Creating a Startup MVP? Save time and move fast with Webflow

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Discovering an excellent business idea is often a Eureka moment for aspiring entrepreneurs. In reality, the actual thrill and perseverance starts from there. The definite first step is to validate (through an MVP) if the idea can really transform into a marketable product that is equally exciting to users.

A business idea is worth nothing till you pursue it. An execution is worth millions till you do it right.

So how do you really create an MVP and put it in the wild to validate user interest and get feedback? 

In this article, let me share my own experience and opinion on : 

1. Why should you test the waters first with a minimal MVP?
2. How can you create an MVP easily with Webflow to test your business idea?

A Minimum Viable Product (MVP) helps you collect your customer’s feedback on your product while you are still in the ideation phase. Through an MVP, you offer your customers a product that consists of the minimum features to help them test the core functionality and customer acceptance. Here is why you should definitely make it a thumb-rule to launch an MVP prior to a full-major release of your product/service: 

1. Quick Market Validation - Starting a business with a new idea is always a riskier proposition, as the results are usually opaque or completely unknown. With an MVP rolled-out, you can quickly gather customer interest, valuable feedback, and traction. This remains to be one of the most critical aspects of initiating a new business and should be followed religiously. 
2. Focused Features - An MVP helps you identify gaps between WHAT YOUR CUSTOMERS WANT vs. WHAT YOU WANT TO OFFER. With quick test data to analyze, you can focus on the pain points and help you on broadening, enriching, or pivoting features of your product selectively for the final release. 
3. Minimum Time to Launch - To adopt a Lean Startup model, a quick development turnaround of the product is a must. With an MVP, you are able to not only launch quickly but are also able to assess the overall effort and challenges towards the development of the entire product-ready instance. 
4. Minimize Risks & Errors - When you are building a new product/service, chances of committing errors are high. While an MVP isn’t a definite guarantee of creating a foolproof product, it certainly gives you a taste of the complexities and errors that you would encounter. With an MVP rolled-out, you learn the complexities, thus making the process simpler and error-free.

Without a doubt, a startup founder with the right mindset can never ignore the importance of an MVP for its obvious benefits. Now that you realize its importance, let me take you through my experience of creating an MVP for Byteline.

How to Create a Startup MVP Easily With Webflow?

Let me explain this with the MVP that I created for Byteline Web Scraper - a tool that offers easy webscraping from a source of your choice to be integrated into a Webflow CMS without writing a line of code. 

Use-Case

Product-based startups usually have a static site (for Marketing and Lead Generation) and a dynamic site (for the Product). The static site is more about outlining your product’s features, case studies, and use-cases to inform and convince the user to try the product, and is essentially the platform where you acquire your users. 

On the other hand, the dynamic site is where your product is accessed. A product in this instance may be an Ecommerce Portal, a SaaS platform, a dynamic booking platform, an order dashboard of a stock exchange, etc.

Byteline MVP

For Byteline, I followed a similar model - a static landing page for marketing and user-conversions, and then a dynamic site that hosted my MVP. To put things into perspective, Byteline offers SaaS services to help build No-Code backend for websites without writing a single line of code.

Static Site

In some of my past projects, I procured generic HTML themes from Themeforest to build static landing pages. But then I had to spend hours customizing it to get a fully-functional page, and invest more for every single edit. On the contrary, for Byteline, I used Webflow to build this static page in significantly less time than what I spent earlier. 

Besides its ease of setting up webpages, the next important feature that Webflow captivated me was its range of SEO features. Through Webflow’s ease of implementing SEO settings, critical aspects such as Meta Data, Open Graph, and Robots.txt were incorporated smoothly, helping with gradual organic growth.  

Made with Webflow, I ensured the landing page essentially showcased Byteline features, pricing, link to our dynamic site, and most importantly, a call-to-action for users to signup. Every user subscription essentially helped to validate the idea I was looking to launch.

Quick Tip: While you create your MVP landing page, make sure you convince the user of your product’s benefits in as few words as possible.

Dynamic site

At the very early stage, my MVP was focused on showcasing Byteline’s Web Scraper service. 

Overwhelmed by the ease of creating the static site, I decided to use Webflow to build Byteline’s MVP pages too.

The MVP showcase idea was to scrape COVID-19 stats from the internet, populated them onto Webflow CMS, and then displayed it on a Webflow site using collection pages (see below image). To make it easier for users to relate, I added a brief how-to demo video, and then again, added a call-to-action for users to signup - this not only gave users a second chance to signup but also helped me revalidate the product.

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While I used Webflow for the frontend, I used Byteline for my backend services. That’s what Byteline offers, which is a number of No-Code services for commonly needed backend features such as DB operations, web scraper, scheduler, and integrations to widely used SaaS services. With Byteline as the backend, you can add dynamic operations within a Webflow site efficiently without writing a single line of code. I used the alpha release of Byteline Web Scraper and Webflow CMS integration to create backend for my MVP.

By the end of the cycle, I validated 

• ‘idea’ and user acceptance on the static site, and
•  ‘product’ on the ‘dynamic site’.

‍Byteline is launching in December this year! Please take a look at the site, upvote, or request features you would like to be included in its list of offerings.