Why I Pulled minti.gg From the Hashnode x thirdweb Hackathon

Why I Pulled minti.gg From the Hashnode x thirdweb Hackathon

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2 min read

Some of you may have briefly seen my submission to the Hashnode x thirdweb January Hackathon. Some of you may have also noticed, that the link to the blog post is now dead and the homepage of minti.gg has changed to this:

Screenshot from 2022-02-04 03-24-34.png

Why all the mystery, Kirk?

Well, as it turns out, the idea in question got a lot of attention...

Screenshot from 2022-02-04 03-32-01.png

A lot for me anyways.

And to keep within the rules of the hackathon, I followed the instruction to make my git repositories public. Herein laid the issue.

What I had created was a pretty solid MVP (minimum viable product) for a service I had dreamed up, that didn't exist yet in the market. And by posting the source code publicly, anyone would have been able to spin up a clone pretty quickly.

While I (now) don't believe "first mover advantage" is all that advantageous, I still didn't want to make the barrier for entry, quite that easy for potential competitors.

Taking down the blog post, and converting the homepage of the site into a "coming soon" lead generator, was painful to say the least.

Not to mention when I read this in my Discord server:

Screenshot from 2022-02-04 03-41-32.png

"... and you were a strong contestant to be one of the winners of the hackathon"

Ouch, my heart!

But anyways, even though it pained me to do it, I believe it was the right move for starting up a legit business with this idea.

Where are things at now?

As it stands, I currently have:

  • One person who offered to partner with me.
  • A response from the Orange DAO, from which I should receive a followup by Friday, the 11th.
  • A meeting with a member of Viatec's team, scheduled for Tuesday, the 8th (shout out to Jesse of Code Ninjas).

I'm excited to say the least.

I am now in the stages of figuring out where to start things as a business and how to plan a graceful entrance into the market.

As long as there's no negative fallout from writing this post, I will continue to document my progress in creating and launching my very first startup.

Be sure to follow for further updates, and comment on the post if you have specific questions.

As always, keep coding!

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