Tools: Stop Building Settings Pages: A Guide To Ruthless Mvp Scoping

Posted on Feb 27

• Originally published at norvilis.com

We all have a ~/projects folder filled with half-finished dreams. Usually, the code isn't broken. The idea isn't bad. The project died because you ran out of steam. You spent 3 weeks building the scaffolding and 0 days building the actual value.

As a One-Person Team, your scarcest resource is momentum. To ship, you need to conduct a "Good Enough" Audit. You need to look at your roadmap and ruthlessly cut everything that doesn't directly solve the user's primary pain point.

Here are the 5 biggest time-sinks you need to delete from your MVP right now.

We developers love Dark Mode. We think it’s a requirement. It is not.

The Cost: Building Dark Mode essentially requires you to design your app twice. You have to test every border, every shadow, and every text contrast ratio in two states. It doubles your CSS workload.

The Reality: Your first 100 users do not care if their retinas are slightly seared. They care if your app saves them money or time. Linear, the gold standard of UI, didn't have Light Mode for years. You don't need Dark Mode for launch.

The Reality: Nobody is going to visit your settings page because nobody uses your app yet. If a user wants to change their email in the first month, they can email you, and you can change it in the database.

"I need 2FA, Forgot Password via SMS, and Social Logins for GitHub, Google, and Twitter."

The Reality: Every barrier you add to the codebase is a barrier to shipping. For an MVP, you need one way to get in.

Source: Dev.to