#3 - MVP, Development Sprints, Coffee Shops and everything that happened last week!
Still missing vroom vroom cars going round in circles. You will find me at Coffee Trotter more often!
Welcome to week 3’s waffle! No one wrote back to me on what they would like to specifically see here so I am just going to yap on about anything I want! I still am open to suggestions though! So fire away!
The cold did get better and at this point it’s only a runny nose that I can’t seem to catch (I know! I know!) Overall, a pretty good week! Did get a bit overwhelmed and lost it for a bit. But “All Iz Well!”
My 2 cents on an MVP - Maybe don’t skip this!
When you are starting up or building, something, you would keep hearing, especially if you are product based, is that you need to really nail out your MVP.
So what is an MVP?
For the sake of conversation, I’m going to say here what Wikipedia says - “A minimum viable product (MVP) is a version of a product with just enough features to be usable by early customers who can then provide feedback for future product development.”
When you are making something to take to a market or to a prospective customer, you definitely don’t have it all figured out. No one does. It’s what your gut tells you - coupled with technical feasibility that must define what your MVP should have. If you think it’s necessary, it is!
Keep building, keep iterating and somewhere, your MVP will actually be something people want and be “usable by early customers”. Its okay if you are “overbuilding” - you can always hide things. Do not underbuild!
Treat this advice like you must treat any advice. My uncle says treat advice like it’s perfume - smell it, don’t drink it! I may come back a while later and eat my words!
But do think about this!
This week was about development sprints
I got this idea from Silicon Valley. Essentially, you block out time on your calendar to do one thing only. Code, iterate, chalk out flows and code. Over the last week, I spent around 80 hours putting together some very important modules which I believe would finally give Fanpit it’s MVP!
I built a catalog manager which supports multi-channel pricing, better transaction claiming flows to make it easier to claim points, landing pages for businesses and the most important of them all, a team management module that helps to build team flows and configure user permissions on Fanpit!
This week I also switched things up and worked from cafes! I found my sweet spot in Chennai at Coffee Trotter - Kotturpuram - where many days ago I launched the Fanpit beta!
Coffee Trotter is amazing! They have great coffee, amazing ambience, amazing scones (YES! SCONES!), sexy fast Wifi, moderately annoying only because it is repetitive music, great seats and the whole place is set at the perfect temperature! Really is my happy place!
Working at Coffee Trotter got me thinking. Why do so many people prefer working at cafes? What about it makes so much sense that websites like I Miss My Cafe exist to simulate a coffee shop experience?
The coffee shop effect
Apparently, this is a thing. Not making it up! Check this out!
Picasso, Rowling, Dylan. Whether they’re painters, singer-songwriters, or musicians, people across the world have time and again testified to the coffee shop effect, that they did a good part of their best work at a cafe!
No, it’s not the coffee or the pretty girl in the coffee shop (Hi Shreya :)) that gets this going. The sounds you hear in a coffee shop - which I Miss My Cafe beautifully simulate, boosts your abstract thinking ability, which can lead to more creative idea generation.
A 2019 study dubbed this as Stochastic-resonance. (Yes, the learning section of this newsletter is back!) It’s the phenomenon in which just the right amount of noise benefits our senses. This is the coffee shop effect and maybe I too can testify to this! Only time will tell!
I went to CT because - being cooped up at home got to me and I needed a better place to go out to think fresh. You should try it too!
Food and nostalgia
There is this scene in the movie Ratatouille where Ego, the critic, takes a bite of Remy’s Ratatouille and is immediately taken back to his childhood days where his mother made Ratatouille, which makes us believe, is his comfort food!
Food-evoked nostalgia, a study by Reid CA, Green JD, Buchmaier S, McSween DK, Wildschut T, Sedikides C., tested this very premise. Results revealed that food is a powerful elicitor of nostalgia and was largely positive!
These help you relive memories and take you back to a place of comfort. I recently felt this over the weekend when I went to Amaravati and took down multiple servings of Andhra Paruppu Podi with nei. Oh! What a day! 11/10 would recommend!
Food-evoked nostalgia is also the theme of the book I’m planning to pick up next - The Kamogawa Food Detectives by Hisashi Kashiwai! More on that when I get to it!
This week my mom gifted me an airfryer
The very idea of air frying french fries making them only 140 calories for a serving of 100 grams is amazing and I cannot believe we did not get one earlier! Up next, I’m going to try making Kung Pao Paneer. More on that next week!
This week I also got to watching the new season of Shrinking!
This show is hilarious and the 8.1 IMDB rating is not surprising! Never did I even think I would watch Marshal from HIMYM (Jason Segel) share a screen with Han Solo from Star Wars (Harrison Ford). I mean - if you were a HIMYM person, you’d understand this - considering Marshall Eriksen was a big fan of Star Wars!
Nothing I say here would do justice to how cute this show is - so take my word, watch it!
I may have made a decision
UPSC vs Fanpit? I may have made a decision. You’ll know soon
Also, fingers crossed - we may land a new customer soon!
Speaking of Fanpit - we started making Ed Sheeran inspired Fanpit merch too! So if you are reading this and want one, let me know and I’ll order one for you too!
My inbox is still open!
What would you like to read more about? Should I talk more about building Fanpit? Do I build more publicly? Tell you about interesting things I study about(if I do
Drop me a note - tell me what clicks, what doesn't - I'm all ears!
You can reach me at tejas@fanpit.live or wherever you usually find me hanging around!
Cheers!
TPS
What stopped me from writing comments on 2 other blog posts was that I couldn't do it anonymously (because what's the fun knowing that the area-boy is fanboying?) but that isn't stopping me anymore.