WuASM Episode 4 - More MVP Talk

Captions as YouTube publishes them, usually machine-generated, so product and people names can be misheard.

1. 8:42

   good morning welcome back to another edition of wake up and more uh I am your host Joe from devhub uh I am going to talk about all kinds of different things here uh if you're new to the show uh we are focused on really trying to get in the habit of building more of we're trying to uh understand how to better ship we are trying to do all the things that uh are related to software development not necessarily just

2. 9:14

   blockchain but just in general uh we are right now in the midst of talking about uh MVPs uh we first talked about app architecture which you can kind of go back and do we're going to do more on on some of that stuff in the future as well uh yesterday I introduced some of the concepts around like how you make decisions for um you know a MVP and like where does it fit in what type of MVP do you actually need uh where that all go in

3. 9:47

   today uh in this episode I want to talk a little bit more about the MVP process but also I want to talk about uh a specific case study and use that as the example because I think think maybe that might help contextualize some of the topics that we were talking about yesterday so let's just kind of Dive Right into some of this here and so uh yesterday when we were talking about uh an MVP it really came down to this

4. 10:20

   top part here like you know do I I you know do I have an idea can I execute uh do I understand what problem trying to solve and who's my audience part of this and can I prove can I show these different things here and we talked about you know a little bit yesterday of okay I need some kind of front end to show what this is going to look like um what kind of actual functionality do I need what kind of actions are going to

5. 10:47

   be in there and then obviously you know just like how do I collect feedback and so we talked a little bit about that yesterday so I go I encourage you to go back if you haven't seen that episode uh in and and check that out also here is we also talked about you know again like what comes into my decision- making around my MVP and sometimes it's something as simple as like you know uh what is my goal right why am i showing you this MVP why aren't

6. 11:20

   I why AR like what is the point of me building this this uh trim down version of my like big vision and so you know and then what is the absolute minimum to actually build out to have something that's MVP and then you know that's some of the things that we talked about there but I think it's really important that we kind of dive into you know some more of this stuff here and I was doing a

7. 11:53

   little uh you know I was doing a little work yesterday afternoon just trying to see if I could find some like good case studies around MVPs and one of the things that I came across was that kind of as I mentioned on yesterday's stream was that like everyone has some different opinions of like what's what is a good MVP and the and I think it's important context that like the concept of the MVP really was born out of a a

8. 12:25

   book and strategy called The Lean Startup and this is again this is kind of coming out of Silicon Valley idea of being able to you know uh iterate quickly move fast get good feedback uh it also if you follow along in like software productivity stuff and uh processes and things like that you know you may have heard of the concept of like Agile development and Agile development is you know uh works like

9. 12:55

   with this hand inand right cuz I can I'm constantly iterating um constantly shipping something but what we're talking about right now is like that first phase like my initial like what am I getting out the door as my first version that are going to go to some audience's hands and like again you really need to determine what your audience is so uh I want to talk a little bit about this case study I found cuz I think

10. 13:28

    that's going to be the best best way to describe this all the way through so let's uh let's change this set up here okay so we're going to change uh how how this this looks a little bit here so I found this this is from this company uh altar. um I don't know anything much about them I'm not necessarily promoting them but they have this excellent uh case study and so I want to make sure I gave them credit uh so they use Airbnb as the example uh I don't know if they actually

11. 14:02

    did any work for Airbnb or they just did this as a case study but this was exactly what I was talking about yesterday so uh if you don't know what Airbnb is Airbnb is a uh booking platform where people can rent out like their own property to other people it's essentially competing with like hotels and um things like that and it's been very successful over the years and it's really grown quite a bit but they started with an MVP and them starting

12. 14:34

    with that mvp I think is critical to really understanding you know if they had any kind of product available because at the time right like when this was first being thought of like there was nothing like it you know and so they they need to be able to actually show like what's going on so the problem was here so let's just talk this through together a little bit because I think this will be really instructive when we talk about how do you determine what an

