My co-founder and I have been reading a lot of startup books lately.  If you are mildly interested in startups, you can’t escape the term MVP.  MVP or Minimum Viable Product is a concept popularized by Eric Ries author of  The Lean Startup.

In product development, the Minimum Viable Product or MVP is a strategy used for fast and quantitative market testing of a product or product feature, popularized by Eric Ries for web applications. – source wikipedia

A couple of weeks ago, we had our first offsite to brainstorm some ideas and clarify our vision and goals.  We agreed on a new product and the goal is to get it out by the end of the year.  I have been coding it for the past week or so and it is coming along nicely.   But I can’t help thinking back to the MVP. I don’t want a half-baked product but I also don’t want to spend the next 3 months building something that no one wants…  the solution is an MMVP i.e a Minimum MVP.

What’s the idea/product?  

It is called Starter Web.  It is a kick-ass starter web app to start your next web project, web startup or even to create your own MVP.  This is no HTML template, this is a project that has all the fundamental pieces of every web app built and tested, so you can focus on YOUR idea and not the BS that you always have to do (authentication, payment processing, etc…)

Who are our customers?

• Web developers that build web apps for clients or for themselves that want to get a running start and don’t want to waste 60+ hours writing the same code.
• Entrepreneurs that want to build web apps and/or startups quickly and don’t want to waste 60+ hours rewriting boring code
• Wantrepreneurs that want to create a quick MVP to prove their concepts and are held back by the all the BS stuff they have to code just get to the fun stuff.

Why do you need it?
How many sites have you built a website before?  What are the common features that you keep implementing over and over and over?  What are the parts that you wish were just built so you can focus on your business idea instead of the generic stuff?  I built and continue to build a lot of websites myself and I find myself repeating the same things several times.  Sure, I will copy and paste a few things here and there or refactor some of it into some reusable library, but I still end up doing things over several times.   I want something to get me started quickly on the next project.  I ran into hackerengine.com a few months ago and thought “wow, that is freaking cool.  I wish they had it in .net”.  There is no .net equivalent, so I am building one.

UPDATE: I just realized that hackerengine is shutting down – this must have just happened because I was on their site 2 days ago.  I guess there are 2 ways to look at this: 1 – there is not enough demand or 2- I have one less competitor to worry about.

The first thing I did is mind map the common features that I need in almost all web projects that I build.  Here is a short list of the most important features that came to mind:

• User management: login, signup, password reset, forgot password, email verification, beta invitation code
• Email integration with Sendgrid (you can plugin whatever you need), email templates
• Payment management - Stripe integration for payment processing, product selling, subscription selling, promo codes and so on.  Everything related to payment will work out of the box, all you gotta do is add your products or subscription plans in configuration and you are done
• Analytics – Integration with KISSmetrics - http://www.kissmetrics.com/ to track and measure all the important events (login, signup, view plan, subscribe, etc…)
• Affiliate management – affiliate, sign up, login, stats, payment, all working right out of the box to help you grow your business very quickly
• Admin Site – A kick-ass admin control panel that will allow you to do all kind of things: ban users, send invitation codes, setup coupons, products, plans, email users, etc…
• And a lot more

Questions: what do you think of these features?  Too much?  Not enough?  Just right?

What does it cost?
Well, what is 60 hours of work worth to you?  What would you pay to have all these things working on day one so you can focus on your REAL app?  $300, $500, $1000.  Seriously though, we are thinking of pricing it around the $299 to $499 range – any suggestions?

What do you get and how?
When you buy StarterWeb, you will receive the SOURCE CODE, specifically, you will receive direct access to our code repository.  You can do whatever you want with it EXCEPT sell it as a template or open source it i.e. you won’t be able to buy it, and re-sell it or give it away as starterweb.org – NOT COOL :).  The code is unit tested with 100% coverage with lots of integration testing for the most common scenarios.

What is the technology stack?

• ASP.NET MVC 4 (Razor + C#) – because the .net community needs love too
• JQuery
• Knockout JS
• Twitter Bootstrap
• SQL backened – the data layer is written using the IRepo pattern and you pretty much can plugin any database you like – I might implement a Mongo DB layer if there is enough demand.
• NUnit

Do you have a demo?
I am glad you asked.  Here is a demo that I deployed ta Azure in less than 20 seconds.  Side note: I have previously complained about the terrible deployment story on Azure but I gotta say, Microsoft gets it right again (on the 3rd version).   I was able to deploy to Azure in under a minute using git – FREAKING AWESOME.

Remember this is only 1 week old (working part time on it), but it has the following features:

• Login
• Signup
• Reset password
• Email verification
• “Beta” invitations

See it at http://starterweb.azurewebsites.net/ - you can signup using the invitation code “mvp“.

You can’t wait?  Want it right now?
Let me know at @eibrahim or eibrahim @ gmail and you can pre-buy it for a discounted price of $149 which gives you a license to use it on 1 website (domain).  You will get a say in the direction the project goes and you will get direct read access to the source code repository.

Thanks and please, please, please, give us feeback.