During my time in Tanzania 🇹🇿, I learned something quite interesting in the way that many people use Uber outside the US.
When requesting an Uber in places like Tanzania or India, payment is usually done outside of the app (e.g. cash). A feature that I thought would be required for Uber to be of value was not being used, but then in a pondering moment I realized that it was still an extremely valuable product for providing a network of available taxis.
That is the minimum value of Uber.
Viability 😕
When building out an initial product for a new idea, it is commonly recommended to build an MVP: Minimum Viable Product. Focusing on the core features that your app needs to be viable allows you to quickly validate whether your idea is valuable to others.
One should be careful though, because building a minimum viable product may also indicate that you may cut on the quality and user experience of your product. By no means should this be the case because first impressions are extremely important. Even when the user is fully aware of a product being in “MVP status”, it still builds an everlasting feeling of the product’s brand in being unfinished and potentially useless.
Value 💡
Let’s change the conoctation of MVP: Minimum Value Product. No longer is the focus to simply push something out as quickly as possible, but instead to provide a single core value.
Build an amazing user experience around a single value, which prevents users from getting confused on what is being provided to them while also building a positive, everlasting relation with your product’s brand.
🗂 Tab Dump
Just freeing up some of my open browser tabs…
- Zero Config Deployments from ZEIT - Introducing Zero Config, a conventional and completely backwards-compatible approach to deployment.
- react-use-auth - The simplest way to add authentication to your React app. Handles everything for you. Users, login forms, redirects, sharing state between components. Everything.
- React-axe - Test your React application with the axe-core accessibility testing library. Results will show in the Chrome DevTools console.
- Lozad.js - 🔥 Highly performant, light ~1kb and configurable lazy loader in pure JS with no dependencies for responsive images, iframes and more
📅 Updates
I recently returned from my 2-week trip to Tanzania, Africa. It was an amazing experience and hopefully you were able to follow along on my Instagram.
Now that I’m back and situated from the jetlag, unpacking, and general catching-up-with-everything, I’m looking forward to being more active with creating content and code.
So stay tuned, and see you next Sunday. Same inbox? 👋