Starting mowme.app
“If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.” — Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn.
“Better done than perfect” — my wife (Kate), and probably someone else.
“Don’t be afraid to start without knowing exactly where you’re going.” — honestly not sure, feel like I heard it at AWS Summit in Sydney earlier this year.
From the moment I had the idea for MowMe it was a constant struggle to not run away with thoughts on how perfect I wanted the front end to be, how seamless the customer experience would be, how smooth the supplier side would run. Thankfully I was put on to a book called The Lean Startup by Eric Ries, possibly by Tim (co-founder), but not sure, my memory isn’t what it used to be (that’s a lie, it has always been rubbish). That book came to me at exactly the right time, the part about Groupon starting with a single red t-shirt for sale put things in focus…
We don’t have to do everything from day one.
Tim, Bob and Richie have been great in keeping focus on a simple question; will that issue/bug stop us from launching? Over time, I started to think the same way.
So yes, the desktop landing page would look a hell of a lot better with some content in that vast white space, but was it going to get in the way of launching? No, it wasn’t
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Day 1, the process of handling payments will be a manual job at night, does that suck? Yes. Does it stop us from launching? No.
You get the point..
We quickly set up the usual tools and frameworks, Slack for chat, Trello for cards, Google Docs, Rollbar, Twilio, AWS, and some other dev related things I am out of my depth to talk about. Progress was slow, we only had a few hours a week to put into the project given we all have demanding jobs and families that seem to want us around, but with a focus on one catch up a week and clear communication on what success looked like before the next catch up, we kept doing enough to not feel like we were stalling completely (although sometimes it was close).
This approach has resulted in the exciting and functional, but clearly minimalist, service you see at mowme.app today.
The aim now is to determine market demand. Are there people out their who are annoyed by the problems we think we are solving? If so, does mowme.app make sense to them? Are our marketing strategies going to work?
If we get the right answers to those questions, that is when we start to focus on the finer details and focus on scaling up.
Please head to mowme.app and throw in an address, we would love to hear your thoughts on the process (keeping in mind that if you live outside of the Gold Coast you will get added to the waiter list).
Thanks for reading,
Brendan (on behalf of the MowMe team)
