This is where the actual story begins.

Identifying a pain point

Clearly people were having real issues with this menu thing. A short research showed that a lot of group owners on Vk.com (the Russian Facebook) use a graphical menu fixed at the top of a group to redirect their audience to the most important parts of the group, such as testimonials, pricing, and an order form.

Here is what a menu usually looks like

You see, groups in this social network eventually become some sort of shop that many people use to start a business, without having the hassle of setting up a standalone website. So it wasn’t just a bunch of some random groups about kittens (although there definitely was a lot of this type), but small businesses with some pain point that could be solved, more or less, automatically. Obviously they needed a solution so badly that they Googled it quite often.

But here’s the best part. In order to make this menu, they had to create it in an image editor, cut it, and then build the menu with a sort of wiki-style mark up. This was definitely too much for them, and outsourcing this job at a price of about $20 a piece was quite common.

The usual process of creating a menu was something like this:

In an image editor, create an image of the menu and place some buttons on it; Сut it into separate parts so that it would be possible to re-assemble it, with the buttons becoming links; Upload all these images to an album in the group or in the owner’s account; Create a wiki-page in the group and put a markup with the images and links; Publish a post with a link to the menu page in the group; Pin it so it stays on top all the time.

Not bad, eh?

Now, let’s find out what we can do to alleviate the problem.

Making an MVP

First, I had to explore the possibilities of the API of the social network to determine what actions could be automated, and to what degree.

It turned out that the API could do anything I needed, with the exception of pinning a post. But it’s too much for an MVP, so I decided to cut down these features:

Authentication. Menu customization. Instead, a user could choose from a dozen predefined templates. Payment processing. I could do this manually. Automatic wiki-page creation. A user could do it themselves and then paste the wiki-markup that my app generated. Automatic post publishing. Again, a user’s manual labor.

So basically, what I had to make was an image generator and an uploader. So here is what it looked like after two to three days of development.