What's taking you so long?

As I've alluded to earlier, a friend and I are working on building an MVP for a startup.  Awesome.  We've got the idea, have key connections in the industry, little competition, and are ready to tear into some code.  I had hoped to have the MVP finished by Jan 14th. so I could write about it here and we could start generating hype.  No dice.  We reset our due date to Jan 31st and hacked all weekend.  We got a LOT done, but looked at our to-do list and realized that it had grown.

Obviously, startups are not a walk in the park, even when life's handed you some great opportunities.  We seem to have fallen for the idea that code is trivial.  Technically speaking, the core of the product was implemented in November.  Since then, all we've done is build up awesome things around it (and school, both of us being full-time students).  We've learned a lot in the past few months.  Here's just some of the things we've encountered:

Stuff creep

This isn't scope creep, as the scope has stayed pretty much the same.  Rather, we find ourselves adding page after page to our todo list of things we never thought of that are must-haves (For instance, a user should be able to reset their password).  It's very important to know what done is.  Sadly, one can't determine everything at the beginning of a project, especially if this is the first time.  We've had some issues with figuring out what we should do next.  We're using Trello (an awesome site) to organize everything (have I mentioned it's drastically important to have a todo list?).  Despite the amount of planning we have put into this, there are still things that we completely missed out on.

Technical difficulties

We're building this with Node.js for two reasons:

• We only have to work with one language from start to finish (very helpful for first timers)
• Node.js is just plain awesome.

Still, various frameworks and asynchronous idiosyncrasies pop up and bog us down as we learn new things or fight back bugs.  It's very easy to assume that everything will work just fine the first time you write it, and schedule for that.  Make sure to allocate time for learning and fixing (most likely, you'll be doing more of those two than anything).

People difficulties

I'm an idiot.  We all are.  I'm sure even the best developers have confessions about how they've managed to shove some code through a trash compactor.  It's ok.  We all suck.  It'll slow you down but that's part of life.  Remember to take a break and eat healthy.

Regardless of above, we're not only still working on our MVP, we're accelerating!  Stay tuned for more updates.  Our latest due date is either March 1 or February 22, depending on who you ask.