13. 15:03

    MVP is going to be so they first started with you know what is air BB's problem and look you know it's this is a nice problem statement and I will I'll pause right here and say uh hopefully the project that you're working on you're trying to build is addressing some kind of particular problem and when we say the word problem we don't necessarily mean that like something is wrong and you're trying to fix something what we say problem is is

14. 15:37

    like what is what is the point of your software essentially like why like why would anyone care to use your software and that kind of sounds off the cuff of git but like that's what we're talking about so here it is Travelers around the world cannot find an easy way to book a room with a a local and or become a host so the main existing offer for tourism accommodation is a hotel which is not

15. 16:00

    adopted to the princip preferences of Millennials because it leaves them disconnected from the city and the culture okay so that's what they're saying airbnb's problem was now here is the part this is very like terminology heavy um which I don't whatever that's everyone's different choice you know this is like very kind of like corporate but whatever um they value proposition right so this is a fancy way of just

16. 16:25

    saying like again how are they solving this problem here we B's Online Marketplace to connect Travelers with local hosts once I could list their available space to local tourism make extra money and The Travelers can book these unique places from the locals saving money hopefully and getting a chance to interact with them that was the original idea so and they realized now Their audience is going to be two

17. 16:49

    parts and this is again what we were talking about yesterday right so right so who is in my audience right and and this is you know I I think really important when I think about again what am I what is my MV CU if I just made the booking site in this example for Airbnb then I'm I I don't have my host in mind right like so I need to be able to see both sides of it so it is right it's the it's the traveler and the host both these

18. 17:29

    are my audience so my MVP has to actually serve both of them if I'm trying to get across the the value right here of my product the problem that I am solving for the reason why I am building this app this is my audience I need to be able to show something to so that's a really important piece that 100% goes back to what we were talking about here of what kind of actions yesterday we talk about like needs to be there what kind of you know like who is going

19. 18:08

    to actually be using this right we need to really understand that okay let's continue um we don't care it doesn't matter so much about who's dealing with it today um why is a better solution um again we don't necessarily these these two parts right now um you can look at what airbnb's elevator pitches it's not really relevant to what we're talking about right now okay so what are the main assumptions though out of the elevator

20. 18:40

    pitch this this is the part that I thought was much more important to get across when we're talking about again like what is my MVP going to be like what am I going to build first right so what does a traveler need to actually be able to do and so you know uh they want to be able to maybe uh be hosted in a private venue have a genuine experience okay so again so that's again I need to be able to book places right uh they

21. 19:10

    willing to share venues with total strangers um again so so my booking system needs to allow maybe multiple things that you know so that's kind of ambiguous uh then they say Travelers want to stay in a private venue on a consistent basis so again I need to be able to book it like a hotel even though it's not a hotel okay so that's just basically what we're getting at the hosts need to be able to actually short Rend out their stuff right they want to be able to do this multiple times they

22. 19:41

    make a listing so they need to be able to set their property to essentially act like a hotel and be able to be booked like a hotel except that uh in this example here you know they are maybe off the market at different times right okay great um I don't keep with the rest of the stuff okay so can you actually get to an MVP based off these main assumptions okay and the answer is absolutely yes

23. 20:16

    like because again like we have now broken down exactly like who our initial audiences and how do we actually starty to validate and how do we actually again let's go back to here how do I actually get to a point where it's like look you know who are who is my audience we know who that is we say yeah can I just build a front end for this now now that I know this of course right it doesn't have to be super fancy either because I'm just trying to

24. 20:50

    see and show how this will work right so yep we can do that so we can have a front end that allows both listing listing and booking easy enough what kind of actions need to be on there right and so I need to have some real actions I can't really mock all of this maybe I can mock some things but I I probably want to have a lot of real actions on here and then I need a way for feedback right so I certainly I definitely need wave feedback I need a lot of uh tracking in here of how things

