Building your MVP with $0 in under a week.

Validating your ideas can be expensive. From designing hiring if you are not technical to hosting, you can leave a lot on the table for something that may not be the right thing to build.

Here are 3 tips for building and validating your idea under a week with $0 by simply using Figma.

Before jumping in, let us remind ourselves why we need to validate our ideas and what we need to validate.

The purpose of idea validation is to ensure there's a need for your product in your target market. It lowers the risk of building the wrong product and minimizes costs.

But also keep in mind that Idea validation doesn't guarantee that your business will succeed.

Being said, now we know that we are plenty of ways to show our potential customers how we can help them solve their problems, and Figma and its prototyping feature is a great way to do it.

There are 3 parts in the validating process: user & product, business model, and market.

Using Figma will help you validate the user & product part, which is about finding out if there's a need for your product. You'll have to complete your finding with your research of the market and the business model.

I thought it would be great to have an example to show, so I'll take a product I built last year with my brother. Even if it did not go the way we wanted, it's was a great source of learning.

Let's Jump In :

Define your hypothesis.

I'll assume that you have an objective in place and know your persona for this one.

A great example will be my journey last year with my brother. We've worked on a B2C app that helped users find a working ATM close to them, knowing that people use cash for everything in my country.

Finding the ATM wasn't the problem. Finding one that works with a low waiting line was the real problem. 2 times out of 4, people used to visit at least 3 ATMs when they wanted to withdraw money from an ATM. Each ATM can have, on average, 3 to 4 kilometers between them, making them time-consuming.

We decide to build a contribution/community app that lets people find and share their experience (ATM status, Waiting Line if an error in the ATM wich error...) so other people can benefit and the app gets more accurate data.

We presume that everything above was true. Therefore, we built the customer journey based on that assumption.

Here are 3 resources to get started very quickly with Figma :

• Learn Design with Figma: https://www.figma.com/resources/learn-design/
• Free Figma UX Design UI Essentials Course: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbZejnPXyLM
• Figma UI Design Tutorial : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTFaQWZBqQ8

Create the flow that addresses the problem you try to solve and observe.

Build a flow around the user journey how users get from a problem to a solution. To keep up with the previous example, we've removed everything from user profile management, onboarding, and setting, and we've kept only the flow that directly addresses the problem.

Here is an example :
Figma interactive prototype

When we shared the prototype, we asked some of our testers to share it with us when they started using it. Figma has Observation Mode, which lets you watch people interact with your prototype.

Prepare your Validation Interviews Form

At the end of the journey, you can redirect your user to a form to gather more data on their experience. Information like motivations, preferences, needs, flaws and anything you want to know about their experience using the prototype.

Advice for indie hackers

This method is not for all use cases. Otherwever, building an MVP should not take as long as 1 month and should not require resources that you can not effort at least at the money level. Additionally, building skills in other areas could prevent you from going broke building your MVP.

What makes validation difficult is that often your assumptions are different from the real challenges. However, as much as you understand and close the gap between your hypothesis and reality, you'll pass these steps with a high confidence level.

I hope it helps more than one. Let me know in the comment what you think and what's your process when validating your idea.

In the same spirit, I've launched an early access program for a minimalist website and landing page builder that I've been working on. If you are interested in using it for free for 2 or 3 months, subscribe HERE or let me know in the comment.