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grantmagdanz

1 karma · joined April 29, 2023

Co-founder of gm.xyz. Find me @grantmagdanz on Twitter.
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grantmagdanz··on How do you determine the scope of your MVP?
I struggle with this question too. It's always tough since as the creator you always see the flaws in what you're building. Here are my 2c, hope it helps:

1. What is your core value prop? An MVP isn't a set of features necessarily, but it should solve a specific problem that you think your users have.

2. What do you still need to learn about your users? What is the shortest path to learning those things? If your product is like most others, it will almost certainly change once you get it into the hands of users. Optimize for learning, not "correctness".

3. What is stopping you from launching? For me, it's often a fear of failure. When it isn't, I rarely question whether I should launch or not. I know the product isn't ready. I then ask myself, what am I afraid of? Usually it's that either 1) no one will care or 2) people will care and the product won't be ready so people will churn.

Taking those individually, I try to shift "no one caring" to actually relieve pressure. If no one cares, then what's there to be afraid of? As for 2, if the product isn't ready and people churn, there will be more users and you will learn a ton.

I find it's helpful to think of launching an MVP as a learning opportunity. I mean this in the most genuine, helpful way: the most likely case is that people won't care and there is a ton of learning in that.

One last thing: you may have already read this but PG has an essay called The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups that covers both launching too early and launching too late: http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html

I hope this was helpful, best of luck!

grantmagdanz··on Ask HN: Share your favorite lesser-known productivity tools for remote work
This is a stretch and might not be what you're looking for but Airalo has changed how I work when I'm traveling in another country. It makes it trivial to get high speed, cheap cellular data. I often rely on this to hotspot in cafes, trains, even hotels / AirBnBs, etc.
grantmagdanz··on Ask HN: Conference recommendations for a CS first year undergrad?
I've only been to a four conferences I think so take all of this with a grain of salt. Where is the interest in attending a conference coming from? Learning something new? Meeting new people?

Conferences are generally really expensive for an individual, even with discounts. Most conferences price attendance with the expectation that a company is going to foot the bill. There are other, more effective, and cheaper ways to both learn new things and meet new people assuming one or both of those are your goals. For example, if it's just about learning many conferences post talks online after the fact for free. Vercel has a Next.js conference if you are interested in web work. AWS re:Invent has some great talks around backend architecture.

The conferences I've gone to have been corporate events (Microsoft, Oracle, GitHub) and I will say the one unique thing about them was direct, easy access to their employees to ask questions and get help with specific issues.

If you post some more specific goals and areas of interest, I or others might be able to point you in a few directions to explore (including some conferences). Also, feel free to ignore! You know yourself best, and it's your journey.