How to Build an MVP App Without Writing Code
process.st
process.st
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...)
Aside from static MVP apps and surveys, what other ways are there to gauge the market for a new business 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 =)
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.
If this statement is true (in my experience, most statements like this are based on lack of proper analysis of one's business/product assumptions) then it sounds like you took an invalid business idea to begin with, then got hung up when you couldn't figure out a way to validate the invalid idea. Customers with high standards for a solution is a classic case of a weak problem or lack of real demand.
In any case, what are you trying to say? Do you believe that facade apps can test all business ideas? Or all software business ideas? Or do you agree that there are some kinds of business ideas that you can't really test using a static app? Or are you telling me there's a third option I missed?
Did Uber test their idea using an Invision mock-up? Can I tell if a video game will sell using a mock-up? Do you think Apple validated the market for the Pencil using mock-ups? Do you think Teller has a valid point that his magic tricks won't work in practice form, or do you think he's wrong?
I think marketplace apps and social networks with static thumbnails & videos & chat are definitely testable using mockups. But I also think there are large classes of interaction ideas you simply can't capture or test using a mockup, you need a real demonstration of the experience.
All that said, I am assuming that a "valid" business idea is one that has market potential but hasn't succeeded yet. If what you mean by "valid" is one that has succeeded, then I totally agree with you. From my perspective, there's a much larger gap between a valid idea and success than there is between an invalid idea and a valid one. Honestly, I don't really even know what an "invalid" idea is. There are plenty of bad ideas that make money, and plenty of good ones that don't, and it's extremely rare that the causes are clear enough to call the idea invalid. Success almost always has more to do with execution, timing, funding, and luck, than with the idea.
Sorry about that. I am just being direct. I don't know enough context about your idea to say, but it is what I consider a pattern.
Please do not take the below as personal criticism, my intent is genuinely to be helpful to you and others with a similar situation/mindset.
> There's plenty of demand to go around when I do cut through the noise, and plenty of customers have validated what we're doing verbally and more importantly with their pocketbooks.
"when I cut through the noise" is a slippery slope. It's not really practical for startups with limited resources to bet on. Warreb Buffet is famous for saying he doesn't look for 5-foot fences to jump over, he looks for 1-foot fences to step over. This type of situation is more of a 5-foot fence. It does not mean you won't be successful, just that your probability is lower from the market perspective.
> Do you believe that facade apps can test all business ideas?
This question is flawed. Nothing can test all aspects of an idea, and an experiment need only be designed to test the most important aspects of an idea. Landing pages can test value proposition, acquisition channels, pricing, and customers' willingness to pay (for all ideas).
> Or do you agree that there are some kinds of business ideas that you can't really test using a static app?
See my last point. You have decided your time is best spent on an idea where you believe your MVP requires significantly more investment than other ideas. You may be right or there may be a way to test it more cheaply that you haven't thought of. My point is that if you are right then you have signed up for a 5-foot fence. My concern is that people who say, "when I break through the noise" usually keep persevering without deciding on and committing to a failure criteria for this idea.
> Did Uber test their idea using an Invision mock-up?
I have to check. It was not a polished app or one built with significant time or resources.
> Can I tell if a video game will sell using a mock-up?
Technically, you can test if it will sell with a landing page and fake screenshots.
> Do you think Apple validated the market for the Pencil using mock-ups?
Apple has billions in cash and existing distribution, it is not a startup.
> Do you think Teller has a valid point that his magic tricks won't work in practice form, or do you think he's wrong?
I think it's irrelevant for startups.
> All that said, I am assuming that a "valid" business idea is one that has market potential but hasn't succeeded yet. If what you mean by "valid" is one that has succeeded, then I totally agree with you.
Technically, yes. Which is why worrying if an idea is valid is useless, one need only worry if it is invalid.
> From my perspective, there's a much larger gap between a valid idea and success than there is between an invalid idea and a valid one.
This might be the crux of the issue. There is an enormous gap between valid and invalid if you take the experimentation approach.
> Honestly, I don't really even know what an "invalid" idea is. There are plenty of bad ideas that make money, and plenty of good ones that don't, and it's extremely rare that the causes are clear enough to call the idea invalid.
Good and bad is subjective. If you set failure criteria, invalid is not.
> Success almost always has more to do with execution, timing, funding, and luck, than with the idea.
Let me get back to you on this one shortly.
> My concern is that people who say, "when I break through the noise" usually keep persevering without deciding on and committing to a failure criteria for this idea.
Well, yes, I made this mistake too.
> There is an enormous gap between valid and invalid if you take the experimentation approach.
I see what you're saying, and I buy this. But I'd say we're having a minor dictionary problem here, which is my fault. Experimentation is by definition execution, and my whole point was about execution. I think of the "idea" as a pure concept without any execution. I am totally with you on there almost always a way to test a business idea with a small amount of execution. That doesn't contradict, in my mind, that facade apps using Invision are simply not the right kind of execution to do experiments with a class of experience based value propositions.
I think you might find this post I wrote in Pando a while back interesting: https://pando.com/2014/01/13/dont-build-a-product-unless-you...
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.
In actual practice, this is the top method for producing vaporware.
I said that we had to build the thing for real, and he replied, "I'm just looking for someone to take over the WordPress work."
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.
I just liked that it was so easy to pick up with little experience and start making things.
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.
Videos and landing pages are only really mentioned once in the introductory paragraphs. The rest is about building sites that people can actually use.
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.
https://forum.bubble.is/t/bubble-chess-anyone/8914
also, in case you are wondering, you CAN get under the hood:
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.
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.
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.
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.