I’m reading ‘The Lean Startup’ by Eric Ries and halfway across the book I thought I had to give a try. I don’t pretend to create a new startup or make any money from it but just to experiment with Lean ideas while developing a pet project that is sitting in drawer for way too long and learn new technologies along the way. So this means fast development cycles won’t be the case in this experiment.

So here it goes…

This project is called ‘Spoiler me’ and it is a simple app that gives the user Movies, TV shows and Book spoilers.

So, first step. Start by defining the MVP. Will I dive into product definition or will I start smaller some how? Since this is a side project to work on my free time (and I have a six months baby boy… ) I don’t expect to have something ready to use soon, so I’m thinking on having a landing page where people will be able to sign up to receive updates. This will test the interest of people in the app and will allow me to send some questionnaires to help me define the MVP. So let’s just start by defining metrics I want to measure in order to know if I’m progressing or not. I’ll have page views, conversion rates (percentage of people that signs up) and then with the mailing list, percentage of people who reads the emails and from those, the percentage of people answering the questionnaires. Do you think these are enough? Are they too much? What other metrics do you have in mind?

First decision was already made. I wrote this post outside a blogging platform with the intent of publishing it here in Medium. But when I was about to publish it I read this post via HackerNews and for a moment I panicked. The post reasoned with me and I immediately started looking for alternatives. But after a day of visiting numerous platforms I thought ‘Why would I start by adding complexity and spend time on something I don’t know people will read’. Let’s just Lean this and go with the first option. No setup needed, just write and publish it. After confirming it has analytics I could use to learn about best times to share on social media this paragraph was added and the post was published.

I’ll document everything along the way so let’s just MVP this as well and while waiting for feedback start writing the next posts.