[Day 3] Zero to MVP in 30 Days — First Doubts & Pivot

Emil Bruckner
HackerNoon.com
2 min readNov 25, 2017

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In this series I’ll validate a new idea. Read about the concept here (Day 0) and the idea here (Day 1).

This Saturday started with a long list of things I wanted to do. I started the day with planning out the dashboard and the logic behind the web-app. Since I still hadn’t done that, I would do the technical validation next.

Scraping data off Quora probably isn’t the most reliable business model. I know that. It’s the reason why I stay very lean with this. There’s always the risk that Quora would simply shut this down. They don’t offer an API, let alone let you visit “their” content without being logged in.
But hey, findbetterquestions.com would still benefit the user without any risk for them.

So, trying to build the first scraper, I noticed that question stats are not available when you’re not logged in. That’s a dealbreaker. I seriously thought about canceling the project. IFraming Quora also doesn’t work.

Then a friend of mine — Timo — suggested I’d create a desktop app with Electron and load Quora there. So that’s the current plan.

Electron is a software for creating desktop apps

The only problem is that I have no idea how to use Electron. Shouldn’t be too much of a problem though. One advantage is that I probably even have to code less.
I still haven’t figured out how to style the app. Should I still use ant.design (a css framework I wanted to try). What do you think?

No exciting metrics, but here they are:
Yesterday I had 117 views on Medium
5 subscribers on Product Hunt Ship

Want to talk about this project? Comment or find my email at emilbruckner.com
Want to be the first one to use the product? Sign up at https://findbetterquestions.com/

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