25. 21:21

    are being used uh and how like the booking system is working making sure there's no like collisions and things like that um so we certainly want a ton of logging we want ways for people to give feedback so we can certainly this fits all of the things that like we're talking about so super super straightforward there right okay so let me let me go here hold I'm just uh want turn my branding back on here uh also here so

26. 21:58

    they say you know while building a nonfunctional MVP would be cheaper it only give us metrics of Market interest it's much more valuable to gain indicators of actual retention and actually show yeah this is exactly exactly what I was talking about yesterday okay sorry it's uh it's warm in my office today uh so this is exactly what we I was talking yesterday like there's a lot of times where like just a design so just a figma or whatever else is like not really appropriate like just having a nonfunctional MVP doesn't fit for this

27. 22:39

    and so when you're evaluating like what you're trying to do you know can we do this and so that's where again I I I really think it's important that you're like taking good effort and time to like actually go in to actually go and like say look you know I can get this kind of feedback right so I can get this like smaller kind of feedback of like hey is this idea relevant you know like does this make sense to you that's the where we talking again talking about yesterday like does this idea just make sense sure

28. 23:17

    like a design a non-functional MVP great like you can certainly do that but if I actually want to dive in and like get a sense of like hey do people understand how to do this can I show like what it looks like to have pardon me a Marketplace essentially what is that what is it going actually be so then I have to really start to think about like what is again the actual minimum part so here again what is my absolute

29. 23:48

    minimum to be able to show this we come to the conclusion that a design is not is not my absolute minimum it's too too it's far too far below it okay so we need to get away from that so if I can't use a design okay all right so so the design is out so I need to start to think about like what is the bare minimum and so again we going to need some kind of website run end okay and we're going to have to have it into two parts here all right and that's going to come down to again right

30. 24:29

    it's the traveler and the host cool right so I need to be able to I need to serve both of these people here okay Additionally you know and I I I think this is a a part that is maybe you know maybe overlooked a little bit here is again I don't I don't want to uh overdo it here as well so even though like I have like this this larger need to serve both of these I think we need to be very careful about like what's in each because you could easily spin out

31. 25:17

    and like start having tons of stuff being built for these and so we don't we have to just be careful so this case study does a nice job of breaking down like really simply like what is those minimum features and like can we just focus on an MVP of like just those features and so as a traveler I want to see houses with prices and profiles with ratings so I see I feel safe and so that's an important part here right so it's not just about the listing so the the

32. 25:49

    minimums I need to be able to to show like oh this is what it's going to look like I I need to be able to actually give people some more information uh have credits of some kind of referral system okay so that's interesting that they determined that like a a referral system was important as part of the MVP now why do they think that well in this example here they're actually going for a full version one MVP where it's

33. 26:19

    like actually going to be you it's not a beta it is not just it's not just in like a test mode it's like we're going we want people to actually come and use this so we want to be able to have some virality so we need some kind of referral system interesting thought process uh certainly makes sense like if you're kind of going live uh you want to capture attention and you want to reward attention so that's that's a valid way that's a

34. 26:50

    valid component to all this as a host right so I need to do some things here so this is the other part of this right so we have two parts all right I want to see uh the applications of The Travelers so I can actually accept them and I can feel safe who I'm allowing in and I will say um the original idea too around Airbnb was more around uh like you are renting a room in someone's house and they're there um

35. 27:19

    so uh it maybe seems kind of wild like I know that's a lot smaller piece of Airbnb now more people are using it as like I'm renting this out please don't be there uh kind of thing and then I have it Airbnb help me get the best for outside of my house uh including maybe like some incentives and marketing stuff um and again this is going to determine like what based off of what your businesses and so from there you can kind of start to iterate let see I can find a picture if you don't remember or

