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Last updated: 25/3/2023

Let's talk No-Code!

How-to's + Tool guide

How to build your MVP with no-code tools?

Do you have a great idea💡for your new start-up?

Did you speak to your potential customers to validate your idea?

Validated? Now, are you planning to build an MVP and launch to get in front of your customers?

But there is a problem — you can’t code 🤦🏻‍♂️ or you don’t have a technical co-founder yet? No Problem! The great news is there are no-code tools available to build your MVP, launch and test your product or service.

Answering the Billion $$ question — How to build your MVP using no-code tools?

Let's get to the basics, What is an MVP?

An MVP is a simple, clear and workable solution showing customers your product or service can deliver value. No bling whatsoever.

The hierarchy of building an MVP using no-code tools

We are fortunate enough to live in a world where many tools and frameworks are made accessible (some for FREE). Let's Capitalise on these!

Retrofitting existing platforms or tools

• If your startup is an E-Commerce business, use Shopify to build your online store, add products, engage customers and deliver to your first customers.
• If you are developing a mobile app to address a large number of users, build your functioning prototype with bubble.io or Glide Apps
• There are tons of tools available to launch your start-up and get your first paying customer in the current day and age.

Using Native Integrations

• Every cloud-based app is now supporting native integrations to build and manage effective workflows.
• If you are a pop-up shop or using Stripe to collect and manage payments, Xero for accounting, stripe offers native integration with Xero, making the reconciliation process easy.
• There are other tonnes of applications that support native integrations making data movement easy and efficient.

Using off the shelf tools

• If you would like to have a complete automated business with multiple integrations and a million moving parts, Zapier offers connectors between 2000+ apps to manage all the moving parts making your MVP completely process-driven.
• You can also use custom build connectors to move information between apps using Zapier’s custom hooks.

Custom Build - Expensive!

• Avoid custom building until you receive enough traction, engage a development team only if your start-up is likely to scale exponentially.
• As most of the start-ups do not have access to immediate funding, you can potentially invest your time and resources on current no-code tools available in the market to get traction and early revenue.

And also remember

You are the MVP! The “most valuable person” of your business.

[Prototyping Stack] No-code tools to Build, Launch and Scale your Start-Up 🚀

Being a founder is always a bumpy ride having to wear different caps and be in the shoes of many.

Considering that the features of your initial service or product can vary a lot depending on what you want to test and your skills, this tool-stack for a founder will also show great changes.

Free and easy-to-use available tools with which you can build and test your MVP

Google Suite

Google Suite is all one powerful platform allowing you to create, collaborate, communicate and engage with your target segments and early adopters.

#Landing pages and website builder

This is important right! conveying the right message with keywords can be a game-changer for your company attracting visitors from around the globe.

Wix, Lead Pages, Unbounce, Wedflow to name a few. They provide an exceptional interface and are completely no-code simply dragging and dropping elements and vectors to beautify your pages.

These definitely assist you / your business to engage with your potential customers and keeping the conversations going.

#Customer feedback survey

Google Forms, Type Form, Survey Monkey are the go-to tools to create and share customer questionnaires and receive feedback.

Understanding the problem you are solving gives you a great competitive advantage in the current market and achieve the best product-market fit.

These tools provide templates, support integrations with off-the-shelf applications and you can also analyse the data and publish them with your respondents.

#Communication

Slack is great for communication among your team (if any). Founders can create public channels to engage with your regularly posting content, running polls, feature updates and develop community engagement from initial days.

Check out 📱[Slack Channels] Startup & Tech Communities

#Project Management

Trello is a free Project Management software to organise, manage and prioritise your tasks.

Sitting in the chair of Founder/CEO gives you a privilege but also comes with huge responsibilities and million to-do lists. Trello gives you the power to get on top of things.

Trello’s Butler provides a great advantage by providing automation and supporting integrations with other third-party apps.

#Customer Relationship Management (CRM) & Email-Marketing

Hubspot and Active Campaign are great CRM tools with live chat, form integration, Bot support, inbound marketing and customer support.

Learn more about Hubspot for startups at https://www.hubspot.com/startups

New to Hubspot? they offer free training and certification at Hubspot Academy.

Mailchimp is an all-in-one integrated platform to visually create beautiful emails from their existing huge template base and reach out to your potential customers.

Asana is a great project management and road-mapping tool. You can also assign tasks and view progress.

There are also many other tools available for project and product management. But, Trello and Asana are simple to set up and use eliminating any learning curve.

#Customer Messaging Platforms

Intercom and Twilio are amazing customer messaging platform that integrates well with your other productivity apps.

Both Twilio and Intercom provides API to integrate with your current website or platform to put your customers first.

#Visual Databases

Airtable gives you the power of a spreadsheet to organise anything and publish them on your website and blogs to visually display content.

Airtable can store information in a spreadsheet that’s visually appealing and easy-to-use, but it’s also powerful enough to act as a database that businesses can use for customer-relationship management (CRM), task management, project planning, and tracking inventory.

Alternative: Notion

#Mobile Apps

You need not code to launch your mobile apps. Yes, you heard me right.

There are tools available to help founders like you put your ideas into practice and develop amazing publishable apps.

