I ended up with a scraping and publishing tool with its own database of high-quality posts relevant to my niche. Having this, I could spent zero time on content issues and could focus on marketing, which was my primary objective.

Although I tried to keep everything under the radar, one of my competitors noticed unusually stable and consistent flow of high-quality posts in my group and decided to ask me about it. I explained the system to her and she offered me something like $200 for it.

I turned the offer down and asked her to pay me monthly instead. She agreed.

That was the inception.

Building an MVP

My crude tool lacked everything a mature web service should have, except the core functionality itself. It had one big advantage, though—it had already been validated, so I could invest heavily in its infrastructure because apparently Vk.com wasn’t the only social network I was going to be asked to support.

Also, from my previous startup, I knew that I need a sophisticated statistics and logging system to track down and fix all sorts of bugs as promptly as possible. I realized that I’m going to have a lot of them because when your project depends heavily on other services, their bugs, become your bugs.

I made a brief list of features for my MVP. It was quite long because I decided to include some stuff I usually avoid in the minimum viable product, like automated payments and all the additional interfaces.

Here is what I needed and what I had had eventually:

The payment gateway. Since the startup was supposed to operate on the Russian market I picked one of the most popular gateways there, Robokassa. It would have been Stripe but they didn’t work in Russia and still don’t, and bothering with setting up a Delaware company was pointless, not financially viable and too much hassle.