Startup Resources: Minimum Viable Product
How to define a minimum viable product (MVP); how to build prototypes quickly and cheaply. See the "Idea, Design, MVP" chapter in Part I, Products for more info.
These startup resources are based on the book Hello, Startup: A Programmer's Guide to Building Products, Technologies, and Teams by Yevgeniy Brikman. These resources are a work in a progress. They are also open source, so you can add your contributions by submitting a pull request to the Hello, Startup GitHub Repository. To see how these resources fit into the bigger picture, check out the The Startup Checklist, which is a comprehensive collection of everything you need to do to launch a startup.
Landing Pages
Tools that help you quickly build a landing pages, drive traffic to it, capture email addresses, and A/B test different copy and designs.
Yola
https://www.yola.com/Create a professional, free website in minutes. Get leads, book appointments and sell online.
GitHub Pages
https://pages.github.com/Websites for you and your projects. Hosted directly from your GitHub repository. Just edit, push, and your changes are live.
Formspree
http://formspree.io/Just send your form to our URL and we'll forward it to your email. No PHP, Javascript or sign up required — perfect for static sites!
A/B Testing
A/B testing and multi-variate testing allow you to test changes to your products against each other and see which ones perform better.
Visual Website Optimizer
https://vwo.comEasily change the headline, button, image or any other element to create multiple variations of your website. VWO will equally divide your website traffic among all the variations and track which one works the best for you.
AdPushup
http://www.adpushup.com/Increase ad revenue from your website with advanced automatic A/B testing.
Modesty
https://github.com/causes/modestyModesty is a simple, scalable, open source split testing and event tracking framework.
How long will your experiment take?
http://www.experimentcalculator.comA simple calculator that you can use to calculate how long you should run an A/B test to get statistically significant results.
Explainer Video
Tools that make it easy to put together a video that explains your product.
PowToon
http://www.powtoon.com/Free business presentation software animated video maker and PowerPoint alternative
GoAnimate
http://goanimate.com/Make Professional Animated Videos. Easy learning curve. Low budget. Simple do-it-yourself tools.
Renderforest
https://www.renderforest.com/Renderforest is free online video maker. Easily create slideshows with music, promotional, explainer or animated business videos, logo animations, kinetic typography and more.
Freesound
https://www.freesound.org/Freesound is a collaborative database of Creative Commons Licensed sounds.
Musopen
https://musopen.org/Musopen is a 501(c)(3) non-profit focused on increasing access to music by creating free resources and educational materials. We provide recordings, sheet music, and textbooks to the public for free, without copyright restrictions. Put simply, our mission is to set music free.
Rapid prototyping tools
Localtunnel
http://localtunnel.me/Localtunnel allows you to easily share a web service on your local development machine without messing with DNS and firewall settings. Localtunnel will assign you a unique publicly accessible url that will proxy all requests to your locally running webserver.
Further Reading
A Minimum Viable Product Is Not a Product, It’s a Process
http://themacro.com/articles/2016/01/minimum-viable-product-process/A blog post that discusses one of the most common causes of startup failure and how to use the MVP process to avoid it.
The Guide to Minimum Viable Products
http://www.uxpin.com/guide-to-minimum-viable-products.htmlFree ebook about the art and science of building great products with minimum resources as practiced by companies like Twitter, Dropbox, Airbnb, and Buffer among others.
If your product is Great, it doesn't need to be Good.
http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2010/02/if-your-product-is-great-it-doesnt-need.htmlWhat's the right approach to new products? Pick three key attributes or features, get those things very, very right, and then forget about everything else.