36. 27:52

    haven't seen it before let's find a picture of like what the original lbnb uh yeah this there's a let me show let's see oh here we go here's one picture of it so like when you would uh search so like when you would search you know like this is kind of how the search looked it was like very simplistic uh this is the logo uh let me find another good picture here uh where's the thing here oh here's a good one with some listings

37. 28:49

    here yeah this actually this a good picture because it has a before and after let me find let me show you this picture here too okay so like this is where it starts right and this is like where it ends you know here let's we can we can zoom in a little bit here so you can see you know some different things here uh they actually had ads on the site and everything um now like it looks more

38. 29:19

    like this and so looks a lot better okay let's go back here so uh you can see there's like an an interation like there's a there's a growth there so with these two things in mind right what are we building and so this goes for like your project here right so it's just like what we were talking about yesterday so I have a website I have the both these things so my minimum though here based of what they're talking about is I'm going to still need you know obviously a back end and like in that back end you

39. 29:52

    know this is where like again I I can't emphasize this enough for your own project and you really have to take take the time to go through the work of this what is my absolute minimum what am I actually having to build here and I'm telling you like this is where people get caught up and you know it can go bad both both ways it can go bad I can overbuild and I can like just do too

40. 30:17

    much and I've now built too much to before I actually are able to do anything else you know and now I've maybe had this technical debt or time sync or whatever else and now I'm in a bad spot or I can go the other way and I just haven't built enough it's not functional enough uh I'm missing pieces and I don't maybe have actual technical debt but I am actually missing key features here that is you know uh not technical debt that I have to go back to technical debt that I'm just missing and

41. 30:49

    so like that's a that's a problem in its own right so you really have to be careful here and so let me let me switch it wrong switching here we want to switch to this here we go so you know I I I want to really be clear here on like when we talk about like what goes into the back end of this part of it is you really have to determine like back to some initial discussions around app architecture right so like what is going to be in this architecture if I need I'm going to need a database in this example right so

42. 31:21

    I have my DB uh I'm going to need all kinds of apis but the thing is here is like like which you know because as like you're planning and as you're thinking about like your product you know there's a lot that you that can go into here but again if I think about my features that they were just talking about they were just talking about again I need to see housing listings I need to see profile

43. 31:46

    listings I need to be able to actually have an action of booking something I need to make sure like the schedules like you know line up right so I need to make sure that that fits I need to be able to you know have maybe some kind of uh communication whatever you know I have a whole series of apis so I need to be able to structure these two things together in concert of meeting again that that bare minimum also on the back

44. 32:17

    end this is a a a a tough case but you have to think a little bit about how your app is going to get used and this is an MVP so we don't want to go crazy if you've ever tried to use any of these different services like AWS Google Cloud Azure whatever it might be one of the things you might see is like uh you know you could there's a million different options you can get into and like all of a sudden your cost start ballooning and next thing you know it's like you have a $22,000 a month

45. 32:48

    Bill and no one's using your app yet right so you have to really be careful you have to be very selective on how you start to do things so this is where part of this is actually uh you actually think of like resources here okay like what are my minimum resources here as well and this also maybe goes into like Personnel so like this is both like you know uh so we'll call this like infra we'll call this

46. 33:19

    people right so I have infra I have people I have uh both you know both these considerations here and from that I then have to just say okay you know what is what is going to what is going to get me get me going the beauty of cloud stuff is you know you can actually scale pretty easily if you need to um and so you can start pretty small and I would always suggest to Smart Start on the smallest possible same

47. 33:52

    thing goes like on on chain right so if I'm doing something that now involves like on blockchain right so blockchain is part of this then I need to really make sure that I am being careful of like what is actually being used here can I use testnet right can I use my my whatever my chain test net is maybe but in this example here like if it involves like booking something I don't want it to be on testet We want it to be on mayet because it needs to be uh you know

48. 34:27

    it it needs to cuz testnets can get like wiped out different issues can happen on testnet um it's a different level of reliability and also like we don't want this whole set of like my early days was only on test net and so my transactions are all there and so now I mve to main net and have you know I'm trying to bridge these things or trying to migrate data uh you need to think about really actually being on Main net you know even at a

