Welcome in this online course on SaaS MVP Engineering.
MVP stands for Minimal Viable Product and is one of the main concepts in the Lean Startup philosophy.
To me, and to many others, MVP is more a process than an product, it is a state of mind, not a version number.
If your goal is to build a SaaS product, you will have to do your research to check if you are really solving a pressing problem, if potential customers see your proposed solution (a SaaS) as a viable solution and at what price.
If your idea survives this first litmus test, you passed a first milestone: Problem/Solution fit. Congrats!!
Now the hard part starts, getting from Problem/Solution fit to Product/Market fit. This means you'll need to actually build a product, get it in the hands of users, and iterate until you have something that "satisfies the market". I personally like to think you have P/M fit when at least 40% of your users would be really disappointed when you take your product away For an indepth discussion, check Quora.
This is the process part: you'll need to install this Build > Measure > Learn loop, and be able to do this time and again.
This course is this loop: In 2 days, we'll develop a little SaaS application and set it up so that you can go through this loop fast and furious. We'll setup a minimal continuous delivery pipeline, so that code changes are released to customers effortlessly and safe. We'll use detailed analytics to learn how our users perceive our software, do our first baby steps in life cycle marketing to welcome new users and while we are at it, setup automated billing to earn our first dollars.
In 2 days, we will show you code examples and walk you through this whole process. Yes, you will be doing some programming, you can't get to through the MVP process without getting your hands dirty.
For each of these walk throughs, we will provide intermediate snapshots of the code, so that you don't need to worry if you can't completely do the assignments in time.
So without further ado: here is assignment 1.
Install meteor, create your first meteor project and push it to an (public) git repo of your choice.
Check out https://www.meteor.com/install for the details.
And while you are at it, just scroll through the tutorial to get quick intro to the meteor full stack web framework we will be using throughout this course.