Do you have an entrepreneur within you and want to bring it to life? Creating a business plan and building an MVP (Minimal Viable Product) is the place to start. In this post, I will share my approach to testing out a new business idea and some of the pitfalls that you should avoid.

What is an MVP?

Let us first get into what an MVP is and why we should start by building an MVP and not just the whole product.
MVP stands for Minimal Viable Product, which means a product with enough features to attract your first customers and thereby validate your idea.
In some cases, this means just a clickable prototype, the main thing is that it is just enough to get validation from customers so that you know if it is worth spending more time and money on.

MVP requirements

Before building your MVP, it’s time to look at your MVP requirements.

1. What problem do you want to solve?
2. Who is your target audience?
3. How can you reach them?
4. What features do you need to solve their problem?
5. What is the most important feature?
6. How can I test that I’m solving their problem?

Try to note down the answers to these questions and be critical of the features – are they necessary for you to get validation?

How to Build an MVP?

Now that you have your MVP requirements we can take a look at the different options you have for building an MVP for your startup. Depending on the technology depth of your MVP you have different options.

1. A clickable MVP without any functionality behind
2. A No Code MVP with hand-held or simple functionality
3. An advanced MVP

1. A clickable MVP without any functionality behind

This is a great choice if you have no technical experience and want to get your MVP out into your customer’s hands quickly.

2. A No-Code MVP with hand-held or simple functionality

Creating a No-Code MVP is underrated. When I started my first Tech startup back in 2018 No-Code was not a thing, but today there is a No-Code that nearly fits every business case. No-code means tools where you can build your application without needing to code. You will of course have some restrictions compared to coding your application from scratch, but if you choose the right No-Code tool you are properly set for many years.
I’m not going to mention all the different No-Code tools available but I can recommend you to have a Talk with Maja Overgaard who is an expert in No Code.
These are the No-Code tools I have used so far.

3. An advanced MVP

When do we need to make an advanced MVP?

Are you trying to invent a new technology that never has been done before you might need to code it to prove it can be done. But often it’s not the UI that makes the difference in the beginning. What I’m trying to say is that you only need to start coding if you need a cool algorithm that does something smart, but then you can use a NoCode to make your algorithm come to life.

If you haven’t tested if your potential customers want to pay for the service you deliver, you can start by making a facade for your products and then hand-hold the functionality behind them. By doing this you can collect data on the customer’s behavior and thereby have data to attain an investment to hire developers to build the functionality behind.

I you wanna code everything from scratch take a look at my post about Starting a tech company without a tech background. Here I will take you through the things you need to consider to choose the best tech stack. 

What I want to tell with this story is, to use your resources where they are best spent. Creating a business is not only building an MVP, it requires many skills so take the shortcuts where you can, and don’t start building a rocket if all you need is a skateboard to get you from A to B. 

Final advice on building an MVP

My advice to you my fellow entrepreneur embarking on building your Minimum Viable Product (MVP) for your startup is to always maintain a critical mindset. Continuously question the necessity of each feature and aspect, asking, “Is this truly essential to prove my idea?” By staying focused on the core elements that validate your concept, you’ll create a lean and effective MVP that efficiently serves its purpose. Remember, the goal is not to build a perfect product from the start but rather to gather crucial insights and feedback to iterate and improve upon. Stay focused, stay critical, and embrace the journey ahead with enthusiasm and determination.

I’m happy to share with you a totally new feature to make your frontend work in Flutter much faster. Adobe XD have just released a new plugin that makes it possible for you to export your Adobe XD design to Flutter code, with a simple press of a button. It’s pretty cool!

Let’s check out how it works. 

Install Adobe XD to Flutter

Go to https://xd.adobelanding.com/xd-to-flutter/ where you can get direct access to download XD to Flutter. Follow their direction and install the plugin. When installed you will find the plugin under Plugins and you will be able to see a new panel as shown below.

Create a new Flutter project

When you export your design you need a project to export it to. So let us start be creating a new Flutter project. Check out my post on how to create a new Flutter project if you are new to Flutter.

In your pubspec.yaml file add adobe_xd to your dependencies.

adobe_xd: "^0.1.3"

You are now ready to export you design to Flutter. 



Export all widgets to Flutter

Now to the magic part exporting your Adobe XD design to Flutter code. Go back to Adobe XD and in the plugin panel choose UI Panel. Here you can choose your newly created Flutter project. When you are ready press Export All Widgets.

If you go to your lib folder in your Flutter project, you will now see a new file. You can rename it to what ever you want.

To see you results go to main.dart and change you home to be the new widget you have imported.

home: Stats(),

And run Flutter run.

Flutter layout

That’s a really easy and fast way to export your design to functional code.

Let me know what you experience is with this new plugin. I personally look forward to working with it and seeing what difference it can make to my day to day work.

Happy coding 👩🏽‍💻