Disclosure: I contribute to the OpenNomos ecosystem, which includes 01MVP.
I spent most of 2024 building things that nobody used. Not because the ideas were bad—but because I kept making the same mistake: treating every project like it had to be perfect before anyone saw it.
Here's what finally clicked.
The Trap: Building Products Instead of Experiments
My first two projects took 3+ months each before I showed them to anyone. I added authentication, dark mode, onboarding flows, payment integration—everything a "real" product needs.
Both launched to silence.
The problem wasn't the features. The problem was that I hadn't validated a single assumption before building all of them.
The Shift: One Hypothesis, One Week
A friend recommended I try a framework called 01MVP that forces you to break your idea into week-by-week deliverables. At first I dismissed it—I knew how to build things. Why do I need a framework?
But the structure changed everything:
Week 1: Define the core hypothesis (not "people want a task manager"—that's too vague. Try "people will pay $5/month for a task manager that auto-prioritizes based on deadlines").
Week 2: Build the absolute minimum to test that hypothesis. Not a landing page. Not a waitlist. An actual working thing, ugly as hell.
Week 3: Put it in front of 10 people and watch them use it.
This sounds obvious in retrospect. But when you're the one coding, the temptation to "just add one more feature" before showing anyone is overwhelming.
Three Rules That Actually Work
After going through this process a few times, here's what stuck:
1. One Feature. Period.
Not three. Not "one and a half." If your core feature doesn't get anyone excited, adding a settings page won't fix it.
2. Off-the-Shelf Everything
You're not proving you can write an auth system. You're proving someone needs your product. Clerk for auth, Stripe for payments, Vercel for hosting—use what exists.
3. Ship in Two Weeks or Kill It
If you can't ship something testable in 14 days, you're either over-scoping or the idea is too vague. Either way, it's a red flag.
The Result
Since adopting this approach, my "time from idea to real user feedback" dropped from months to weeks. More importantly, I kill bad ideas before they consume months of my life.
The hardest part isn't the code. It's the discipline to stop building and start testing.
If you're sitting on an idea right now, give yourself two weeks. Ship something ugly. See what happens.
What's your MVP process look like? I'd love to hear what's worked (or failed) for you.
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