Finished MVP
by Jeff BowenI built the MVP in a month using Django and started getting my friends to sign up and try it out. I had to fight my instinct to wait to share it until it was “perfect”. By truly scoping it down to a minimum viable product, I was able to get something out there to start testing the hypothesis that this was even something people would want.
I picked the name, ReferCodes, simply because the domains refer.codes and refercodes.com were available. Didn’t love it but I’ve always liked naming products with names from which you could actually guess what the product does. I liked the refer.codes domain because it would give users a nice, short vanity profile URL that would be easy to remember and share.
The MVP had two main “features” beyond just being a simple CRUD app. The first was that I curated the referral programs that I added since I hated finding referral codes on RetailMeNot or Reddit that lied about what you’d get for signing up (e.g. “use mine for $10 off”, “use mine for $20 off!”). Most referral programs offer the same reward to all users regardless of whose referral code you use.
The second feature was that I used regular expressions to match referral links to referral deals which both made it quick to add a new one just by pasting your referral link and allowed me to validate that a referral link was legit.
