Trivia Now

Bad day to be Jeopardy! We launched our MVP.

After weeks of blood, sweat, digital tears, 40 minute video call timeouts, and some mainlined caffeine, Trivia Now is finally up and running at trivia-now.com.

It took us about 2 weeks to move from idea to MVP. Here's how we did it.

Step 1: Planning/Design (3 Days)
We mapped out our original concept using Figma and Zoom. Since we're working remotely, it was critical that we used a platform where we could all make contributions asynchronously. Figma + Zoom was the perfect combo for us - we were able to talk through several iterations while keeping everyone on the same page.

While we were working on our design, we were also chatting with folks on reddit (shoutout r/trivia we love you) to learn more about how people were trying to play trivia online and how we could improve upon that.

Step 2: Development (10 days)
We built Trivia Now with Laravel and Vue.js because it was the stack we could move fastest in. We didn't run into many major hiccups, it was just a matter of coordinating between our front-end and backend developers. We're a team of two devs, one of which had ne'er worked with Vue before because he uses React and prefers to drink wine from a bag. (take it easy, React guys, take it easy, we love you). Jokes aside, catching the rook up to speed was our biggest challenge.

Step 3: Marketing (#nodaysoff)
While the nerds were hard at work, our marketing team was in the online trenches. We can't say enough about how incredible Reddit is for both product/market validation and community development. We spent most of our time talking to folks, asking them how they were currently playing trivia, getting a feel for the landscape, and establishing ourselves within the community. We sent along the beta version to close friends and family as well for some user testing.

Step 4: Profit?
Now that our product has launched, we're excited to keep building upon it with user feedback. We're looking to add user accounts so that hosts and players can save their games and keep track of their stats/standings. We also plan on adding monetization soon with pre-made rounds that hosts can purchase to quickly make games!