Toolkit
Something to keep in mind when building - if you have a validated idea and are confident people will pay you money to use it, don’t waste time designing a stack based on free tiers. Your time is more valuable than the 💸, and your first customers will cover the costs. Worst case you shut it down after a couple months because your validation was wrong, it forced you to learn quickly to not bleed cash.
🦜Prototyping and validating 🔗︎
Before you worry about building, keep things as simple as possible. An MVP is not a product, it’s a process - could be as simple as a napkin mockup and talking to potential customers .
- Draw out your idea on paper, Excalidraw, One Note, or similar.
- How do you think you can jump in and design an app if you can’t even draw what you want?
- Build prototypes with the simplest tools you know - KeyNote/Powerpoint can make some incredible without you needing to learn an entirely new tool.
🔧Tools 🔗︎
Webapps with No Code 🔗︎
There’s a lot of web app builders that provide too much control, so it becomes like visual coding and doesn’t really speed up the process.
Pick up and use 🔗︎
These are my favorites to start with because they things like User Authentication dead simple with hardly a thought, and have good balance between customizability and done-for-you components.
- Glideapps - uses Google Sheets as a backend
- Softr - uses Airtable as a backend
Complicated, but more features 🔗︎
Not as quick or easy to get up and running, but these give you a lot of control.
- Bildr
- Bubble
Developers 🔗︎
🤔Strategies 🔗︎
This one goes out to the chronic over-thinkers and over-researchers that get overwhelmed by options and struggle to start.
- Avoiding building right away
- 🤔
- Avoiding superfluous features once you’ve started building
- Write out milestone with explicit user stories, e.g. User can login, User can create a ToDo, User can delete a ToDo. Nothing in there mentioning account deletion, notifications, or other “nice-to-haves”.
- ? Suggestions from the Community?