Lean Startup Experiment - Day 2

The second day of our lean startup experiment is over now. What did we accomplish? What did we learn?

What did we accomplish? 

The first thing we did this morning was to reprioritize our product backlog. We then managed to sketch some (seventeen!) paper prototypes and chose the one we liked best in fifteen minutes. Afterwards we kicked the complete technology stack we wanted to use yesterday and set up a new one. But still we managed to get a first UI prototype online this evening. You can find it here: http://thatsmykid.de/

First UI live prototype of ThatsMyKid

Key learnings:

• The prioritization of a product backlog in a lean startup project is stable for at most half a day...
• Do not start lean startup experiments if it is 35 degrees celsius outside - can be quite demotivating :-(
• The open working environment at Coworking Space Nuremberg is really cool and enjoyable.
• The new technology stack (Meteor, JQuery, JavaScript) is really good for rapid prototyping.
• Having an hourly status (review) meeting before commiting code helped us a lot to stay focused and avoid trouble.
• Technology is waste (it takes a LOT of time - even if you are not an expert with it)
• Driving three different technological approaches to our first prototype was a good idea, since we learned very fastly, which one would fit our project.
• No design is the best design (at least almost none :-)
• If you have your first UI prototype this is REALLY motivating!

This day started out very frustrating but had an amazing turning point when we first saw our UI prototype in the first review working. The deeper we dive into technology and minimal feature set, the more obvious it becomes, how massively complex a simple application must be. We are optimistic to learn a lot during the next three days and are glad that we love our design so much.