This is part of my building in public journey. I'm going to show you how and using what tools we're building our MVP!
Okay before we get started, we know it's not recommended by many to focus on marketing while building a product, but I don't think that's the case anymore, building a community and marketing the business as we are currently is also important while building product!
The planning
Since Pinglr is fairly new, we had a good idea in our head of what to build; design and feature-wise. Nevertheless, I had a feeling we would iterate again and again and never launch so we made a product spec in Notion.so! We broke that product spec into a product roadmap on airtable.com, which in all honesty we've never used — I think it's because of the simplicity of the MVP.
Designing
All of our designs were made in figma.com, an amazing free tool anyone can use. We haven't outsourced anything so it was just me building the designs, and I thought I knew design because of making graphics in photoshop for a looong time, turns out web-design is different. There went the first version of the website (which looked horrible!)
The second version was a revised layout with a purple color scheme, even though it was visually appealing, I wasn't satisfied with it because it didn't represent Pinglr. So that went down the drain.
Lastly, I made a theme that you see on our landing page today and used that for the UI. The desktop version looks horrible so we've decided to scrap the desktop version and just put something out ASAP and make the design of the desktop and launch it later. So, we'll only be available on phone at the moment!
Making the designs come to life
Initially, during designs 1 and 2, we used actual code but since then we only have one cofounder, me. So I decided to switch it and use bubble.io! And this is still happening as I learn bubble, make it a bit, learn more, and so on!
This I feel is a great choice since an integration between Bubble and Figma saved me from doing all the front-end work that would take more than a week! And the backend is fairly simple compared to the customizability it offers unlike other popular front-end heavy platforms( Wix, Webflow, etc)
To anyone who needs customisability, choosing Bubble would be the best option even if you know how to code because cause no-code helps iterate faster— incredibly important for any startup!
Setbacks
During this tenure of 3 weeks, we have lost a co-founder, 2 weeks of programming due to design changes, and the desktop version along with a couple of features like a visual progress indicator, we'll add this later since I want to push the product ASAP!
What's ahead
After crunching the numbers, I've realised that thanks to bubble.io we'll have our platform ready in about 2-3 days but this doesn't mean we can launch just yet because we haven't integrated other tools like MailChimp and the content itself is barely there ( we have made 2 courses so far)
How much longer? Perhaps a month. As we promised each course is made after immense research and this is why it takes approximately 15 hours to build 1 course that's 15-20 days long, I think we should atleast have 10 courses when we launch. Furthermore, the tool we're currently going to use to deliver emails is Mailchimp.com's feature called customer journey's which need to be set up for each and every course, taking another week or so!
Overall thoughts
The progress and timeline are going to be maintained 'cause of no-code, a definitely better choice for now! And We are cutting so many of the additional features which I don't feel great about cause I think it reduces the value of the product however what we're building is going to validate the idea as it has all the core features necessary to make "self-learning easier, faster and better"!
If you've liked this, sign up for the Pinglr waitlist here!
