Lesson 01

Here’s the first update from an experiment we’re doing at Make. Believe.

We started on our first project (mkblv01, in homage to Factory Records) towards the end of June. It’s a start up called ‘YumTuc’. And I know the founder George Thwaites because he’s an old friend from Bristol University (and I mean old, that was 30 years ago).

George had been carrying around this idea for some time, a concept born of Coronavirus, lock downs and lateral thinking. One of the freedoms we all lost in that incredible time is the breadth of food we can find in our local restaurants. He wanted to find a way to celebrate and encourage that discovery. And to bring another layer to the sometimes slightly mindless snapping of food we see on social networks.

His idea is an app specifically for the sharing of food, with additional facets like asking questions and collecting points / competing with other members.

George had progressed the idea. He had a pitch, some PowerPoint, and the beginnings of a prototype. It seemed obvious that the idea couldn’t be assessed in an academic way that you might do with typical problem-solution products. To know if it was, indeed, fun, you’d have to use it, and to know if people would take to it, you’d have to build it.

And so that is what we’ve done.

Focussing, as far as we can, on the core idea – but with the constraints of an app that will be used, over weeks not hours, in the wild by real punters. You can download it from the website (https://yumtuc.com) right now.

I hope the app is a good example of the speed at which reasonably high-quality products can be summoned into being when you use the incredible tools that are around today.

Designed in Figma, and build using react-native (and Expo), on top of an AWS backend (express, mySQL, S3) and Auth0 for authentication, we were able to have the first working versions in our hands in less than a month. Then came the inevitably difficult process of getting to the real minimum scope. I’m sure it could be less than we ended up with. But… a lot has ended up on the cutting room floor (or the ‘Day 67’ list as George affectionately calls it).

I have been struck, from a product perspective at the value of building over planning. Several features have been more shaped by what can be done (or done quickly) rather than some imagined product purity. And building has allowed us to understand many of the other mechanics of the app much better than I think you ever get with protoypes. Imagining using something is simply not the same. The context is so important. We now know why (for example) Instagram starts up with your camera roll and not your camera. And, we took three different feed designs to production because you don’t know what a mobile product is really like until you’ve used it on a bus, or in a restaurant. Actually used it.

I’ve been lucky too to have a partner in crime who is focussed on the real prize (getting proper user feedback) over, again, idealistically sticking to our first imaginings.

Of course the real learnings are to come, as we launch and roll out the product in a regional trial this week. I’m sure much of what we ‘know’ today will be blown out of the water then. As it should be.

Will it work? I certainly hope so. But soon, we will know. We’ll know in a way we could never intuit by ourselves or find out from research, and we’ve spent less time doing that then we could have spent in reflection, or in research, or even in ‘discovery’.

We’ve spent only a fraction of the time making it, that George had spent thinking about it before.

So, to labour the point, we’ve made it, and soon we’ll know if we should believe (and invest) in it.