Glide, Thunkable, Appsheet and Bubble.io are the Best in the industry.

#E-Commerce platforms

Shopify does it all for you. It's simple and easy to set up and you can start shipping your items in days and get paid.

# Accounting and Payments

Your go-to options should be Xero for accounting and Stripe for payments.

Stripe also provides free resources to start-ups. See Atlas.

yay! your business is almost ready to get up and running?

But, worrying about the manual administration and managing all the moving parts and data between your apps and platforms?

We have Zapier :)

Zapier provides seamless no-code integrations between applications automating your workflows, saving time and costs and you can make more sales!

All the apps and platforms mentioned above requires NO CODING EXPERIENCE. How amazing is that?

Unleash your power and start building the next unicorn🦄

What and How Startups can “Automate” to scale?

If your think automation is only for big companies replacing human employees with robots, think twice.

Applications like GSuite, Zapier, IFTTT and many more exist to save time, reduce costs and get more done. Already using this/one of these at your business? — you are already tapping into the power of automation.

Business processes are everywhere and are interconnected but disconnected and distributed. Using automation in your business can make your business agile, lower costs, improve employee productivity, minimize human errors ultimately improve customer satisfaction.

As a business owner or employee, you can connect all your daily favourite cloud-based apps and build integrations delivering seamless workflows.

Top tools that are currently used by many startups to organise and manage their work;

So, what can Startups’s automate?

You can automate anything from signing up a new customer to issuing invoices, from lead generation to lead conversion, customer support and enquiry handling, project and product management and all your document handling and file sharing.

# Business Process Management

Having a well-defined business process means better performance. Automation can reduce operational complexity and improve efficiency.

• Create and Manage: Define your business processes across all functions and applications. Manage them all easily in real-time.
• Flexibility: Make your processes work for your business. Change them anytime easily to optimise performance.
• In your Apps: Automate business processes right inside your existing apps. Building integration between cloud run apps to move data.
• Minimal Investment: Implement BPM with minimal investment at zero business disruption and in a matter of hours!

# Marketing Automation

Marketing Automation is becoming a mainstream and most favourable application of automation as there are many moving parts in the process of capturing data to final conversion.

• Email Automation: Send automated email messages when things happen in your CRM or Payments system. Automate follow-ups.
• Integrate Landing Pages: Link your web forms or landing pages with CRM or marketing apps and set up autoresponders.
• Mobile Advertising and Marketing: Engage with your customers on mobile and auto send personalised messages.

# E-Commerce, Payment Processing and Accounting

Automate bookkeeping, accounts payable and reconciliation to save millions of hours for yourself.

Streamlining the entire process from check-out to adding the customer to your books.

• Automated Order Processing: Build order workflows and manage all your orders without any hassle and also keep your customers informed with automated emails.
• Automated Bookkeeping: Streamline order payments, invoicing and bookkeeping across your e-commerce, payments and accounting apps.
• And many more: No more manual data entry. Put your apps into work by making them talk and share data creating multi-app workflows.

# Sales and Customer Relation Management

Automate all your marketing, sales and customer support management to manage interactions with customers that are essential for your success

• Integrate CRM with third-party apps: Connect your CRM with other cloud apps — Email, Marketing, Accounting, Customer Support etc to keep data in sync.
• Streamline Sales process: Define your sales process. Streamline sales on top of your Marketing, Sales and Payments apps.
• CRM Automation: Perform actions automatically when things happen in your CRM or any other cloud apps.

Hurray! you are now close to putting your business on autopilot and steering more sales to scale your business.

How can Startups Automate?

1. Using native integrations: Most of the cloud-based apps support native integrations with many third-party apps.
2. Use simple conditional statements on connectors like Zapier, IFTTT, Tray.io etc to connect the apps you use to complete routine tasks automatically.

# Automation Lifecycle:

Applying the CI/CD approach, you can plan what processes need to be automated, Map how the process should be tied, which apps need to be integrated and automated and how to optimise and improve.

Happy founding!

No-Code Tool Landscape

#A directory of NoCode tools for entrepreneurs, small businesses and side hustlers.

No-Code Communities

Please join any of these communities to receive weekly insights on how no-code tools are transforming ventures (internal/external), tutorials, online courses, and meet no-code founders across the globe.

Follow these no-code experts to see the extent of projects/products that can be made taking full advantage of the current no-code tools and their capabilities.

100+ Top No-Code Experts You Should Be Following

Looking to learn about no-code development? Here are some of the best no-code experts you can get practical knowledge and inspiration from.

www.softr.io

If you have any questions or feedback, please don't hesitate to reach out at hello@founderskit.tools

Happy startupping!

Page Contents

• Let's talk No-Code!
• How to build your MVP with no-code tools?
• The hierarchy of building an MVP using no-code tools
• Retrofitting existing platforms or tools
• Using Native Integrations
• Using off the shelf tools
• Custom Build - Expensive!
• [Prototyping Stack] No-code tools to Build, Launch and Scale your Start-Up 🚀
• What and How Startups can “Automate” to scale?
• Top tools that are currently used by many startups to organise and manage their work;
• So, what can Startups’s automate?
• How can Startups Automate?
• No-Code Tool Landscape
• No-Code Communities