I make things on the internet. I like the things I make, from client projects to my personal site to some stupid overnight hack.

My problem is that the cost of shipping an MVP is extremely low for me. The first iteration of http://getmadideas.com took roughly 6 hours, the first iteration of http://beerpicker.herokuapp.com took 4. Both are deployed to heroku so ran for free to begin with. Net spend: 0. If anything I have gained from building these two projects, Get Mad Ideas taught me to use the twitter API and Beer Picker introduced me to Sinatra. That’s just on the dev side. Both Get Mad Ideas and Beer Picker forced me into the product launch/promotion/marketing side of things as well. When to post to Hacker News, how to title your posts, using Reddit, managing a Facebook Page, running TweetDeck, writing Medium Posts, curating content the list goes on. I have learnt a lot but two things bother me:

1. I could have learnt so much more

2. These projects will never get off the ground

Hack =/= Product

Just because something is on the internet and you would use it or your neighbour or their cat would use it doesn’t make it a product. Even if it goes viral it’s not a product.

A product is designed to meet a market need. A piece of art is made to convey emotions. My hack-projects fall in between.

These projects’ goal isn’t to gain market share or profitability. Then again we can’t really call them art since they’re heavily engineered pieces, their design isn’t up to scratch and plainly because I don’t think of them as such.

They don’t solve a daily problem people have

They have no retention mechanism, the feature set is so limited that users get bored very quickly: they don’t solve a daily problem people have. They solve a problem I see daily though: indecision. Get Mad Ideas was meant to be my default answer in the conversation that goes a bit like this:

A: I want to learn to code, what’s the best way?

B: Make something.

A: What can I make?

B: Check Get Mad Ideas

It’s a side-project inspiration feed of sorts.

The motivation behind Beer Picker is a bit clearer. I was going to the supermarket to get beers and I wanted inspiration (recurring theme) since most of them are very similar (in shops anyways). So it picks a random stock beer with a comment from me and the alcohol by volume for that beer.

Now these would be nice MVPs in terms of feature-set, if they were products. They aren’t. They’re also solving the wrong problem: the biggest issue people have when learning to code is actually getting started and not lack of ideas/inspiration. And the beer-buying conundrum is easily solved by buying the cheapest available beer. So these two projects were doing what I call “treating symptoms” in that they’re a good reply to people’s perceived problems but those perceptions are erroneous and the problems don’t even lie there.

Had I thought a tiny bit more before just making/launching these, I would have spotted this dissonance. A tiny bit of market research, even just a conversation would have meant I didn’t try to solve the wrong problem.

Now I’m attempting to fix that, I want to pivot Beer Picker to something else and need to validate the market existence first. I would highly appreciate it if you filled out the following survey: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/17p6N4iCYIIs5z7OjOH2K6By5R_2jZ5OQE-oyM7O7wws/viewform?usp=send_form

It’s a survey about beer and buying habits, it’s around 5 questions long so please do share it around.

If you want to check out my projects, my personal website hugodf.github.io has them all listed there. You can also follow me on twitter @hugo__df.

I’ll keep making random things, it’s just the ones that matter will get more attention now ;)

‘Til next time,

Hugo