1,000 Hours to an MVP: Where we put our effort to launch

We just hit a milestone for Hardcover ( https://hardcover.app/ ) this past week: our first MVP! Our product is to a point where we can start having some early users use it and give feedback. Being the stats geek I am, I wanted to look at what it took to get there and do a little write up for anyone else interested in seeing what it took to reach an MVP for our situation. Here's how it went:

In April of 2021 I sent out a simple Tweet on my personal account:

I'm considering making a Goodreads competitor (or more aptly a Letterboxd for books) out of spite for Amazon. A "Spite Site" if you will.

It resonated with a bunch of my friends – many of which I trade book recommendations with all the time. This got me wondering - could I actually make this? What would it take?

Within two weeks I'd posted on Reddit looking for cofounders and we had our initial team kickoff on May 1st with 5 team members interesting in contributing to this idea (dev+product, dev, design, biz/marketing, ux research).

Over the next 5 months a lot happened:

• We conducted over 50 user interviews – some sharing prototypes and getting feedback, others just understanding user problems.
• We created and iterated on prototypes in Figma.
• We dug into some of the hard technical questions like "how do we get and maintain a database of books?", "how do we import books from Goodreads?", "what's our tech stack?" and "how do we generate recommendations in line with the prototype features users resonate with?".
• We created a newsletter (200 people so far), a blog, social channels (Twitter, Instagram - and even TikTok) to start connecting with readers.
• We formalized our team equity model (using Slicing Pie to share equity based on contributions).
• We built and deployed the MVP to production!

In all, this took about 1,000 hours.

Since the beginning we've been tracking hours for our dynamic equity split. This meant we had a clear picture of where we've spent our time to get us here! So, what's it look like?

Hourly Breakdown by project:
• Software Development: 570 hours. This includes about 50 hours of research on the ideal tech stack for this platform. I wanted to choose the pieces that were best for the problem – not just the stack I was most comfortable with. This meant switching from Ruby on Rails to Next.js and starting to learn TensorFlow.
• Product research: 115 hours. Conducting user interviews, writing discussion guides for user interviews, extracting common themes from interviews.
• Meetings: 104 hours. This includes a lot of group product collaboration meetings that led into research, or were follow ups to our product research.
• Design: 100 hours. Usually in Figma.
• Marketing: 60 hours. Posting to Twitter, Instagram, TikTok and exploring other collaborations.
• Management & People: 43 hours. Interviewing new team members, creating systems for the company, equity model, general admin.
• Content: 30 hours. Writing blog posts, writing newsletters and creating content for marketing.

The more simple breakdown looks like this:
• 60% Software Development
• 20% Product Research
• 20% Marketing & Content

This is the effort to get us to our internal MVP – not the MVP where we fully release this to the public. I'd guess that by the time we're ready to allow any users into the app, the Marketing & Content areas are going to be quite a bit higher as we crank up the social channels with more to show.

Who's working on this?
1,000 hours is a LOT. All the time I see posts here on Indiehackers about someone who successfully launched a product solo in 3 months that now generates $x,xxx in revenue. This isn't one of those stories. 😅

In this case, the project is mostly me working semi-full time (70% of hours), and the rest of the team working part-time (30% of hours). I'm fortunate to be in a position where I'm not working thanks to a nice exit at a previous company.

Working on this ~25-40 hours a week has been my main professional focus over this time and has been soooo much fun! I've learned Next.js and React, discovered how much I love GraphQL, read enough about TensorFlow.js to be dangerous and talked to users about books every day. I'm creating a business in a market that I enjoy, which makes everything that much more fun.

While getting to an MVP is an awesome step, there's a lot to still figure out. In our research we've already identified that our initial revenue model (having readers pay for a pro account with additional features) wouldn't really work at the scale we want it to.

With that idea scrapped, we have other revenue models in mind, but they aren't the "make money from day 1" kind. Instead, we're hoping to keep expenses low (<$500/month) and fund the project with a combination of Patreon and allowing team members to buy additional equity (as part of our dynamic equity model) by paying the companies bills. (side note: If a team member leaves the team they keep equity they paid for, but the company can repay them and buy back the equity for up to a year.)

The end goal for this project is still a long ways out. Going up against the #133 largest site in the US (Goodreads) is an ambitious target. But I think we're off to a good start! I can't wait to see where we are after the next 1,000 hours.