49. 34:58

    smaller scale so that means again like what are for this example too like what are the minimal contracts that I need you know how complex does my contract have to be um it's a it's a lot to consider if you have anything that's Financial going through there you're going to probably want your contract audited you know and so that's a big cost and that's hard for your MVP so that actually has to be a consideration here of like what actually needs to be part of that

50. 35:35

    okay then I need to actually put all the pieces together and actually have like a V1 of my product and when people are using my product this all goes back to the stuff yesterday is this part here how am I going to get feedback how am I going to track what's actually happening how how do I know that people are actually you know using this that are people actually part of this and actually you know learning from this so uh that's what we really want to make

51. 36:16

    sure that we're actually addressing so this becomes now the considerations for my MVP there is this great graphic to here now let's switch back to uh here so when you think about like how you move up through your MVP that it shouldn't be like this top one right like this is this is like when I'm trying to get to a car right it's not like I'm having pieces of my car and now like that is how I eventually get to

52. 36:55

    like from MVP to a bigger thing this is more like uh hey you know like we're we're going to start at you know a skateboard we're going to move to a scooter and we're going to continually move our way up through our iterations to get to that car and the reason why is because when you go this top route uh you run into a couple different issues that I think are not well not always discussed clearly to new developers one is that like you are

53. 37:35

    essentially segmenting off parts of your app in order to have an MVP the problem is is that like one from a building and architecture standpoint this could end up being a nightmare like super fast like you could actually really spiral into something that um like your architecture is just not making sense you are piling on technical that it's just not a great route to go I would

54. 38:00

    never suggest that to someone also two when you start just having all these different components like part of the problem becomes that you are now component managing and you're not really product building anymore and that might sound similar but it's actually different where I'm not I I'm not holistically thinking about my whole product anymore I'm simply thinking about like oh well I have this component and yeah it doesn't really work exactly

55. 38:23

    the way I want to do we're missing stuff but once it connects to the other part of the comp component right now I have oh uh you know two wheels right or now I have the the chassis here it's all going to work together it's like well that's not a great approach and now you're constantly like you're you're not providing a good user experience you're not serving your own developers and your time and everything else while your

56. 38:46

    feedback is not going to be as relevant where if you start with the other approach of like look I'm here's the smallest version of my app okay this this works this app works it does what it needs to do this is the smallest version of it it doesn't have to look super pretty it doesn't have to be really like super full featured it does it does what it needs to do right it's uh you know I don't know if this

57. 39:10

    translates through other uh Lang languages and countries but like the meat and potatoes of uh my product right it's just the basics where I then can grow and start adding in other features you know expanding my product right and I can do that in a way way of like you know if this is version one maybe this is version two this is version three and I'm iterating I'm making it better I'm expanding on it and now I

58. 39:38

    have this much better experience overall of leading towards the car right so that's where I I think you need to start to consider your own product and that's why in the example here in talking about you know Airbnb a a little bit is it really made sense to use this as an example because you could see where like just thinking about a product like Airbnb there's a million ways that you could go like your first version could

59. 40:12

    be super bloated right off the bat but if you're taking that time and you're just pulling back a little bit here and saying like you know look what is my true version one you know what is what do I need to start getting this in people's hands you know who's going to be my initial audience can I have that initial product that's all stuff for me that I think is super important and that's all we need to really focus on so if we pull all of that together now we can start to actually build our first

60. 40:44

    product and then like this little graphic here at the bottom here let me zoom in so you can see that better so now like I can go through these different steps and I can start to expand I can start to think about okay here's my basic of the API which apis do I need for this first version for my skateboard he there all right look at what happened to my other camera Let's see we can get everything back here all

