In the early 2000’s, you could throw up a calculator. A todo list. A forum. An affiliate marketing page (a blog). A favicon generator. An image combiner. A love calculator. A timer. Etc…Now a days, the kinds of product required to be “minimally viable” is beyond what an average developer can program by themselves, in a reasonable amount of time.
There are some niche cases, but just think about it. What are you going to build, that doesn’t already exist, and how are you going to market it, make people pay for it, afford it yourself, and offer a seamless experience? We have every social media site. Every video streaming site. Every audio streaming site. There isn’t a single tool I personally use, that I can’t just google, and find 20 companies offering it with a generous free-tier.
It’s kind of like comparing the person who invented the fork, to the person who invented the air fryer. in 2023, you can’t just bend some sharp metal, an make a MVP. Shit’s gotten harder, and harder, and harder.
I thought that by focusing on a niche and taking dedicated actions, I thought that it’s possible but after reading this, I reflected on how many such cases I have actually seen and now I’m a bit insecure. wonder how you guys are thinking.
You should read Lean Startup by Eric Ries. Maybe a cliche recommendation, but it solves the problem you’ve run into. All those crud products you’ve mentioned were stepping stone for someone’s bootstrap career. In terms of “building something that doesn’t exist” that is a risk that not even Apple or Google would commit to. Most the products you find have surpassed the CRUD building phase that would motivate you, and reached a phase where they can pay thousands to sell you an end product on a google search. There’s a resume website I found that is so CRUD, it says ‘AI’ but it’s just a long form where you fill out information and a button that rephrases using GPT-3.5. It’s beyond simple but every week I see a new feature that is available they’re testing for retention. I would’ve requested a refund but in the second week they added ‘Monthly Resume Review by a Human’ which kept me from leaving. That feature over time will be apart of their collection of features that have been proven to attract customers.
Eric Reis talks about how you should create a MVP (Minimum Viable Product). A product that is so simple (To do list) that periodically (weekly) has features added to a A/B testing pool to see if it increases retention (Invest more time) or doesn’t account for increased retention (drop it and move on). After a couple of years that Todo app becomes Notion, a fully realized product that initially charged 4.99 for a CRUD markdown viewer connected to a git repo. Based on their own data they realized their customer base was NOT interested in styling font so they reoriented. Facebook and google use this concept all the time, the like button was created this way. Initially a redumentary feature with just a single functionality that increased retention which produced further investment to become the cornerstone of all social media today.
Consider creating a publicly creating a new app every month. SOOOOOOOO simple, don’t even create an app, create a PWA (Progressive Web App) It’s a website that behaves like an app and users can create a shortcut to it on their Lock Screen (acts just like an app), then let the audience choose its direction. If the product doesn’t get an attention of an audience, then you’ve saved an entire year devoting yourself to a product that fundamentally didn’t have interest.
PWA Example: (This will blow your mind)
(P.S) Notion didn’t start as a TODO list, but as a mark down website maker. However you can conclude with a Notion like product from starting at a TODO app. Also Door dash came after Uber Eats but now has a 60% market share, The top 10 delivery apps found their own footing by listening to a different market. Uber Eats listened consumers and DoorDash listen to restaurants. CocaCola markets to the youth and Pepsi markets to the boomers (Thus their failed BLM ad).