck with your ideas!
Lee
That's amazing. I also struggle a lot before starting to build something. But once I start I get hooked and it's hard to stop.
I also did an MVP in few hours some months ago. It's was a YouTube videos generator from Medium posts. I wrote about it and you can see the code in here
Dude, that is fun! Well done!
Thank you Michal. Stackdraft looks awesome btw! For how long has it been released? What is it build on? And, .... where can I see the stack Stackdraft uses? hahaha
Thank you :)! I launched it nearly a month ago. Here's a comment where I answered what I used:
https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/show-ih-stackdraft-create-and-present-3d-cloud-architecture-diagrams-047b603c05?commentId=-LJZ5GYPS_v8JLWQLJDp
There aren't many uses out in the public yet (for now, the tool exports to PNG only). Here's a sample I made:
https://twitter.com/stackdraft_io/status/1033134064402923521
There's a bit more in stackdraft_io media on Twitter in case you're interested :). Cheers!
Jonathan, that is AWESOME. I just love scalable content in general. Thanks for sharing. I could see something like that creeping into my freelance work also. 🔥
Thank you Lee for saying that it's awesome. I felt really proud and wrote a couple of articles in my medium about machine-generated content.
You also must be feeling proud after releasing this music-video generator. What are your next steps with this project?
Well, one thing I wanted to get in the MVP which I missed was the ability to change the background color. As for as development goes, I will build that in next. I also have an email list with some of the top artists / managers / labels in the world, so I will likely create a newsletter to let them know the app exists soon. 🙏🏻
Nice! I would like to know more about this email you are sending to the artists/managers/labels. I wonder about the conversion rate. Interesting exercise
Yeh, I think so too. I've shared some simple utilities in the past but nothing quite like this. Here's the newsletter if you'd like to receive:
https://confirmsubscription.com/h/j/7BE1CD1F96F6B42F
Monetization idea. Build 20-30 seconds with your app for Free and if people want to have the complete video, pay something.
Not a bad idea!
There's actually some interesting limitations already in place:
15 second video limit on Instagram story videos
60 second video limit on Instagram timeline videos
In addition, the infrastructure I use (Lambda) will only allow a processing script that can finish under 5 minutes, so... I may not be able to create longer tracks. For instance, I worry about someone trying to upload a full podcast.
For those reasons, charging for duration might be confusing. My first step might simply be to charge a fee to remove the watermark but I'd like to get some adoption first.
You can use ECS to overcome the 5 mins execution lambda limitation. I have my container code on github if you want to check it out. I think I use a lambda to start the container.
Thanks again Jonathan! If things get out of hand, that's where I'll look next. 💪🏻
Removing the watermark is a good thing also. There was a mobile app around that was making a few thousands per month by removing the watermark and they were allowing users to create longer Instagram stories or something like that
Thanks for the tip Dragos. 💪🏻
That is incredible! The first app I built took me almost 2 years to release, the second around 6 months, then 3/2 months for another two projects. I am so impressed with something taking a few days to release!
Congrats!
Cheers Andrew. Looks like you're also headed for the 1 week release! I suspect my speed has a lot to do with how I've wired myself as a freelance dev in the music business. It's a double edged sword though.
Honest disclaimer - it's late and I haven't tried it out, BUT - it does seem like a fun little project. It's cool you challenged yourself to focus on a simple MVP and pull it off in 36 hours, that's actually pretty impressive. I also like how you shared you worked in blocks to keep up the juices flowing and avoid burn out.
Nicely done, good luck with your MVP :)
Thank you Michal! I take the same approach (blocks) with my client work as well. My biggest issue is that I can step away from my client work after 2-3 weeks. I'm still learning how to dedicate more of my time to the scalable work.
Good stuff. I had to double take your name for a second there as it's identical to mine. I wonder if we're related. I have Martins in wales, spain and all over.
Dad? 👶🏻
Haha!
Awesome writeup and top result. Looks very nice and to-the-point, just as how it should be 👌🏻.
One question, tho:
Functional wise it is there, looks nice and is ready for use. So if we look at MVP, the Minimum and Product are there ✅✅. And for the users, the Viable part is also present: generated videos for Instagram to present your audio ✅.
