Preamble

This article assumes that you’re a Technical person like me. And shows you my view from a Tech Lead perspective of a Software Product/MVP.

Main Article

In the past 4 years, I’ve been working on several different Startups on every product stage and I managed to form an opinion on how to quickly build an MVP (Minimum Viable Product).

Before building a Product MVP there’s one thing to have into consideration:

Will someone actually pay for this?

I know I’m being very cold regarding monetization, but the bottom line is this, either people pay for the product or you have no product.

Now, before creating an MVP you need to make a small Pitch on what problem are you trying to solve and the most important part, Target Audience. Let’s face it, there’s a big chance that there are at least 2 or 3 products trying to solve the same problem but with a different approach and audience, so be as opinionated as you can, and be pushy on that. If you’re just copying the others, you don’t have differentiation.

Your Product must bring value. e.g.: If you’re charging 10 EUR/month/user, the customer needs to at least transform those 10 EUR/month/user into an income of 15/20 EUR/month/user.

Build a Prototype

So, assuming that you’ve spoken to a couple of people, they are willing to pay for your product and you see a market fit, let’s discuss the Technical Part.

Tech Stack

Be very careful with the Tech Stack you chose. I will not say that Python or Ruby or Go or Java or C is better, you should not be religious when it comes to this. My top criteria for chosing a Tech Stack is available Talent in your area. I’ve recently worked in a Startup Studio that has chosen Python/Django for all Backend development due to the Data Engineering Libraries available, which is a fair point, but this is what I call “Premature Optimization”, since they were thinking way ahead of the Product Journey. You only start to worry about Data Warehouse and Analytics when you have a well established Product and a couple of successful Funding Rounds. We ended up having lots of problems hiring Talent to help us develop the Product, because where we were based (Lisbon), and there’s not many Experienced Python Developers available and the ones that are, are way over your Salary Budget, we’ve tried to have the 1 Senior + 1 or 2 Intermediate + Juniors approach. We either got very Senior (way over budget) or very Junior (too unexperienced).