January 14th, 2018 | MMA Matchups
My first side project, MMA matchup. Fresh and invigorated after leaving behind the ‘burden’ of trying to build the next unicorn and raise money in order to become the next Zucks, I decided to start small and go fast. Inspired by the work of Pieter Levels, 12 startups in 12 months, I decided I wanted to keep a similar tempo in 2018, if not faster. So I decided to go to my know-hows, and one of them is MMA. In the MMA community, which is mostly concentrated on YouTube in the comment section and a littles less on Instagram and Twitter, a topic is talked about AGAIN and AGAIN and AGAIN. That is debating who should fight who next. So I decided to build a super simple website, where I would populate a list with all the possible MMA matchups and let people up vote the ones they want to see. I built it in about 10 days, not as fast as I would want to cause I got trapped in over engineering again. First of all, I chose Rails as the backend and React with Bootstrap on the front end. The React part was chosen because it is very popular when it comes to jobs. Hosted on Heroku. After ten days, I was ready to show the world about my project. I sent a quick email to 15 MMA journalists, nothing. Went to the MMA sub Reddit posted my website, nothing. Tried again, got banned! Went to the biggest MMA forums, again “I am sorry we don’t allow advertisement.” I JUST WANT TO SHARE SOMETHING I BUILT FOR THE MMA COMMUNITY!!!!!!! So I tried something different, Instagram content marketing, created an account, uploaded MMA content, mostly crazy knockouts and such and put my website in the bio. After a week, the result was 66 users with a median time on website 1m 44s, and a 10% signup rate to vote. Not bad users! Then I took a page of other makers’ book and tried what is called engineered marketing. Created a spin off product in a day into something trendy, McGregor Next Fight, half of the MMA fans only watch MMA for McGregor and posted it in Sports sub Reddit. Result : 70 users with no sign ups and 0m 1s median time on website, 100% bounce rate, really bad users! Concluding, I realized that MMA is not as easy to promote like tech, where you have product hunt. I would need to invest time and post to Reddit and the forums, meet the administrators and go from there. Since I am going fast at the moment, anyway a B2B software service is what I am aiming for with Pricing and profitability from day one, let’s leave MMA matchup alone, no hard feelings. What I learned from MMA matchup. 1) React is not needed for simple websites, just makes things more complicated. 2) Rails and Heroku is the way to go for me. 3) You should pick a market you are knowledgable BUT you must also see a clear path to your goal, and that is profitability for me. MMA products would most probably be B2C, not easy, and also I don’t have a platform like product hunt and product hunt ship to validate early. So let’s leave MMA for now. 4) Go for b2b, not b2c. 5) I lost a lot of energy, time and even money on domain names. I was pondering whether I would buy mmamatchups.net or mma-matchups.com and also I bought initially whoshouldmcgregorfightnext.com and then bought mcgregornextfight.com. 40 euros in domains! WTF too much. Lesson learned: Domain don’t mean shit when it comes to validating stupid little websites.
A screenshot of my first app, MMAMatchups
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