Successful Software Development Using The Hot Dog Stand Method

Develop software like you would manage a hot dog stand — it will save you time, money and stress!

I am probably not the one who invented this type of software development, I am just trying to make this more accessible for non-developers. I’m surprised by how few people seem to know about this method. I think that especially clients of developers should know more about it, because it saves them time and money.

What are you even talking about?

Imagine yourself as someone wanting to open a hot dog stand. First you would need to have a certain amount of buns, sausages and something to heat them up — onions, relish, ketchup and everything else can be left aside at this point. As long as you sell a bun with a sausage it’s a hot dog right? Probably not one that people will line up for yet and maybe quite dry — but it can be called a hot dog.

That’s exactly how I start out when I develop software. At first I focus on the main feature(s) — in case of our hot dog stand, that would be the sausages and the buns. Everything else isn’t important at this point, even if you might worry that you wouldn’t be able to “sell” it like this.

We heavily relied on this method while developing a Content-Management-System software. In our case, the core value we wanted to achieve was for designers to be able to build creative websites for multiple customers without any technical restrictions on the design itself and an easy-to-use backend. These were a lot of requirements to accomplish at once, so we tried to break that down to the minimum requirements. Which were:

• being able to create one new site ,
• adding multiple templates built with plain html, css and js with no need for a script language
• and finally to create pages based on these templates.

At that time there was no need for folders, authorization, SEO features or whatever we added later. After a very short period of time we could launch our first websites with this new piece of software and learn how to improve it.

During the whole process of development I only focus on one central feature or a small set of features.

The perks of this method

• Users can try out the software earlier. This means you get feedback faster, which helps to make sure you develop for actual user needs.
• You won’t lose time developing features that people might have no use for, that’s also good for your wallet.
• A limited range of features also limits the risk to miscalculate your estimated costs and most of the time it makes your product easier to understand and to use.
• If you are able to focus on one or just a few features and make sure they run smoothly, this will result in a better product.

More features will follow later, but based rather on clearly stated needs of the users, than just based on assumptions. In the same way that we would of course later serve certain sauces and garnishes with our hot dog.

A tip for developing additional features

I will later develop only those features that a critical group of users demand. No one would start serving sweet mustard just because one customer asks for it, right? Trying to please everyone only leads to software being packed with too many features. In the end that’s always bad for your usability and the one who has to pay the price would be the user. You don’t want that.

I further enhanced this method over the years and this is know one of my concepts to create new product ideas as an MVP — minimal viable product.

If you want to read more about this method and my other more business related methods, you can find them here:

• (German) Die Hot-Dog-Stand-Methode für MVPs
• (German) Die SPARK-Methode

I would love to hear about your experiences — thanks for sharing!

Do you want to check out our “hotdog stand” yourself?