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From 0 to MPV in 3 steps

From 0 to MPV in 3 steps

Here's what I've done - Live-building a SaaS in public, day 12

Matt Hertel
July 13, 2024

I spent the last 12 days posting daily updates on how I'm building my new SaaS.

I've been asked a few times in various comments / DMs how to go from nothing to start building a MVP. You should listen to me when I have proof that what I'm saying works. For now, I can only talk about what I've done and what I'd do if could go back.

Before I break it all down, let me first first tell you what I'm doing.

I'm building a SaaS in public, posting progress every day. I'm also adding lessons from all the mistakes I made and learning from current events.

You can binge-read all the past updates in my newsletter.

So, from 0 to MVP, how to go about it?

Here's what I did:

I decided that this time I would want to share my journey with people.

I didn't do it for some selfless reasons. I was working alone on my previous startup and it gets very lonely at times.

Sharing was a fantastic idea. 10/10 would recommend it to anyone. It also required a bit of upfront work and figuring things out.

I didn't know where to post, how often, and some other logistical things. For example, posting on Reddit every day makes it super hard to go back to day 3. That problem led me to centralize all the posts in a newsletter on Behiive. That way all the updates are there and if people want to follow along, they'll get an email.

Here's a breakdown of my journey so far:

The first 5 days were the figuring public posting out and getting into the flow of writing every day. I am committed to doing this for a whole month, then I'll decide if I want to change the frequency.

I started talking about all the mistakes I made in the past. (highly recommend reading it if you want to know what NOT to do). I also talked about how I was planning to approach the new SaaS.

I explained my strategy:

I had a problem I wanted to solve
I made a hypothesis
Started doing user interviews to confirm the hypothesis

5 days is a long time in startup time, but it paid off big time. I have met several wonderful people and forged new connections.

Took day 6 off. I just put together an "investor update" and enjoyed my Sunday.

I spent the first 3 days of this week doing user interviews. I spoke with 5 people from a wide range of backgrounds. After the first 5, I heard enough people telling me they had similar problems. I could safely start building something.

I spent the last 3 days:

- posting an update every day

- doing more user interviews - 8 in total so far

- building an MVP

This is not the normal journey people would want to go through, this was my choice. I missed working with people and posting in public allows me to connect more.

What I've done can be generalized in 3 steps:

Step 1 find a problem to solve

I spoke at length about this in previous posts.

Not solving a problem was the ONE reason why my previous startup failed.

Making $10k a month or reaching $100K in ARR are not problems. I have seen tons of posts from people saying they want to start a company and their goal is $10k a month. That's the wrong way to start. The worst part is that some of them will succeed and tell everybody about their success. Beware of that type of post.

Step 2 talk with as many people as you can

I always thought of startup building as a series of processes to do one after the other.

Find a problem, talk to people about it, build something that solves the problem, and get customers.

The past 12 days have taught me otherwise. You can and should do most of the above in parallel.

Start talking with people. After the first 4 or 5 interviews you'll have enough info to decide whether you can start building.

If you hear similar problems from people you're on the right track. If none of them has the problem you're trying to solve, that's not good. Maybe you should find more people to talk to or pivot to a different problem.

After 4 or 5, do not stop! Each interview adds precious information that you can use now or in the future. You're also forging connections with people.

This is a secret weapon I didn't have in my previous attempt.

It's very likely that people will ask you for updates or will want to see progress. They will generally root for you. It's incredible what you can do when you have support from people.

Step 3 build really fast

Build an initial prototype in the most scrappy way you can think of. Use any trick in the books to get things working well enough that you can show people something working.

Iterate on it every day. Don't plan 10 feature, plan 1. Don't plan for the week, plan for today. Make it so that you can make significant progress every single day. After a week of this is very likely you'll have a product running.

Once you have a product running, put a price tag on it and start getting customers.

Step 3 is where I am right now and the part where I'm struggling the most.

I'm an engineer and I wrote decent code all my life. I normally build stuff that would last for a while. Nobody wants to hire an engineer who builds stuff that needs rewriting every few months.

But this time is different. I need something to show people as quickly as possible.

I put all my mistakes out in the open so here's what I screwed up this week:

I wasted an hour fighting with dark mode on NextJs using Tailwind. I don't need dark mode now.
I spent 3 hours trying out different ways to store analytics data. I was trying to optimize space and const at scale. I don't have scale, this was a colossal waste of time

I need to build something that will need to be rewritten in a couple of months, why do I waste time adding dark mode?!

What's helping is posting a progress update every day.

This forces me to have something meaningful to write about or be labeled as a hypocrite. I don't like that.

Here's everything I've done so far and I would start if could go back 2 years.

What do you think of this 3-step plan? good or bad? let me know in the comments, I'd love to hear your opinion

Progress update

- I'm currently validating a hypothesis. "People are willing to pay for a product that makes it easy to create high-converting landing pages." I have enough data to start building something.

- I have recruited 12 people to do a user interview, and I've interviewed 8 people so far.

- I'm shipping part of the MVP daily. Yesterday I added a simple analytics tool to see how many people saw a page and the CTR of the page. Today I'm adding a simple UI layer so I can show it to people. I'll add some screenshots in one of my next posts

From 0 to MPV in 3 steps

Here's what I've done - Live-building a SaaS in public, day 12

Progress update

Celebrations

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