From Idea to MVP: My Journey at Akinon

When I was working at Akinon, we participated in a company-wide hackathon focused on creating a live stream platform. I aim to explain how I managed to achieve the opportunity to win the competition and create the most viable product in the fastest way possible.

Focusing on the Main Problem

During our team discussions, I noticed that each member was focused on showcasing their capabilities rather than addressing the immediate task at hand.

We were confident that the company already had a solution for the live streaming platform and was simply seeking additional ideas. However, we were deceiving ourselves because it was actually the most challenging part. After a couple of hours, we accepted our situation because our discussion wasn’t making any progress.

I believe it’s important to acknowledge that we all have strengths and weaknesses as individuals. However, now is the time to truly showcase our abilities. We might even surprise ourselves by discovering skills we didn’t know we had.

Searching for Examples

Every project and idea is unique, but I think they share similarities in small ways. We started looking for similar projects, even those completely different from our own. It’s important to understand that every living creature learns and evolves over time. As children, we often looked up to our parents as role models, for instance. I believe projects will develop similarly.

We came across some projects offering WebRTC servers and WebSocket solutions. Although we knew these were different from our plans, we studied their structures. We also explored how YouTube and Twitch operate behind the scenes. Eventually, we realized our requirements were quite similar to those environments, giving us a clear understanding of the architecture we needed to build.

Baby Steps

Rome wasn’t built in a day, so we need to keep that in mind. Our past experiences shape who we are today, so it’s important to understand this and not rush to build everything at once.

As we searched for examples, we tried out every technology we came across. Our main task was to stream a single frame of a picture. We put in a lot of effort, even including people who didn’t know how to code in our meetings, as they shared their opinions. I believe this inclusivity is important in the creative process because sometimes we can get so focused that we overlook small details, which can lead us into loops.

Simplicity: The Key to Success

After achieving your baby steps, it’s important to keep things simpler and prioritize them. You can’t run before you’ve taken a few steps.

We were also in a loop deciding what we should do next. Some people were discussing building the front-end side of the project to get camera input from users to stream, while others were confident about migrating the back-end to cloud solutions.

These ideas seemed unrealistic when we had only managed to stream a single frame on our localhost. After taking a break, we came up with a simpler idea: streaming a one-minute-long video from one PC to a server and then watching the stream from other PCs.

Fake It Until You Make It

I say ‘fake it until you make it’ because you can’t reinvent the wheel every time you’re building a car. First, you need to see if it’s going to work or not.

We successfully streamed a one-minute-long video to the server, but encountered a problem when attempting to watch the stream from other PCs. We soon realized that building an entire live streaming platform, complete with a player and other features in 24 hours, is impossible. After discussing for a while, we decided to send the video to our server and then distribute that video to YouTube. Following that, we integrated YouTube’s player with our own design.

Wrapping It Up

It was time to make our project more appealing. Our streaming service was functioning smoothly with YouTube’s player, and we even discovered that we could stream to multiple platforms using our service. While this feature was unnecessary, we were definitely going to incorporate it into our project as a built-in feature.

Now, we were able to discuss the design, user experience, and other aspects we used to talk about. We began by simply improving the design and then focusing on user experience because our project was nothing without its users.

We went even further and added some functions that display product details on the video player during the live stream. Users could create a list of products to showcase and change the showcased product via a panel.

‘Sell Me This Pen’

I’ve read that Steve Jobs spent a lot of time on his presentations, and I firmly believe that first impressions play a crucial role in everything. Even though I was just a kid when Apple announced the iPhone, it left a lasting impression on me. I still find myself watching Steve Jobs’ iPhone 3 presentation from time to time.

It was our moment to pitch our project to our investors and C-level managers. We crafted a presentation detailing our technical background and showcased a real-time demo. They were amazed by what we had accomplished in just 24 hours, especially considering that other teams struggled to build their own services. I’m not saying their projects were bad; rather, they seemed to have missed the main problem, which was creating a project capable of streaming a live feed.

Happy Ending

Although we didn’t finish as the first team, we secured the second position and earned the opportunity to further develop our project with the team we had assembled. We enthusiastically continued the project and attracted customer brands. Our first stream was with Lacoste, followed by collaborations with Sephora and Samsung.

We even developed our own live stream player with the perfect features tailored to our specific needs.

Long story short, don’t get stuck in the small details. Try to see the big picture and just say ‘Hallederiz’ — in English, ‘We will handle it.’ Take simpler and smaller steps, and keep building on them.

Embrace the ‘Hallederiz’ spirit.