A Pragmatic Approach
You have made some awesome moves already! You know what you are passionate about and perhaps you have already created a very first Minimum Viable Product (MVP). This could be a website, a survey, or maybe even a very simple app. It does not really matter how it manifests itself. The only thing that is important here is that it is something that could prove your hypothesis and it is something that requires only minimal effort. Learn from the feedback that you get, and figure out if your earliest assumptions are correct. If so, it is time for the next step.
In this chapter, we will see how to move on and how to deal with one of the biggest challenges of a startup. Time and timing are essential. This is particularly true for a bootstrapped startup. We will look at how to get things done when nothing is there yet and when the most important resources (time and money) are very limited. What you need is the right mindset and a very pragmatic approach.
You do not need a huge office and all kinds of fancy stuff. Also, you do not need many rules, but most of the time things do not happen automatically. Anyhow, we need a few rules, no matter how cool your startup may be. A pragmatic approach is a nice balance between total chaos and bureaucracy. You will keep a clear focus on what you want to accomplish, and developing new features is not going to take you longer than strictly needed. Such an approach will result in developing exactly the required functionality during a particular stage of your app.
There are no shortcuts in startup land when searching for a product-solution or a product-market fit, but as a developer you often do not need to reinvent the wheel. Readymade solutions are widely available for most situations. For example, in Chapter 8, Cloud Solutions for App Experiments, we will investigate which parties are offering a Mobile Backend as a Service (MBaaS), and in Chapter 10, There Is an API for That!, we will look at various mash-up ideas. Such solutions are real-time savers irrespective of whether you are just using them to build an MVP or using them during the whole lifetime of your app.
Specifically, we will cover the following topics:
- Learn about the benefits of timeboxed programming
- See what options are available to get started with nothing
- Demonstrate how to keep things well structured
- Investigate whether there are any shortcuts