But how is it viable for YOU, the creator? IOW: how will it be sustainable. Are you working on a premium feature that people can pay to buy other designs or something?
Hey Edwin, first of all thanks and great question. I've worked in the music business for 15 years so owning a tool that allows artists to share music is inherently viable as an engineering as marketing play. However, I suspect my path to premium will begin by simply allow folks to remove the watermark for a fee. Then I could dive into some visual customizations. However, I think a free version of the app must always be available to build the brand of the company because that in itself could unlock other paths of viability. At the moment, I'm simply not sweating in and hoping for some adoption.
Thanks for your response. Watermarks will work fine. I agree that a free tier is always good.. And not only for the (hopefully) conversion into paid accounts further down the road, it also enables more people to get a taste and "spread the word".
I was thinking on how it could be useful for people sharing a nice quote or part of a podcast, but I now see the use for promoting beats and music, too 😅
Right, right. Well, the core problem is "sharing audio on socials" so any creator is welcome to use the solution. 🔥
Thats a great story, and i love the fact you finished the MVP so fast. i did the same with a project in march, allthough i had to take it down as it attracted to much attention to fast.
Keep working on it, and keep us updated and if you need any help marketing this thing let @JeroenvanGils and me know!
Cheers Arne!
Lee well done!
💪🏻
Pretty awesome! Congrats on rolling this out. One of the things I haven't seen is this offered in terms of an API, have you thought about that?
Thank you! Can you elaborate a bit on your vision for the API?
Just something I can use programmatically. I personally think it would be useful if I can just call an API with an image and audio and get back what you're outputting.
That's pretty interesting. Technically, it does exist because this was built on Amazon Lambda and API Gateway. I'll keep that in mind. Thank you!
Would you believe that one of my music clients basically asked for an API of this? Curious indeed!
Cool! Did u use ffmpeg to encode the videos?
Yes, indeed! Served from a Lambda, no less. (That's the technical stuff that was pretty foreign to me going into it)
Cool, I used something like lambda (well firebase functions) in the past but it ended up quite expensive ($30 a month) ... back to digital ocean's tiny VPS for $5 a month!
Yep, I'll have to keep an eye on things. 💸
Don't you think you could have done that all client side?
Perhaps but client side video rendering was a bit foreign to me so I decided against it for the MVP. Likely something I'll be looking into in the future.
Really cool!
My first attempt was to use a gif, but it seems to not have worked, I suggest to add an error pop up message for such occasions :D
Also a request, what if I don't want to have audio? I want to have a spinning disc of my profile picture :P
Oh, wow, I'm surprised you could choose a GIF since I have that file input set to only allow JPG files. I'll work on some simple error messaging. 👍🏻
At the moment, trying to create a video without audio would be difficult because of how tightly connected it is. I would probably worry about users that didn't have images before I tackled users who didn't have audio. 😅
Oh, for me the file input defaults to "all files"
Also why only JPEG? Surely PNG and other common image types should be ok? :)
Haha, well, my MVP decisions are pretty strict and will likely add PNG once I can properly test it. Which browser are you using?
Testing? You treat your MVP's better than certain multi-million projects I have seen :)
I'm using chrome, latest version on Windows 10
Ha! I wasn't exactly sure what the path for images would be so at some point the PNG would need to be converted to JPG for the video creator. I believe it would happen at the beginning now though, right when you see the preview on the website. I'll make that addition at some point. Thanks for the feedback!
Hi Lee! What did you build it with?
Hey Austen, good question! The frontend application was developed with Nuxt and is hosted on Heroku. All files are sent to Transloadit to be cleaned up before I send them to a series of AWS Lambda actions which create the actual video. In the center of everything is the incredible FFMpeg library which generates the video.
Great job. Now hire a UI/UX designer and give it some polish and figure out how to monetize it. Also need a good brand logo
Haha, well, I do a lot of UI/UX stuff (in music) but I didn't really worry too much about that for the MVP. 👨🏻🎨 I've got some monetization thoughts but I'll snooze those until I feel good about adoption and better understand what users are willing to pay for. I'm all ears if you have some logo ideas!