DesignBake #3: Building an MVP

Update #3: Follow along as I build a side project in public with a goal to make $1,000/month in revenue. I'll spend ~1 day per week on it and will post weekly updates here.

Key Metrics

• One-line pitch: A service for startups to get monthly critiques by top 1% designers.‍

• Revenue: $0‍

• Advisor leads: 6‍

• Startup leads: 6

Public Update #3 🌊

Here are the updates from Week 3 and 4 of building DesignBake.

TL:DR; It's been super exciting to spend evenings and Fridays on DesignBake! I still haven't made revenue (my primary KPI), but I have two startups matched with design advisors that are waiting to start their design critiques soon (potential $500 in MRR).

One-line pitch: You'll notice that I'm constantly iterating on my one-line pitch every week. This is a live example of me revising DesignBake's value prop constantly and finding a way to communicate it in the least number of words possible. A stellar one-line pitch is simple, understandable, and easy to repeat back to the next person. It's an underrated foundational block to sell what you're building.

PS: I missed sharing updates last weekend since the 2nd COVID vaccine shot knocked the wind out of me. 😅

Building an MVP

In building early on, one of the biggest traps is to aim for the 'perfect' product instead of building an MVP to test the core of your idea. The most common version of this is, "I'm building a unique product, so the only way for me to test it is to build a custom app for it."

Building a software application is hard — it takes a ton of resources, money, time, and attention. Moreover, it distracts from actually validating your most important, untested assumptions.

Instead of defaulting to 'building an app', ask yourself "What would need to be true for my idea to work?" and test your response to that question.

In DesignBake's case, my assumption is that early-stage startups want access to top 1% designers, but it's often inaccessible, expensive, or difficult to get their guidance. Meanwhile, I've met many seasoned designers who want to help more startups but aren't sure how to get involved in the early-stage startup scene and get started.

So in order to test my assumption, what needs to be true? It needs to be true that:

• Early-stage startups value good design as a way to make money or get users.

• Early-stage startups find it difficult to get feedback from industry-leading designers.

• Early-stage startups would pay to connect with high quality design advisors.

Another advantage that I have in this scenario, is that I'm a designer at my current early-stage startup (Memberstack), so I've literally experienced a lot of the assumptions that I'm testing above. Design is so important to us that we're willing to spend money to get it as right as we can. We've invited various designers to critique our work for the last 3-4 months and their input has been game-changing. While this process has been impactful, it's also been time-consuming and challenging to source, invite, and co-ordinate design feedback sessions with the right people.

This is where the idea for DesignBake comes from. Even though this is from personal experience, I'm still testing it against the experiences of other startups to see if it's a pattern.

A no-code tech-stack

Instead of investing tons of time and money into building something that is a hit or miss, I'm selecting tools that have the path of least friction for me to make my idea work. For example, here's my current tech stack and how much I'm paying for it:

• Website: Webflow - $39/mo

• Documentation: Notion — free

• Scheduling: Calendly — free

• Payments: Stripe — 2.9% + 30¢ of the revenue I make

• Matching startups to design advisors: Slack and Slack Connect — $70/mo for ~7 design advisors at the moment.

• Automations: Zapier — $20/mo (Not paying for this yet, but will do eventually)

Total cost: $120/mo
Build time: ~20 hours

That's how cheap & fast this can be; this stack can easily help me get to $10,000+ in MRR. 🤯

Compare this with the cost of building a custom app for >$1k and still not getting it right. Going with no-code tools reduces the barrier for me to test and validate my assumptions before I actually spend a lot of money in building a product or service around it.