MVP - Alex Ponomarev

9 Sep 2023 · 4 min read

The Myth of the 10x Engineer Building Products in 10 Days

The open-source software community is a beautiful thing. As a kid, I was amazed by the universe of software available to play with and learn from. In the early 2000s,

9 Dec 2019 · 4 min read

How Zappos Built a Product By Faking It

OK, it wasn’t really faking it because there was a lot of work involved. It all started in 1999 when Nick Swinmurn, a software engineer from California, couldn’t

3 Dec 2019 · 3 min read

Build An Educational Product as Your MVP

Multiple kinds of MVPs exist, and each serves its own purpose. A fake door MVP allows you to test interest with only an ad. A smoke test MVP will provide

1 Dec 2019 · 4 min read

How Groupon Built an MVP Without Tech and Validated an Idea in a Month

In 2010, Groupon, a marketplace that offers its users deals with local merchants, had 700 copycat sites. Do you know the names of any of Groupon’s copycats? I don’

24 Nov 2019 · 4 min read

Should You Build a Core Team Before Building an MVP?

A prospective client of mine recently told me that his biggest struggle as a founder was dealing with procrastination. Procrastination happens when you have a task but it’s scary,

22 Nov 2019 · 4 min read

The Three Biggest Misconceptions About MVPs

Throughout the years, as I’ve built products for startups — each of which started as an MVP — I’ve worked with many founders who had major misconceptions surrounding what MVPs

20 Nov 2019 · 4 min read

Why Your MVP Probably Shouldn’t Be a Software Product

More often than not, it’s not a good idea to build software as your minimum viable product. Building software is risky. It’s time-consuming. It’s expensive. Especially if

19 Nov 2019 · 3 min read

Four Myths About What “Viable” Means In Minimum Viable Product

The goal of any business is to provide value to your customers. And the only trustworthy indication of whether you’re doing that — of whether your minimum viable product is,

15 Nov 2019 · 3 min read

What Is Pretotyping and How Is It Different from Prototyping and building MVP?

The term “pretotype” was coined by Alberto Savoia, former Engineering Director at Google. Ass he explains on his website, the main advantage of building a pretotype is to accelerate learning

14 Nov 2019 · 4 min read

What Is the Difference Between a Prototype and an MVP?

Using electric car manufacturing as an example, I’ll illustrate the difference first: A prototype for an electric car might be a wooden, life-size model of the car. The model

8 Nov 2019 · 3 min read

Minimum Viable Product Isn’t What You Think It Is

To fully understand what minimum viable product means, let’s first dissect the term, word by word. Minimum refers to the least amount of effort required to create something. Viable

7 Nov 2019 · 3 min read

How To Calculate The Real Cost Of MVP For Your Startup

Calculating the real cost of a minimum viable product (MVP) is so important to my development team that we’ve hired a business analyst who dedicates their time to getting

21 Aug 2019 · 4 min read

How to build an app 2x faster and cheaper

My journey into product development started from building websites back in 2004. The web was pretty much a collection of HTML pages with some CGI scripts sprinkled here and there.

2 Dec 2018 · 5 min read

How to choose a tech stack for your application

A tech stack is a set of programming languages, frameworks and software products that are used to build your application. A typical application consists of at least two layers — client-side

23 Sep 2018 · 4 min read

Make sure that your MVP is really minimal

I made a post earlier this week about why you might not need MVP at all. That post was poorly titled and my intended idea wasn’t very well described.

17 Sep 2018 · 4 min read

Why you might not need MVP at all

There are a lot of questions about building the MVP version of the app on this sub, so I decided to write a post based on recent discussions. I see