The Bootstrapped Product
Welcome to part 3 of my bootstrapper’s diary,
In part 1 I outlined what the aims and plans for this series were, I plan to create a series of different bootstrapped products.
In part 2 I explained my product and announced the name Kanban cash flow. I also launched my landing page.
In this post I will explain how I plan to build my MVP including what development framework to create it and what features I am going to aim to add and which ones to leave out.
The Missing Feature
Before I get into the details, let me add explain a feature that was not in part 2. The aim of Kanban cash flow is to help freelancers manage their cash flow via Kanban, and all the features I mentioned were about incoming cash flow. The feature I left out in the original announcement was yes you guessed it 😉 handling outgoing cash. The reason for leaving this out was I wanted to focus on getting money into a freelancer’s businesses. Also, another reason for not wanting to bring it up yet was that this is not an accounts package and I felt that if I mentioned outgoing cash flow, it might make it sound like one.
So how will outgoing cash flow be managed?
It will be a monthly system, and at the start of each month, your Kanban bins(lists) for outgoing cash flow will be reset.
It consists of 3 bins (lists) one each for:
Recurring costs
The recurring costs list will include expenses that you pay on a monthly basis. On each new month, these will stay in place.
One-offs
The One-offs list will be where your one-off payments that you made for that month will be listed. At the beginning of each month, this will be reset.
Marketing
The Marketing list is for all marketing costs during a month. At the beginning of each month, this will be reset.
In addition to the outgoing feature, there will be a dashboard which will give you a high-level view of your cash flow position.
In addition to the outgoing feature, there will be a dashboard which will give you a high-level view of your cash flow position.
Here is an outline of the product’s features:
- Cash flow Dashboard
- Incoming cash flow
- Leads
- Booked
- To Invoice
- Invoiced
- Outgoing cash flow
- Recurring payments
- One-offs
- Marketing
- Reporting
- Account management
What is an MVP?
An MVP stands for a Minimum Viable product which to me means a product with just enough features to be useful and allow customers to achieve something with your product.
What features to put into the MVP?
For me to make my MVP for Kanban cash flow, I have to decide what features that the product should have out of outline above.
I want to launch the product with the following features.
- Incoming cash flow
- Leads
- Booked
- To Invoice
- Invoiced
My reasoning is that I have managed my business cash flow with this system and it works well for me and will help Kanban cash flow customers massively with their day to day businesses.
But what about the missing features?
Well, I will be adding them to the build list for after launch.
Choosing the framework/platform to develop
I am a big believer in using the tools you use every day to build your product. As a developer, and like most developers, I am always looking for an excuse to make with the next something in with the current development world hotness. We have all been there, Rails, Node, Go, Python and Laravel, etc. I think it is a needless distraction and I suspect most of us do it look cool or show off if we are honest 😉 Now before I make my decision on what framework/platform to use I am going to discount anything I don’t already know. If you are at the same stage in your product development then I would consider doing the same, why waste precious time learning when you could be just making…
What features do I need a framework/platform to get this project done quickly?
– templating
– routing
– User Management signup, login, logout, forgotten password
– Payments – Setup payments, payments, monthly or annual billing.
Most frameworks have libraries or add-ons that handle most of my requirements. For the payments, I will use Stripe which makes it easy to connect the users to the billing, and most frameworks have a library for it.
Based on the above requirements and not wanting to reinvent the wheel the framework/platform I am going to use is WordPress…
Why WordPress?
Now I can hear the hush tones, and gasps from here so let me explain why I have chosen WordPress to develop this product.
Firstly, I build WordPress websites on a daily basis so its a no brainer for me as I am in that World.
Secondly thanks to WordPress ecosystem it comes with a lot of plugins that can do most of what I want for the membership and the billing. It also has the WordPress REST API which means I can do most of the development on the front-end and build the MVP very quickly.
What is next for Kanban cash flow?
Well, don’t forget to visit kanbancashflow.com and sign up for launch list and help motivate me a little 😉
Next week, I will give an update on how the development is going and hopefully have some screenshots or video of the work in progress.
[gravityform id=”2″ title=”false” description=”true”]
