
How to Build an MVP App Without Writing Code - iamviqui
https://www.process.st/mvp-app/
======
dahart
This is good advice, and it's helpful to have specific tools. There are
definitely certain kinds of business ideas you can gauge the market using a
facade MVP. If you're making a straightforward CRUD app on an standard stack,
chances are high that you can prototype & test it without engineering.

I have a startup that made the mistake of building too much too early, but I
don't think an MVP app would have helped me. The core idea of the app depends
a lot on the experience and performance of the finished product, and customers
have higher standards than we expected and they need integrations with lots of
other services to know if it'll work for them.

I suspect there are lots of business ideas where you can't tell if it's going
to work until the complete experience is in place. Uber, for example, since it
was mentioned in the article. Certainly you can prototype the app to get a
feel for the app, but that won't deliver the experience of the product at all,
you won't know if you'd pay for it until you got a ride from a stranger in
under two minutes.

This American Life recently had a podcast on magic, and interviewed Penn &
Teller. Teller said something interesting along the lines of 'there are lots
of things you can do halfway, but with magic you can't, with magic it either
works or it's stupid.' ([https://m.thisamericanlife.org/radio-
archives/episode/619/th...](https://m.thisamericanlife.org/radio-
archives/episode/619/the-magic-show))

Aside from static MVP apps and surveys, what other ways are there to gauge the
market for a new business idea?

~~~
clairity
i've made this kind of argument time and again to myself, and as a result,
made the mistake of building too much before establishing the market-readiness
of the idea.

it's just too tempting to build first because you can "see the future" of the
product, as opposed to the foggy marketing side of things.

i've been harboring a nascent conjecture for a while that there is _always_ a
way to test a product without writing code. the only potential exception is
for truly revolutionary technology that people simply have a hard time
realistically imagining, but even that's debatable.

the hard part is finding that __one__ key differentiating feature of your
product and devising a very clever test to see if it's valuable without
writing code. this is truly difficult, and is also the reason most of us feel
like we can't test an idea before we build it (i fall for this fallacy over
and over so have lots of experience now identifying it =)

~~~
dahart
> it's just too tempting to build first because you can "see the future" of
> the product, as opposed to the foggy marketing side of things.

Exactly! That's exactly what I did, and my mistake has given me a much greater
appreciation for marketing. For me, getting to the right value proposition has
been far harder than figuring out whether a market exists.

Teller's got a pretty interesting point. I suspect your conjecture is right,
that there is always a way to test without much engineering. Maybe these are
two different answers to two different questions.

It can be true that there's a market, and still have a product and execution
that fails to tap that market. Teller's point is perhaps more about execution
- he said that any given magic trick won't work until the performance is
perfected. If you break the illusion on a practice version, the trick is a
complete failure.

I'm not sure, but maybe the analogy is that you can do market validation
without engineering, and find that a market exists, but you still won't know
if your idea will be a successful business until after it's a successful
business.

------
beager
It's a very valid observation that a fleshed-out platform is not required to
gauge market interest or even product-market fit, but the further convoluted
your non-technical technology-based platform gets, the more painful it will be
to move past the inevitable impasse brought on by the limitations of a closed
vendor system, be that a cost limitation or a capability limitation.

A wordpress blog to start is fine. Point and click/WYSIWYG web apps and mobile
apps? Possibly, but there are more pitfalls.

I wholly support this post because I think entrepreneurship should be more
accessible and not less, but I'd love to see the complement to this, something
that helps the very technical build more with less, and how to build just
enough to continue that incremental validation.

------
fortythirteen
In a perfect world it's fantastic to test out new ideas in this manner.

In actual practice, this is the top method for producing vaporware.

~~~
lotyrin
Can you imagine being the first tech hire in a company that started this way?
"We just sold a contract with Y but they need it to do X" "Well... Google
Sheets duct-taped to Zapier duct-taped to Twilio can't support X, so the first
step to get X is to re-implement features A through... uh.. W by prototyping,
producing, and testing some actual software product as well as a big
migration... so..." or doing any debugging of intermittent delivery failures
between third-party systems with a customer dogging you for updates...

