To recap my previous post, I want to create a subscription-based website that teaches New Zealand English to speakers of Korean.
Specifically, I’m envisioning an online workbook; a rich collection of worksheets that will help a learner to gain mastery over one small chunk of language at a time, while building up their exposure to the New Zealand accent.
Initially, my idea for an MVP resembled a tin of Danish butter cookies — a sampler of about six different worksheet types, plus other features of the website that I’d dreamt up, the idea being that I’d get people excited about all the different ways they could use the website for their learning.
But then I discovered the back catalogue of Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson’s business reckons and have since decided: The MVP will be made up of just one type of worksheet, my most basic formula:
A succinct introduction in Korean, upfront, to explain the nuances of the phrase.
Task 1 — 20 English-to-Korean exercises to familiarise yourself with its usage and practice deciphering into your native language, with audio.
Task 2 — 20 Korean-to-English translation exercises, to practice thinking into your target language, with audio for the English answers.
I want to have 50 of these basic worksheets as an MVP. Two thousand sentences, two thousand translations, two thousand audio recordings. I’ve even downloaded a counter app to keep track of my progress. (I’ll actually be okay if this ends up being 30 pages, but I’m making moves to make the full set of 50 viable.)
More than once, I’ve been tempted to sneak in a bell or whistle or two, but I’m sticking to the advice of Jason Fried and DHH: Do less. If you still have a product without it, remove it. You’re wanting to put out half a product, not a half-a$$ed product.
Relatedly, I found it helpful to see this drawing from Ryan Singer, who used to work with them. The drawing comes from this blog post.
“Feature complexity is like surface area and quality of execution is like height.
Features can be different sizes with more or less complexity, but quality of experience should be constant across all features. That constant quality of experience is what gives your customers trust. It demonstrates to them that whatever you build, you build well.”
Which is to say, don’t introduce me to a vibe you can’t maintain. And truth be told, I don’t think I could keep up those extras for every single release hereafter. So it was an easy decision to let them go.
I’ll be talking more about the things I’ve learned from DHH and Jason Fried on this blog, but the ReWork podcast is a great place to start, if you’ve never heard of these two before.
In summary:
Make one type of cookie, and make sure you roll out the dough evenly.
Tschüß! 🍪