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Ben Nadel at cf.Objective() 2014 (Bloomington, MN) with: Madeline Johnsen
Ben Nadel at cf.Objective() 2014 (Bloomington, MN) with: Madeline Johnsen

Working Code Podcast - Episode 187: Viability Of The Minimum Viable Product

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There's no question that the bar of user experience (UX) has been raised up over the last decade of web application development. With the proliferation of technologies, frameworks, and design systems, developers can now do far more with far less. But, all software has to start somewhere (see John Gall's Law on building complex systems). Which begs the question, what level of fidelity is appropriate for your "v1"?

The recent past has been dominated by the Minimum Viable Product (MVP); and, the sentiment that if you aren't embarrassed by your software, you waited too long to launch it. Venture Capitalists (VCs) argue that this epoch is over; and that the only way for software to be successful is to come to the table with a highly polished, robust, and luxurious user experience.

But, if you work backwards from this goal as your "v1", how does that work? You'd have to have a team of talented people working on this perfectly polished product. And, you have to pay those people a salary. And, how do you do that before your company is making money? You have to have venture capital.

So, is getting VC funding the only way to build successful software? Or is that just the sentiment of a small echo-chamber of people whose entire world revolves around betting on unicorn companies?

All that and more on this week's show:

... featuring these beautiful, beautiful people:

With audio editing and engineering by ZCross Media.

For the full show notes and links, visit the episode page. And, be sure to follow the show and come chat with us on Discord! Our website is workingcode.dev and we're @WorkingCodePod on Twitter and Instagram. New episodes drop weekly on Wednesday.

Reader Comments

4 Comments

Adam and Ben,

As a long time solo entrepreneur the advice I'd give is don't be afraid to get help on what you're not good at. In my case its getting AWS servers set up.

Ben, one good hang out for one or two man teams on Slack is the MicroConf folks. Around double the daily traffic of the CFML Slack.

https://microconfconnect.slack.com/

They also run conferences in America and Europe. Here's a summary of past presentations ordered by topic.

https://microconf.gen.co/

One of the principals is Rob Walling who has a long time podcast here: https://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/

He has also written two great books for the small entrepreneur.

They also do investments but don't operate anything like a traditional VC. https://tinyseed.com/

Rick

15,822 Comments

@Rick,

Getting help is one of those things that is so obvious from the outside; but, isn't always obvious when you're in the midst of things. It's also one of those things where when you don't have the muscle memory for it, it's hard to know where to start (ie, I need help with "XYZ", where do I find people that know "XYZ").

Thanks for the links, especially to the podcast - I'm always looking for new things to listen to.

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