Help me build a product in 4 days
Hello everyone, thank you for clicking, CTR is important.
Background
I have 4 days starting now to build an MVP in 4 days. I am a software developer with 5+ years of experience building products at my job. There is this idea that I want to see out there in the world but need help to drill down, choose a small feature set, and build it.
Idea
For some reason I still fight the urge to hide my idea, so here is a gist.
I want to build a community like indiehackers but for specific types of users, indiehackers is a niche community but I want something micro-niche.
Goals
I don't think it will be an overnight success and I don't care. This project is about flexing my product building muscles and getting something out there which is somewhat usable.
Technology
While I can write code, work with databases, and do other programming stuff, I want to take a different approach.
I wish to write minimal code, and initially see if I can do this with no code tools.
I have no idea what will be the end technology stack but right now I am struggling with holding myself back and not diving into coding right away.
Rough plan
- Get the core feature properly defined
- Think about the technology stack
- Build and test the core feature to make sure it works.
- pick colors, create a simple logo, landing page, etc.
- Add some analytics
- Some automation to get notified if people get interested in this product.
You can help
While if I had Jira tickets with user stories and intended features I can write code to implement it. But to build a whole product is a big thing in my mind.
I have done this in past but usually, it takes me months of perfecting things, choosing templates and colors, thinking about text to show, doing unnecessary tasks, and having an okayish half-finished project in the end.
This time I plan to do things differently but I have no plan.
- How would you do it?
- What is the first thing to focus on?
- Any advice on removing fluff and focusing on the core feature?
- Tool recommendations?
Thank you for reading and any helpful advice you give in the comments, Have a great day.
Stay updated?
I will be posting about my journey in a thread at the end of four days because I tried buildinpublic and it did not motivate me in past. So I'd rather focus on finishing this.
If you look forward to the results or the journey you can follow me here or on https://twitter.com/ri5hirajp and I'll post about my progress over time on Monday 18th April in the evening (CET) in both places.
ps. if you end up following on Twitter, drop a dm, I'd love some encouragement and it'll motivate me to finish it so I can show it to you.
If you want to keep it really MVP, you could just spool up a Discourse forum in a few minutes and start building your community on there. Then leverage that community to help decide features and then move them over to the new site when ready.
Great idea, I am not sure if I can make it open to everyone without an account, but I'll definitely try it out. Thanks
Theres some other similar ones like flarum.org too if that one doesn't fit. I haven't tried them all so not sure what features they have.
Currently looking at a free demo of Flarium, it feels really great and might actually be what I am looking for.
I like the microtimelines.
For this one I echo that the challenge isn't 'can we build it?' but rather 'should we build it?'
If I embarked on this I'd spend more time getting people to commit to requesting an invite than building a login, comment, markup rendingering, etc.
If we think success would be say 100 users in 4 days, how might we deliver on that? Who has already gathered these people or how might they signal their skills/interests?
Could a landing page asking to join a MightyNetworks community work? A discord group? Online community platforms can be considered a commodity that you can get 80% of the functionality just with a simple subscription OR template.
Are these people on Twitter? Do they list their interest on their profile? Are they following any other accounts?
As for letting people interact without creating an account -- do these members you want to gather have a desire NOT to register? Is that a feature list that likely isn't going to be common on off the shelf platforms that important to delay interacting and building the community while you recreate a login system, comments, picture uploads? Do you just want a Reddit clone? Or a 4Chan clone?
Great points, I love how much detail you provided to make your stand clear. The success for me would be to be able to learn something in 4 days.
You say 100 users, I don't think even 2 will join this community.
But here is the question I am trying to answer if someone gave me 10,000 bucks and challenged me to build one (a product, not an actual community of people), how would I go about it and would I be able to do it?
Just trying to learn how to cut down on what I don't want and focus on the core ideas to produce an output.
And if you had $10K to throw at a problem where someone would likely pay you for it so you can turn $10K into $20K then $100K, there's tons of problems out there to be solved. Hell, I'm sitting on 10 I found this week that deserve to be solved and tons of people complain about it. Some even have revenue streams.
Example: for the past 30 days I've filled out identical information for about 6 doctors. Same thing. Every. Single. Time. And they STILL get the info wrong and I have to correct it. There's no 1 source of truth for the medication list, historical diagnosis and current medical orders. I'd love for some way I could electronically give the info and I have the source of truth and updates cascade.
Anyway, do whatever it is you want to do to learn, learn fast and move to a next step.
If you don't think 2 users will join, it sounds like you just want to go through a course to learn how to build something?
If you're looking to learn some skills with programming take a look at Wes Boss and his courses, really good. https://wesbos.com/courses/ and tons of Udemy courses.
If you want to build something, just build it, but it doesn't sound like you think there will ever be users interacting, which will be a bit deflating because you'll never see how people use the platform and no one gets value.
Thank you for the suggestions, I do wish to learn and hope I will.
There are SaaS' spesifically built for this. It would took 40 minutes to get things going and test the waters.
There are niches in here like IndieParents etc, it's highly unlikely to someone steal your idea. Considering it could be done in 4 days :) Does it really matter if someone steals it, 4 days later.
Thanks, @Rusted,
Any recommendations? something you've used in past.
I am definitely not afraid of someone stealing it, it is something else that's stopping me from posting it, all I can say is it's stupid and not even worth discussing.
I know very well now that it's better to talk about your idea and get feedback as early as possible, but I just want to do things differently this time.
Problem for me here, it's unclear what you are looking for. Something like indiehackers is a bit broad also it's so simple, it's a forum. You want to flex your product building skills so an open sourced forum seems like the best fit. Also mentioning no-code, as I believe it's way harder to expand, add features to those solutions.
"I want to build a community like indiehackers but for specific types of users, indiehackers is a niche community but I want something micro-niche."
Building a community doesn't require features but people. It's possible to run a community on an IRC channel.
Here is a year old discussion as a good starting point; The best community platform
If you did your research before and see which product missing the features you are looking for. It would be easier for us to provide useful information.
I believe once I was in a community built on top of circle.so it was looking neat and mature enough.
Thank you, the links are really helpful, and I am more focused on building something and trying to learn the process, so building and running a community is not on the list, I guess I should update the title to say product instead of startup.
Best of luck, curious to see what the micro niche is 👀
thank you, I'll try to keep you updated. Just to be clear this project is more about learning how to build X in Y days, then actually caring about what X is 😉