Before I go ahead and explain what’s what and what happened, I’d like to share how I used to work and how I keep optimizing my workflow. So, here it is. I was one of those designers/developers who spend a 30% of their time actually building stuff while spending the remaining in research to follow the best possible path. Even when I wrote, I wrote with the belief that the easy, conversational tone of good writing comes only on the eighth rewrite. As Will Smith in The Pursuit of Happyness would say — That part of my life was called, “Being Perfectionist”.
Who… Perfectionist… What?#
Perfectionist is a fictional term to describe an event of technical stupidity. Yes, stupidity, while there are people who won’t agree with me but if you are someone who wants to work with the ideal workflow, to produce ideal products, and get ideal results then you my friend are delusional. There’s no such thing as IDEAL/PERFECT.
Running after an ideal state will only make you realize, after enough expense of time, that it was not worth it. I don’t know how and when, what happened but at least about two years ago, it was Jan 2013 when I first understood this term called MVP (late to the party). The minimum viable product. I was like, why didn’t I know that before
The Minimum Viability…#
According to Wikipedia the minimum viable product (MVP) is the product with the highest return on investment versus risk. I am an EMBA student at the moment, but instead of discussing the technical bull, I’ll just come straight to the point.
So, the Concept of MVP Is; When#
- you get an idea and after some research, your subconscious mind suggests you to follow it
- you start building your product, but you keep it simple and build only what matters the most
- you build and launch it as quickly as you could, in the least possible amount of time to help reduce the risk factor in the case of failure and increase the ROI (return on investment) in the case of success
Enough with the story? This concept of building a product and launching it right away was awesome. I’m practicing it for about two years now, this strategy has turned my life upside down is so many ways, that I can’t even begin to explain (read as, I am explaining it anyway :P )
There were several reasons behind building an MVP instead a full-fledged product, one of them was ‘How it felt working on your product after 6 months which is yet to be released’…
My Workflow in Ref to MVPs#
So, WPMetaList.com was an idea, that said, I’ve always been a big fan of HackerNews and then came ProductHunt. Being in love with WordPress and unable to find a similar site for WordPress niche, I decided to build one.
i.e. A platform to feature creative, cool and intuitive WordPress Products every week and then allowing WordPress followers to vote & share their recommendations by voting or writing comments.
It was September 2014, I guess. I even bought a domain WPHawker.com. Came January and a few holidays, I thought this is the best time to build it. Spent a week building the site, designing the layout, figuring out the workflow and dealing with complex responsive media queries (read as not so complex). When someone asked how long it took me to build something like that, I was like…
So, when I was done, I posted it over social media asking for feedback. Amazing feedback, a few people were more than happy to contribute to making it better, you know, WordPress community; always helping each other out. Two years ago, I would’ve never attempted to build a product this way. It must have taken at least three months, one month for market research, one and a half for design & development and half a month for onboarding/copywriting/documentation and stuff. And after all, that work if someone had told me that WPHawker domain name sounds pretty weird, my reaction would’ve been something like this…
What Happened With the MVP Then?#
One of my friends in WordPress community, Ansel Taft, a friendly front end developer reached out to me right after Jean Galea from WPMayor.com had told me that he was not so sure about the name WPHawker. Ansel on the other hand, took his time, not only to provide me with feedback, he thought was critical, but also helped me brainstorm a new name. After 15-20 minutes of brainstorming, I was setting up the DNS for WPMetaList.com. And this time, after the feedback, my reaction was…
This is not all, more than 50 people with 100+ feedback comments/messages in 24 hours, YOU GUYS ROCK! You won’t find such an active and helping community anywhere else. You can call it one of the biggest reasons why I love WordPress.
To put it in a nutshell, I built something which could be useful with the risk of failure, but only built what was primarily needed, like there was even no newsletter signup form at that moment, and then Kim asked about it! So, I went ahead and coded one.
WPMetaList is doing just fine for a platform which is only 7 days old. Don’t take my word for it, ask around who registered, or register yourself after reading these stats.
- More than 2,500 visitors
- About 250 registered WordPress users (known developers, designers, plugin/product owners)
- 147+ votes casted in WPMetaList N.1 and 130+ product submissions by awesome WordPress businesses
- and about 48 subscribers through the newsletter called Mewsletter (= Newsletter + MetaList) which started three days ago
So, if you haven’t considered building a minimum viable product so far, try now and don’t forget to register yourself at WPMetaList.com
To Conclude#
I’d say; Yes! it’s started as a minimum viable product but that doesn’t mean, what I built was crap, I put about 50 working hours or so, to make it look better, I knew what I was doing (nine years of WordPress dev/design experience).
I kept the dev/design process agile as the feedback came in, almost 80% of it was built/fixed and shipped right within a week. I don’t want you to build crap, I want you to build and launch your products as soon as possible, don’t try to build the next big thing right from the start. Build a strong foundation! otherwise…
Ahmad Awais
You’re absolutely right, Ahamd.
Being a perfectionist is like being Stupid. Loved the post with some absolutely amazing GIFs. Thanks for sharing knowledge and laughs =D
Hi,
If you’re serious about the fact you changed the name of your domain then perhaps you want to update the title bar at the head of the browser.
It still reads “About WPHawker”
Cheers
Looks like we missed it. Out of 5 pages 1 was not edited. Thanks for letting us know. Fixed it!
Hi,
Your frontpage still says “At WPHawks, you can help WordPress community by voting up the products which deserve to be at the top.” ;)
Best regards,
J.
Hey thanks for picking it up. Fixed :)
I also agree in that ‘There’s no such thing as IDEAL/PERFECT.’ Mainly because such a perfection is a bit relative according to the viewer. And the funny images your post just made me laugh a bit! :-)
That’s the point :)