Found a product idea on Twitter & made a MVP in 3 hours. I just reached $40 of sales with it!

Nico
7 replies
Hey PH! 😁 This is my first post in the PH discussion and I wanted to share a small win! Two weeks ago, I was reading comments on Twitter, when I saw someone asking "With all the A.I. stuff, would it be possible to restore old photos?" I was already doing it for my mom, as she's a big fan of genealogy. I didn't wasted time making a whole product, I just made a quick landing page in plain HTML, added a Typeform to upload pictures + collect payments, and then I answered the tweet saying I made a landing page for him. It worked and I got the first sale from it. Made the picture, sent them to him, and he was happy with the results. (The back-end was basically me manually using my pipeline of models to edit the pictures) I then posted the story on IndieHackers, it ended up on the first page, and I got lots of attention from it! I know for sure I got a few sales from it, but not sure how much exactly. I haven't done any marketing yet, other than posting two updates on my personal Twitter and answering "Describe your app in X words" posts on Twitter. Next step is to automate the whole thing (almost done, currently testing with some users), start promoting it a bit, then launching on ProductHunt! $40 in 2 weeks might not seems much, but it's only my second project that generated some money, so I'm pretty happy about it 😁

My key takeaways:

• Fast is better than perfect • Doing things manually can help you test your workflow. Here I can make sure the quality is the best and make adjustments • Automation after validation: manually processing the photos isn't scalable, but it's not a problem unless I have too much sales. I could

Replies

Joonas Hämäläinen
Congrats! :) Looks like you've naturally followed main princibles in good product development. Fast is always better than perfect, when needing to validate idea, and if it gets any attention. Doing things manually initially saves a lot of coding, which allows things to be done fast. And then you don't code things that are not wanted / not needed, instead you have real user experiences to take in account when actually coding.
Nico
@kerberos Exactly! For me a MVP shouldn't take more than 1 or 2 weeks, it it takes longer, then MVP will be a landing page to join the waitlist haha
Nico
For those who are interested, I also made a post writing in real-time when I was doing the app: https://jeannen.com/making-an-ap... 😁
Jean Matthee
That is what I call moving fast! I do like that you knew getting it out quickly was probably more important than trying to perfect the whole backend. In my opinion you needed to only validate the idea and once the idea was validated, in your case It seems like it was, then you can start polishing the things around the idea to make it a quality experience and product. Thanks for the share!
Sean Riordan
That is awesome! Congrats! Make sure you have a corporate vision and then some strategic vision items to constantly upgrade your service and you will be super successful. Good luck and stay excited! S Riordan/mpf234 Founder - My Place Forever Corp