~~~
dagw
_We just sold a contract with Y but they need it to do X_

Heh. Company I used to work for almost bought that contract. Based on what we
read on their homepage and some initial talks the thing they where selling was
perfect for us and we were basically ready to cut them a check for $~10-20k
and possibly quite a lot more over time. However the more we talked with them
and the more we started asking to actually be allowed to test the full
capabilities of what they where promising the more it became obvious that they
where full of shit. Eventually they just admitted to us that they'd straight
up lied on their homepage.

The funny thing was that they then asked if we wanted to become investors in
their company so that they could afford to possibly build the thing they had
been trying to sell us.

------
sky_projektor
It sounds outdated, but I miss Flash which was so good to create stupid stuff
such as UIs & applications! These resources are limited to the one & only
problem they are designed for!

~~~
Yhippa
It also makes me think back to when I used Hypercard when I was in high
school. The distribution piece was missing but it was so easy for me to make
cool workflows with a handful of widgets. I guess Flash solved the
distribution problem there.

I just liked that it was so easy to pick up with little experience and start
making things.

------
kafkaesq
I get what the poster is saying about "gauging market interest" and all that.
And about how videos and landing pages can do a lot to help you do that, and
much lower cost, etc.

But if they think that such activities are somehow a form of actually
"building" something, they're horribly, horribly confused.

"Don't Build When You Can Just Bluff" might have been a more accurate title of
their posting, in that sense.

~~~
adamhh
I feel like the examples given in the article of tools to use and products you
could build are real.

Videos and landing pages are only really mentioned once in the introductory
paragraphs. The rest is about building sites that people can actually use.

~~~
kafkaesq
Like "building" with WordPress templates, and the like?

That's just a variant of the video / landing page, basically. Something that
_looks like_ a product (and may in fact even offer some partial
functionality). But isn't like, you know, a real, actual product. Where "real"
of course means _sustainable_.

Which again might still make sense as a business strategy. But shouldn't be
confused with actually "building" something.

------
dalacv
Bubble is awesome!

[https://forum.bubble.is/t/bubble-chess-
anyone/8914](https://forum.bubble.is/t/bubble-chess-anyone/8914)

also, in case you are wondering, you CAN get under the hood:

[https://manual.bubble.is/building-
plugins.html](https://manual.bubble.is/building-plugins.html)

~~~
adamhh
This is key. The more open the community and collaboration elements, the more
useful the tool is going forward (in terms of building things with it, not
just its own business success).

------
gremlinsinc
As a laravel developer w/ the skills to build out a new app/mvp -- Bubble
looks pretty awesome. I have a ton of MVP ideas but never get started because,
while coding isn't difficult--the time level to code all the aspects is
daunting when I have a 9-5 job to hold down too.

I could see myself using something like this for side project validation until
they start gaining revenue, then I'd probably transition to something more
solid and choose a framework that can scale properly. But for validation this
looks pretty awesome.

~~~
adamhh
Yeah, the ability to make something which looks good and works well in one
evening is a big sell for me.

If I want to put countless weekends into it later, I'm still free to do so. I
don't want to just commit to one idea at the beginning when I'm 100% sure on
it.

Makes Bubble a really attractive tool for me.

------
Bretts89
Equal amount of time should be put into developing tests to validate or
invalidate the idea. There's not point in doing any work if all the feedback
you get is from your family, friends, etc., saying "Looks great I would
totally buy this!"

That said, even before putting anything on the web you can easily bootleg
wireframes in powerpoint and even add buttons that click through to specific
slides as if it were a functioning product.

------
thruflo22
[https://podio.com/](https://podio.com/) is another useful tool for
prototyping workflows with structured content objects.

When I last used it, it had major limitations -- poorly designed API, third
party backup solutions, good luck maintaining anything complex. However as a
tool to prototype an arbitrary business process it's pretty good.

~~~
victor106
This seems more like a project management tool and not a prototyping tool

