Yesterday we hosted our very first Live Start-up Surgery.
Ari Scott and Natana Mayer are the Founders of ADHD Entrepreneurs Club. They are currently working on building their MVP, but need support understanding which no-code tools better suit their solution.
During the Clubhouse session, our Product Managers helped them mapping their user stories, which listeners could follow live on a Miro board, and discussed possible solutions for their platform.
Here are some of the recommendations and tools the team discussed, how they can help and the next steps we recommend that Ari and Natana should consider:
- Bubble provides lessons to help people get up to speed with its functionality. Here is one that could be useful when upskilling with the platform.
- Webflow searching/filtering can be tricky, but they provide a range of lessons and courses that can help non-technical Founders, including MixItUp, which is an option for dynamic filtering and sorting. Given the requirements in the user story mapping for Ari and Natana specifically, Jetboost would be a good solution as well (here’s an example).
- Webflow doesn’t hold user data natively within the platform (yet!) so you would need to integrate with something like Memberstack to handle user sign up, login and user-specific content. Here is a tutorial of a site similar to your feature set that would be worth going through. Note - as Bubble is a platform solution, the user sign up and login can be handled natively within Bubble.
- Connor Finlayson, Founder of Unicorn Factory, shared this video about how he built an E-Learning platform using Webflow and other tools.
- Finsweet CMS Library is a free collection of pre-written Javascript functions that help you organise your Webflow CMS lists.
- Wized is a useful extension for Webflow projects - it helps you integrate data from APIs, build login functionality, custom payment flows and more.
Next steps:
- 1 - Conduct a tech spike (i.e. picking a distinct part of the product and getting it working without worrying about how it looks or how it fits into the wider product - it's a throwaway experiment to learn and to prove that something can be done in a particular technology) in Bubble to check the learning curve and to understand:
a) How authentication works and how it links to user accounts and memberships etc. This could also include integration with a payment system or plugin to handle lots or some of this with Bubble’s built-in authentication tools.
b) The content creator workspace, how can video files be uploaded and hosted, how would you store the data that makes up a course so that its relationships are correct and can be used later.
c) Can the data from a course be manifested in Bubble in a suitable way so that users can view it and add text etc?
d) Are there enough design options to make the site look how it needs to? (for MVP this is likely to be yes) - As well as the above:
a) When considering Webflow, map out the user journey (either in a similar way to the Clubhouse or by drawing shapes) and work out which tools would be needed to achieve the result. For example, if Webflow is the overall interface, then something is needed to manage memberships - that could be Memberstack. Something would be needed to manage video hosting - that could be YouTube. Can a white label solution handle all the course features and simply be embedded or linked out with seamless user authentication handovers?
b) Tech spikes could be conducted on all the mapped interactions/handovers to check that various tools can be knitted together/embedded in Webflow to create a suitable experience. - Is there a white label solution that does everything that would let you get your MVP out even faster and just let you focus on your unique domain/persona/content to acquire users?
- Depending on the above research, a tech strategy could be chosen with more confidence that the builder could use the tool and that the “hardest parts” could be achieved.
If you’re a Founder and are interested in joining a Start-up Surgery; to get help on product, tech or commercial challenges, email marketing@founderandlightning.com
