We all do this. We come up with this awesome idea that we want to build and can’t wait to build it. Then a while later we lose interest and the idea doesn’t look so good anymore. Or we get tired and drained and other priorities come up.
Stages
Make the idea in stages. The MVP should really be that the minimal effort to something resembling a product. The idea of stages is to limit your possibility of going out of scope.
Weeks 1
- Idea brainstorming
- Writing the whitepaper
Week 2
- Collecting research for each feature in the MVP
- Design Final UI/UX and logo
Week 3
- Create each feature in the MVP as isolated projects
Week 4
- Piece together each feature as the final MVP
- Create a 1-pager, press-kit, and add to app-store
Proving your self wrong
The first thing you should do after you have written down the idea in a whitepaper is to start looking for pitfalls. Where are the areas that can drain you for time and money. Since the chance of de-railing is so high it’s crusial to stick to the plan. So the more time you spend on proving something to be difficult and time consuming the better your chance of finishing a project in the aloted time you gave your project.
Define the entire UI/UX from the begining
Before you create an MVP you should define the entire UI/UX of the final app. Because while an MVP may work, scaling it from MVP to final product may not be feasable. There may be complxity issues that will keep you from scaling. Like too many edge cases, or too advance UI’s etc.
Modularity
When you build the first MVP, you should consider building each feature as an isolated project. When you have all the pieces you then have intimate knowledge of how to complete the MVP in one go. It’s also easier to estimate how much time something will take and not lose track of the final picture. It’s also easier for humans to work on one problem at the time, instead of multiple at once. Another posetive side-effect is that your less likley to get stuck. You also avoid spending too much time one one piece of the puzzle.
Limit your scope:
The reason limiting your scope is so important is to avoid the feeling of swiming and swiming and not feeling your getting closer to a goal. Projects can essentially be infinite if there is no limit, changing conditions, changing priorities, it could always be better etc. Whatever you do, be it making big financial decisions, work projects, home projects etc, you should always structure your projects by first limiting the scope and firmly sticking to it. Because essentially all projects are infinite.
Final note:
You often see these wonder-kids casually noting how little time they spent on making a product on producthunt etc. What they don’t tell you is that they spent alot of time researching the viability of the project, doing pre-research, doing tests and even completing parts of the project before hand. So the actual time they spent constructing the product was small. So stop your self the next time you get an idea you just have to do right away. Rather than start coding, start planing, find the pitfalls. It’s not as fun as jumping right in, but you will finish so much faster and save your self alot of dissapointment and stress. You may also discover ideas that you wouldn’t have found if you started building right away.