Building MVPs cheap

Friday come’s along … let’s make an MVP #

Jason Moreau from GrabScience reached out to me to work on a MVP for an idea he has. I won’t go into details but I will discuss some of the problems we ran into and how we solved it.

Large File Sizes #

Jason’s idea will have user’s that will be uploading files sizes upwards of 80 mb. For an MVP we would need to process and index the file sizes. This meant that with some quick calculations … the cost for transfer rates is the bottleneck to beat. At just a 150 users we are hitting a pretty (11$) high monthly cost for an MVP that we haven’t even had a chance to show customers. And since we are considering adverts as the revenue stream breaking even will require a lot more users then 150.

In the past I would have recommend we just get a Linode box and go nuts. But this is 2014! Everything is on the cloud (for better of for worse), So I came up with a solution that uses Google Drive API, Firebase for hosting and we have a working prototype for 0$!

More on this later :)