During the summer months, I embarked on a community challenge called Summer Startup, where my goal was to build and launch a mobile app in just 30 days. While it may seem daunting to develop an app in such a short timeframe, with the right approach, anyone can achieve this feat.

The traditional method of building software involves spending countless hours crafting a business plan, conducting extensive market research, and writing code without user feedback. This often results in a project that takes years to complete, only to find out that the market demand doesn't align with your initial assumptions. As Elon Musk wisely said, "the biggest mistake engineers make is solving problems that don't exist."

Is there a better way?

The Lean Startup methodology offers a more efficient approach to developing businesses and products. This framework aims to shorten product development cycles and rapidly discover whether a proposed business model is viable. At the core of Lean Startups are:

  • Hypothesis and Validated Learning
  • Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
  • Customer feedback over intuition
  • Iterative product releases
  • Flexibility over planning

Hypothesis and Validated Learning

Rather than treating our ideas as hard truths, we should view them as hypotheses to be validated or invalidated. This leads to learning. When a hypothesis is validated based on data and feedback from real customers, that's validated learning. Our initial goal in building a startup is to gather as much validated learning as possible through experimentation.

The Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

At the heart of the Lean Methodology is the MVP. This is a version of your app that allows you to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort. The MVP's primary goal is to test the most risky business assumptions and validate that there is a need for your solution.

Build something small, focused on the core feature, and get it in the hands of users as soon as possible. The MVP doesn't have to have the same shape or form as you envision it, but it should solve the same problem (or a subset of the bigger problem) that customers face. If your goal is to help people move from point A to point B, and your vision of solving the problem is building a car, start with a bike – it will take less time to build and still solve the need.

Customer Feedback Over Intuition

Once you have an MVP launched, you can begin basing your decisions on customer feedback over intuition. Even better, base your decisions on customers' actions and inactions. Most of the time, customers don't know what they want. Henry Ford famously said, "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."

Iterative Product Releases

After launching the MVP, you continue iterating on it, but this time, you're led by customer feedback. Fix major bugs that affect most users, work on the most requested features, and release them as soon as they're ready. With each iteration, keep a lean approach and apply the MVP concept to new features in the app. Don't jump head-first into development; implement the smallest version of that feature, run some experiments, check how people are using it, and if it's something they need. With more validated learning, you can continue improving it over time.

The Lean Startup in Practice

During the Summer Startup Challenge, my goal is to build and launch an app that helps couples and young families manage their finances. There are many features I'd like to develop, such as shared budgets, expense tracking, savings goals, bill reminders, financial overview, stock tracking, and debt management. Instead of diving into development, I want to gather some validated learnings first about how couples and families manage their finances.

For that reason, I'll focus on getting the app into users' hands as fast as possible and focus on a single feature – financial goals. In fact, I've already finished the MVP version of this feature in just three livestreams on YouTube, which took around 10 hours of development. By the end of the week, I'll have the MVP ready to be launched and start gathering feedback from real customers.

This will help me validate some of my assumptions and steer product development in the direction that benefits the customers. If you want to follow my journey, I'm documenting the whole process live on YouTube every Tuesday and Friday.

Common Pitfalls

When working with a lot of developers or stakeholders, it's easy to get sidetracked by feature creep or endless planning. Remember to prioritize gathering validated learnings over developing features.