New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: What are the *first* steps to take before building an MVP?

Ask HN: What are the *first* steps to take before building an MVP?
3 by opal-puce | 1 comments on Hacker News.
While stuck at home over the last several months, I've frequently contemplated starting to use my free-time to start building the MVP for "that idea" that's been bouncing around in my head years. However, whenever I build up the initiative to create a repo and start building away, I get frozen by one of the following questions and would love the HN community's help in answer any of them. If these have already been covered to death elsewhere, I'd love some help knowing where to look -- links to old HN threads, relevant bloggers or books, etc. * There's a lot to learn from the failures of previous companies, but companies that fail quickly don't leave much trace behind. So... how do I find out if a similar company/product has been tried before and failed? I've searched through HN threads, Crunchbase, various tech news sites, but what are some other good places to go to do your due diligence? * How do you protect the IP in your new project from your current company? I know not to do my work on company hardware, but with flexible hours and WFH become the new-normal, it's hard to know if you're "doing work on company time" that could come back to cause problems. * At what point do you start the legal paperwork to become "a real business"? Should you do that before you commit the first line of code for your MVP to make sure you have all the protections of being an LLC in place, or can that wait until you actually get customers?

Comments