61. 41:38

    right let's change it at least to this camera which is not my normal camera all right what is happening here just pause and we'll be right back on hey we're back we are back all right so gotta live live I don't know why that happened um anyways we're wrapping up here anyways this part uh so let's let's just quickly recap and uh we can we can we can end on this here uh I would I will definitely say that we

62. 42:39

    want to make sure that again with our MVP that we are being very considerate of what exactly lets us go from A to B to C and again in that graphic this is I can still show that graphic here CU I think again this is this is a great graphic right this is a really you know excellent breakdown of that's not what I want here we go of like the different steps here of how we want to approach this so if I can go from all these different parts of like again what is the bare minimum what's a

63. 43:23

    little bit more and still a full product and in each step this is a full product and I think that's the important part is a skateboard is a full product a scooter is a full product a bicycle is a full product where here like this is not a full product up here if I'm just building components and I'm just sticking components together I do not have a full product until I get to the end and now I might not get to the end I might not have money I might not have

64. 43:47

    time I might not have resources I might not have validated my idea people might see my thing and be like what the heck is this so you know we we we need to be cautious about that I also want to really make sure that I'm we're emphasizing again how you make decisions about what you decide to build uh and this is something where again if you're going to take time and try to you know actually build here that

65. 44:24

    we talked about down below here if you you see of like what a apis are being needed here what resources are needed and this again if I'm taking this approach here I can scale accordingly so I'm going to leave you with with this part here that we really need to be thoughtful and plan how each stage will go your MVP really needs to actually be thought of as a the like again the bare minimum of a product that can get you feedback and actually works and then you can iterate if you're

66. 45:03

    taking any other approach um you're asking again you could still be successful there's no like perfect right answer or wrong answer but you really need to just be thoughtful about this because you can put yourself in a bad situation uh at this point you know again we're going to talk more about some some building stuff some architecture stuff I definitely want to dive into more of you know what does it look like to start to plan out your apis

67. 45:35

    uh I think that's a big part that sometimes people forget so when you know you're designing your front end you know and you're designing your whole app and your architecture you know the the data flow is really Paramount to how your product runs I would say unless you're building a game even game needs data right but unless you're building like a game I mean everything every other product otherwise is really data driven everything's a front end for some kind

68. 46:04

    of data set so you need to really be considerate of how are you getting that data where the data coming from how you're restructuring everything and so we'll we're going to talk about um API we're going to talk about that stuff we're going to talk about pulling data from on chain and putting data on chain as well and we're going to talk about the blockchain parts of that as well that's all coming coming up in in up in

69. 46:28

    future episodes here so plenty more to get into uh if you haven't uh you can join the telegram group below and you can always ask questions there uh you can go back and watch any of the replays on our YouTube channel uh I really encourage everyone to you know take time and go through all of that uh and come back with questions hey I just watched episode two that you know can you explain more of this uh things like that so that the telegram

70. 47:00

    group is a great place for that as well uh we will be back uh soon with the next episode maybe tomorrow uh maybe early next week uh but I certainly encourage you to uh come continue to check these out uh I mentioned early on that there are going to be some actions that are going to build up towards something and people who are regular Watchers people who are participating uh will build towards something so if you hadn't uh already uh you can claim this nft here and that

71. 47:33

    that's kind of phase one and then uh the next phase is is coming up next week um so I wanted to give it a couple weeks for the first phase get people introduced then we'll jump into the more stuff uh I hope this is informative for people uh please ask questions please feel free to suggest topics uh you know bring things up uh I this can be uh certainly more interactive and I want

72. 47:55

    this to be helpful to people of as they're trying to build so uh this has been a little bit more MVP hopefully this gives you a better sense of like how to Think Through Your MVP uh nothing is prescriptive you can always again uh you need to make your own decisions on your product but this is hopefully the framework of what you need to actually do it uh so until next week uh or until

73. 48:18

    next time uh this is been wake up and chipm more I appreciate everyone coming out and watching uh please share this if you thought this was helpful uh and please join