How I Built My First MVP (and Actually Shipped It)

For the longest time I've wanted to build my own products and sell them. After a solid month of grinding, I finally have one. It's called Feedbackworthy, and it's the first MVP I've actually shipped instead of abandoning.

The motivation wasn't some problem I was personally facing. It was more about delivering something clients and regular people could actually use. I didn't build this just to show it off. I want to learn the entire product lifecycle through it: sales, marketing, development, customer support, the whole thing.

A good product comes down to how fast you iterate on it and how useful it is to the people using it. I built Feedbackworthy specifically to collect reviews. There are bigger players already, like testimonial.to and senja.io, operating at a much larger scale.

Why this as my first product? The market. Since it's my first, I didn't want to build something that needed market validation. There's a huge risk in that, especially for your first MVP. Ideally you pick something that already exists and just improve on it. That's half the battle of MVP development right there: you skip the part where you're guessing whether anyone wants the thing.

I didn't do this alone. I've started products before and dropped them halfway, those repos are still sitting in my GitHub collecting dust. This time I built it with my friend Majid, which made the whole process way more fun.

So what does it do? Feedbackworthy lets users collect reviews and manage them straight from the dashboard. Clients sign up, share a form link with their customers, and start collecting reviews. We give you custom components you can copy-paste into your site, and with shadow mode they blend in without breaking your theme. For now we're only shipping the bare minimum components.

The hard part was payment integration. This is the side of MVP software engineering nobody really warns you about. It's one thing to say you know how to work with APIs. It's a whole different level when actual money is on the line. If it breaks, you lose revenue. And if the customer isn't kind enough to report it and you don't have logging in place, just forget about figuring it out anytime soon. I'll write about payment integration in another post. This one's about Feedbackworthy.

We took our time with this one. Early on I was building in public, but the pressure of freelancing while building the whole MVP website overwhelmed me and I had to stop. We were still making progress every day, I just stopped posting so I could catch a break.

Currently we have added the following features:

• Users can collect and manage feedbacks using workspaces and forms.
• You can create a component for them, and simply embed them in your website. No coding is needed.
• The free version includes our branding, but the paid one doesn't and we actually tried to price it so that it makes sense to an individual to purchase it and use it. There will be more plans and features in the future as well.

Now that it's ready, I'm determined to market it and try to make some revenue. I've never worked in sales before, so we'll see how this goes. Inshallah I'll figure it out along the way. The goal now is simple: market it, improve it, keep selling.

I'm also going to work on onboarding for the app. I'm pretty sure that'll help convert the traffic landing on my site.

Finishing this MVP and polishing it felt like a win on its own, which is why I wanted to write about it. If we break the market and crack some crazy numbers, I'll write another one.