Lessons I learned during the development of my extension.
by Andrii Kalinin#1. Idea and Validation.
So, I read somewhere that the first MVP should be made in 2 weeks with minimal or no cash for young and inexperienced founders.
After spending 25,000 € of my own money and more than six months of development, I entirely agree with that.
It:
a) is time-consuming: communicating, conveying the idea and vision to the developer, which is essential because developers cannot read your mind. It's better to over-communicate than under-communicate.
b) requires constant testing after each step and repeating the steps until you get exactly what you wanted.
c) each such step costs money: with all due respect and even while knowing that developers are trying their best, almost every time I caught myself thinking that the out-source guys are motivated to do a job longer :) BTW, if you read this, guys, I can only thank you, you did a great job. It is just... natural.
d) you don't know if it will AT LEAST pay off to zero.
e) If you have to make changes (and you will), you don't have a choice but to call/message your old developer, which is not flexible and consumes time and money.
If you've already started, here's how I tried to reduce the pain:
Strip your product down to the essentials. Cut out everything you don't need. Remember that you can become funded with just an idea, a pitch deck, and a couple of pictures.
Use deadlines. Although it may be obvious to you, dear reader, as a physician, I'm not used to deadlines. In the six months I spent developing the raw product, I didn't put a single deadline for my developers.
Find other sources of funding. I took extra shifts to fund the project. As a side, I'll probably continue to take these extra shifts for a long time since I found them to be highly worth my time today. It's a win all along.
Get involved in what the developers do, but only if you have built trust and know what to do. For example, making a Stripe account, a meta tag for the webpage, or a tag for Google Analytics saves extra minutes to hours of developer work time.
In the next product, I plan to use Nocode and make it on my own.
-Andrii
