You're right, Kippt is really in the MVP stage right now while you could consider it as our second MVP: We originally build Kippt over 1 year ago during one day for Forrst App Contest (http://mykippt.appspot.com/). Today's Kippt was build on weekends during past 1.5 months remotely but we already had a pretty good idea what we wanted to do. While we needed to cut a lot of corners, drop features etc we wanted to have a product we and our loved ones would like to use. So far the feedback has been extremely good, so it's safe to say that pushing the early product was a right decision (also validated many of assumptions).
What comes to the press and RWW: we didn't contact any press outlets. In fact we decided to post Kippt only to HN so that we could get feedback and some users outside our friends. I think Marshall saw the submission or some tweet as he didn't contact us for the article, all the information was taken from our submission and other public sources. So I guess we just lucky but I like to think of it this way: It's always the product that does the selling, not the PR (but fanatic users would also help :)
I hope this clears things out. It has been an exciting day and it's really nice to hear that you liked how Kippt looks (Karri deserves credit for that). I should probably write a blog post about this but if you have anymore question, feel free to shoot me an email (jtlallo and the usual gmail suffix).
You're right, Kippt is really in the MVP stage right now while you could consider it as our second MVP: We originally build Kippt over 1 year ago during one day for Forrst App Contest (http://mykippt.appspot.com/). Today's Kippt was build on weekends during past 1.5 months remotely but we already had a pretty good idea what we wanted to do. While we needed to cut a lot of corners, drop features etc we wanted to have a product we and our loved ones would like to use. So far the feedback has been extremely good, so it's safe to say that pushing the early product was a right decision (also validated many of assumptions).
What comes to the press and RWW: we didn't contact any press outlets. In fact we decided to post Kippt only to HN so that we could get feedback and some users outside our friends. I think Marshall saw the submission or some tweet as he didn't contact us for the article, all the information was taken from our submission and other public sources. So I guess we just lucky but I like to think of it this way: It's always the product that does the selling, not the PR (but fanatic users would also help :)
I hope this clears things out. It has been an exciting day and it's really nice to hear that you liked how Kippt looks (Karri deserves credit for that). I should probably write a blog post about this but if you have anymore question, feel free to shoot me an email (jtlallo and the usual gmail suffix).
-Jori