We launched Smores - an AI Music Discovery App | Part 3 - The MVP 🔨

Chapter 3: The MVP

The next part of our journey was all about building the most minimal version of the app + analytics. Within a couple of weeks, we had our MVP ready to be published on Testflight and the App Store for listeners to try.

Lessons and tips while building the MVP:

Constantly seek criticism — Listen to your users throughout the process. We did this by conducting interviews with our users. You should be doing this before you even have a product out and long after you’ve launched as well. The moment you stop doing this, your product will die. Here is the 7 question script we used for our research interviews to determine , inspired by Y-Combinator.
Script:

1. How often do you actively discover new music?
2. What’s the hardest part about discovering/sharing new music or making playlists [or whatever problem you want to validate]?
3. Tell me about the last time you encountered this problem? [the key here is for the user to paint a narrative and to extract context, listen carefully, and the pain point will surface without force]
4. Why was this hard?
5. What, if anything, have you done to try to solve this problem? (any existing tools, or workarounds)
6. What don’t you love about the solutions that you’ve already tried?
7. If you could wave a magic wand and build anything related to music discover/creation, what would it be?

I highly recommend you ask your potential users similar questions before you begin. You can adapt this to suit whatever problem you want to test.

Define your Primary and Secondary Success Metrics — Make sure you understand exactly what metrics to track and create a small achievable goal to define the success of the product. Next, build out the analytics layer using any number of platforms like Google Analytics or Amplitude. If you don’t have this, you are launching blind. Numbers don’t lie.

Building a music app is difficult! — We originally had a goal to build the MVP in 2 weeks. It ended up taking us roughly a month of engineering work. The real fun started when we needed permission to use the music rights and permission scopes from the Spotify API. After that, we had to get past the App Store review. This process took us an additional month.

Product Validation Length — We are 6 months into working this and just now we think we’ve hit a true working version that we are proud of; there are different schools of thought around product development. Some say, try something for a month, if it doesn’t work out move on to the next thing. We’re still here 6 months later, so obviously we have a different product perspective on this, but also working together has kept us more motivated than if we would have worked alone.

Project link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/smores-music-discovery/id1626768775?ign-itscg=30200&ign-itsct=apps_box_badge