In this post I will go over the MVP building phase of Honeypot Login, from idea to launched product and what my next steps will be.
Idea phase
I work in technology in my day job and have friends working in information security. One day, over beers, we talked about honeypot servers, users and so on. They have tremendous benefits to companies of all sizes, so I started wondering if they could have benefits to users too.
After talking to a couple of other friends, taking care that some of them don’t work in technology, I had the feeling that there may be a market for this.
As a result I created a .md file for the idea and wrote down what it should be able to do.
It looked something like this:
# Honeypot user
- Sign-up & pay
- Get username & password for a fake website
- Get alerted when credentials are used on fake website with some info like user agent and IP
- Fake site needs to be high value target, maybe crypto investment?
Building phase
I knew I needed a couple of different things to launch this product and I mostly chose tools I already have experience with (going fast) or already have paid plan for (keeping costs low).
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Landing page
carrd.co with one of it’s great premium templates
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A payment processor, preferably merchant of record
lemon squeezy, this was the fun wildcard, since I didn’t use them before
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A backend with a DB to process payment events and capture honeypot logins
Python with Django and SQlite for the backend, hosted on PythonAnywhere
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A landing page for the fake website hosted somewhere else
A landing page template and custom hacked together PHP and jQuery, hosted on a existing webspace I have with hosting.de
Utilizing all those tools I built out and deployed the MVP in about a week or, more precisely, about 12 hours of work.
The total cost of running this MVP is now about 15€ a year and I’m able to scale up fast should traffic increase and still stay profitable from the start.
Next up: Validation phase
Having now launched a workable MVP I will continue with what I call the validation phase. I do this in a couple different ways:
- Reach out to my personal network with either heavy discount codes to get an opinion or just to let them know I did a thing
- Look for facebook groups that could be interested in this tool and engage with them
- Post a couple of videos to Instagram and TikTok, just in case the algorithm may like this product
I know in theory I should’ve validated before launching, but given the minimal development time I decided to do it the other way around this time, let’s see how that plays out for me.