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Building a MVP at $0. Possible?
4 points by iprithvitharun 2186 days ago
We are a few weeks away from launching our MVP (themellow.work) and so far we've spent only $10

Hosting server backend (AWS) - $0 Email Server (AWS) - $0 Hosting website frontend (S3 Bucket) - $0 Website analytics (GTM, GA, and Hotjar) - $0 Customer support tools (Zoho) - $0 Design and collaboration (Figma) - $0 Documentation (Slite ) - $0 Communication (Hangouts and Meet) - $0 Domain - $10

Are there any other expenses that we'll comes across before launch or after launching immediately?

5 comments

Legal docs and data privacy compliance?

I don't see anything about that on your site, so until it's there, can't consider.

Something better than slack would be a nice change!

Thanks for the feedback. I'd be skeptical too.

We are in the process of getting these docs ready and it will be up in a couple of weeks.

As an American English speaker, the description of the product and explanation about why a whole new paradigm was necessary was not very idiomatic and therefore pretty difficult to read.
Thanks for the feedback :)

That's on me. I'll get it fixed.

I find it's always useful to put a monetary value on time.
Yes. Nobody can deny that. Everyone's time is valuable.

But when talking about money, we haven't crossed $10 mark yet.

For sure: newsletter management, logo + design, marketing, ads
So far, all the traffic is done through LinkedIn organically. We've got 200+ registrations.

We've got Designer in our team so pretty logo and UX are set.

We'll have to start paid Ads but that will take atleast another 3 months. We've planned to have closed beta launch test it for a month then push it out to public.

If you can bootstrap this, then you are fine, but it's hard to tell from just the "services pov" It's much more complex: How many active daily users are there?, can the free tier for AWS handle that?, until when your AWS credits will expire? etc... Generally, you wanna keep monitoring AWS expenses the first 3 months to be sure you aren't up-sold on some service you aren't using. Also you can make use of the SUS $5k AWS credits if you aren't already. For more info you can check this paragraph "Your servers will make you pay for what you don’t know (Literally)" of my blog article: https://yassine.substack.com/p/the-gap-between-learning-code...

Good luck!

"since they can make life easier." - Ain't that the truth.

We are using AWS now. Any other services that you've used worth recommending?