Top Tools for Bootstrapping Your Startup’s MVP

You just had an amazing idea for a new product. You’ve identified a great market and a huge problem and you have decided to start building an initial version of your product.

This initial version won't be perfect. The product needs to work, absolutely, and it needs to be able to show value. Your objective is to have a product with enough features for those early customers and that’s able to get feedback from them to start building your roadmap. This is what we call an MVP or minimum viable product.

Every great product and company had an MVP, but why? Well, simply because building a great product takes time and is quite expensive. You first have to prove your market and have something for potential investors to see.

Now, the question is, how do I build an MVP, promote it for people to use it, and get the feedback I need? Below, we are going to give you some of the best free or inexpensive tools for building, promoting and getting feedback on your MVP:

Top Tools for Building Your Startup’s MVP

Ready to get started building your startup's MVP or beta product? You're in the right place. Check out these tools that can help!

Bubble

Bubble is one of the leading No-Code tools out there. With Bubble, users can build web apps from scratch using a purely drag and drop interface, which is great if you’re not a technical founder. Bubble has quite a repertoire of things you can build with it, from SaaS platforms to marketplaces, to even building your own CRM.

One of the main advantages of Bubble is its great community of users. More than 1 million users in the world use Bubble to create all kinds of projects. making not only community support quite helpful, but also allowing for many resources to be available. Templates are a great example. For a low-cost, or even for free you can find a template for the project you’re building.

Pricing: Free version with limited platform features, Paid plans begin at $25/month

Glide

Glide is another great tool to start building your MVP in the least amount of time as possible. Glide lets you turn spreadsheets into beautiful and powerful apps without a single line of code. This is great for founders who have their basic ideas in an Airtable, Google Sheets or Excel.

In addition to apps, Glide recently added a new product called Glide Pages. Glide Pages allow users to create websites, which are great for the promotion of your MVP, from any spreadsheet.

Pricing: Free version with limited platform features. Paid plans begin at $25/month

AppGyver

If you’re looking for a lot more flexibility in terms of form (i.e mobile, desktop, tv) AppGyver an excellent alternative to build your MVP. As the ones we’ve previously mentioned, AppGyver is another No-Code tool to build apps.

AppGyver offers very advanced features for your app, such as a wide array of APIs and custom logic. If you’re a technical founder, you’ll definitely like the fact that AppGyver lets you export the code in case you wish to keep building your product with traditional code.

Pricing: Free for companies with under $10 million in revenue

Adalo

Like with AppGyver, if you’re looking for flexibility for your MVP, Adalo is wonderful to quickly build mobile and web applications. With a very intuitive interface, Adalo can help you build a good looking app for whatever purpose you need.

As it occurs with Bubble and other No-Code tools, Adalo has a good marketplace for you to get templates and plugins to ensure that your MVP does what you need. It can also support a good amount of users.

Pricing: Free plan with limited features and no publishing in the app stores. Paid plans start at $50/month

Figma

When thinking about design, Figma is probably the first product that comes to mind. What’s great about Figma is it’s not only easy to learn and use, but that’s also collaborative. So if you are with a a team building an MVP, you can all collaborate in real time and build an MVP that aligns with everyone’s views.

Moreover, Figma gives you the ability to create a prototype, which is definitely not enough as an MVP, but it does let you test a lot a things and make sure you are on the right track. There are also special plugins that allow Figma designs to be exported directly into Bubble and other tools listed above.

Pricing: Free plan with limited features. Paid plans start at $12/month per user

Tools to Receive Feedback on Your Startup’s MVP

You build your MVP and now it's time to collect customer feedback - check out a few of the tools you may want to use below!

Typeform

Getting consistent and thoughtful customer feedback is crucial when building your MVP, and the most efficient way to get it is through forms. It is no secret that people hate filling out long and wordy forms, but that’s when Typeform comes into play.

Typeform allows you to create engaging forms to your users, in a way that is actually conversational. Forms are quite easy to set up and logic can be built into them if you desire, making the experience a lot more personalized.

Pricing: Free plan with limited features. Paid plans start at $25 per month

Google Forms

You can’t go wrong with Google Forms. If your objective is to find a quick and easy way of creating a form, definitely consider this alternative. As long as you have a google account, you can use this tool free forever, which makes it the go-to if resources are limited.

Although it doesn’t offer as much flexibility as Typeform does, in terms of design and logic, Google Sheets does have the advantage of centralizing everything in the Google Suite. For instance, all responses can be automatically collected in Gsheet making the reporting autonomous.

Pricing: Free

Product Hunt

If you want to get lots of promotion and users signing up to your MVP, Product Hunt is an amazing tool. Product Hunt allows users to submit new products on their website and allows other users to upvote them and comment, making them discoverable for other users.

When doing your launch, try to get the highest number of people to upvote your product, the more they’ve been on product hunt the better. That way, you have more chances of being in the top 10 products of the day and making it into their newsletter, which will expand your reach.

Pricing: Free

Reddit

We can’t leave aside one of the largest and most influential online communities, Reddit. Within the platform there are various subreddits where you can post your MVP and ask for feedback.

Keep in mind that Reddit is a double edged sword, since it’s completely anonymous, you never really know who you are dealing with. It can be a curious student or a VP in a Fortune 500 company. That said, the community is extremely large, allowing for a lot of user testing and candid feedback which is always valuable for product development.

Pricing: Free

Let us know which other tools you would recommend!

There are many tools to choose from, and new tools to build or promote your MVP are created each day. We’re sure that we missed some! We really appreciate your input, and we’re sure that your fellow startup founders and employees do too! Feel free to let us know what you use to bootstrap your MVP right here.