We meet people all the time looking to bring new digital products to market. They often have lots (and lots) of different ideas. Having ideas is great but what’s important is working out which ones stand the best chance of making it. There are some basic questions that you can ask to work this out.
Is the idea complex? Is there a good revenue model? Are there competitors? How unique is it? Etc. etc.
Sparked a spreadsheet used by our buddies over at H Bureau to do just this job we thought it would be awesome to build an online version to help these people out. Could we put together a platform that allowed them to rank their ideas and find the ones that they could move on to research and development?
We wanted to test the waters with an MVP and take it from concept to product in just two days. Client work was on hold, all of the studio were in. It was time to get designing and building.
Condensing a complex process into 48 hours was always going to be a challenge but we’ve become experts at helping product owners cut features, question their plans and shave off time so why couldn’t we do this for ourselves?
For any project with limited time it’s most important to know what can be achieved in the time available. Even with the whole team working resource was tight and we wanted a product we could be proud of.
The design team got going on the look and feel creating the question interface as well as some fun animations to bring it all to life. The developers started planning databases, working out how to best implement the algorithms that had previously lived in a collection of spreadsheets.
As we worked onwards Distiller began to take shape. We live tweeted progress to record the stress, the achievements and, of course, the end of day celebrations.
In the end we made it. As with any MVP there are some bits that we wish were a little more polished but great planning, not taking on more than is possible and a focused team meant our MVP was ready for release real-world testing.