Is Decent Data Good Enough?

I’ve been working on the next version of the “book library” MVP with a developer friend. Living the problem this past summer by reading, taking notes, blogging, podcasting, etc. is coming in handy. The insights are helping with feature prioritization and nuances around how it’s built.

One thing I didn’t expect that we’re encountering this week has to do with data. We’re finding errors and weird record relationships in book databases that we’d planned on using. My gut instinct is to create our own pristine database by aggregating and cleansing the data from various sources. But that’s a decent amount of work, and I’m not sure we need to do it for what I want to accomplish with the MVP. I’ll think about it some more over the next few days.