Medium as an MVP
Let’s Hack Medium To Build A Product
Written by Ghilia Weldesselasie
Lately I’ve been obsessed with using other apps to build MVPs. Apps like Zapier, Webflow, and Bubble. These days, I’ve been paying more attention to Medium as a way to build your next MVP.
Here are some use cases I outlined where you can use Medium as an MVP:
- an e-commerce Store
- an online community
- a social network
- a portfolio
- a product landing page
In other words, virtually anything that hinges on content can be built on Medium.
E-commerce
You can use Medium as a way to showcase your products or even showcase an e-book and then use Gumroad to embed your checkout form on your post. This one works less, because in e-commerce it’s important to build trust or else no one will want to buy your product. Unless you already have a huge following that trusts you, I doubt anyone will look at your Medium post and feel the urge to buy from there.
I tried this experiment with Nomad Furniture, a furniture store full of flat-pack and modular furniture that’s easy to assemble and disassemble, perfect for nomads. I ended up using Plasso instead of Gumroad, because the fees are lower. The only downside to this is that you can’t (yet) embed a Plasso store on Medium, so you’ll have to link to it in your post.
Communities
You can also use Medium to build an online community. You’ll have to manually accept anyone who wants to join in as a writer, so that can tiring if ever your publication (where you’re going to host this community) become popular. Features like responses can used to comment on posts and recommend posts and comments to “upvote”. If you want to have a closed community where invites are handed out every now and then a la Product Hunt, you can always slowly invite writers and editors to your publication.
I haven’t started yet, but soon I’m going to build a community here on Medium. It’s going to be a place to discuss products that have appeared on Product Hunt or other parts of the web in depth. Stay tuned if you want to know when it opens.
Social Network
Building a social network works the same way as building a community. Although this option isn’t recommended for a long time because of how social networks usually scale quickly. If you want to build “sub-reddits” like what they have on Reddit, you can always the navigation bars on Medium publication to divide your network into categories.
Website
If you want an easy way to host your site for free on a platform that makes edits easy for you and keeps the burden of good design off your shoulders, you should go with Medium. You can easily use Medium to display your portfolio (display your work using image grids) or a landing page for your startup. You can even build your startup on Medium.
This is what we’re doing at Neue Store. While Jake Frey already built a website for Neue Store, I decided to build a Medium publication for it. What this allows us to do is:
- host a blog for Neue Store, which is vital for eventually bringing new users.
- test out new features like categories (via navigation) and comments (via responses).
There you have it, I’m sure there are plenty of other uses cases where you can build an MVP on Medium. If you’re just looking to quickly build an MVP to validate your idea, there’s no better way than using Medium. It’s simplicity and ease of use means you can be up and running in minutes.
If you need any help getting an MVP set up on Medium, hit me up on Twitter. I always reply within 24 hours.
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