Fast Prototyping And Quick Iteration: A Must For Startup Success

Picture this: you’ve got a great idea for a mobile app. You’ve envisioned every feature, every button, and how it’ll change the world. You’re eager to get started, so you dive headfirst into building it. Fast forward a few months, and you’ve poured countless hours into crafting what you’re sure is a groundbreaking product. But when you finally share it with users, the reaction is worse that you thought, they think it's nice but it only partially overlaps with their needs. Basically,. I've done this in the recently, it was a B2B SaaS web based product, needless to say, that project is dead now.

A Lesson Learned the Hard Way

During that project, I was convinced I knew exactly what users needed. I spent over 10 months building a product that's ready to scalewith all the bells and whistles. Such as:

• robust backend architecture with end to end typesafety (thanks to DrizzleORM and Valibot).
• smooth design, we even had animations.
• incredible DX (Developer Experince) with Nuxt, typescript, tailwind, Github Actions etc.

Don't get me wrong, it was still an MVP (Minimum Viable Product), but even an MVP needs to work In production. Anyhow, I was confident that users would find it amazing. But when it finally time, something unexpected happened: almost no one wanted to use it; Sales conversations weren't going anywhere and there were some big red flags in what we built it turned out

What went wrong? I was so sure of our vision that I neglected to validate it. I skipped the essential step of prototyping and gathering feedback, The experience was humbling, but it taught me an invaluable lesson: it’s not about building what you think users want; it’s about building what they actually need, and the only way to discover that is by testing your ideas quickly and iterating based on real feedback. This could never more true for B2B products

The Power of Fast Prototyping

Fast prototyping isn’t just a step in the development process, it’s a philosophy. It’s about getting a functional version of your product into users’ hands as quickly as possible, so you can learn and adapt in real time. The sooner you can validate your ideas, the faster you can iterate and refine them, ensuring that you’re on the right path.

Peter Thiel’s Zero to One talks about the importance of creating something truly new and valuable. But even groundbreaking ideas need validation. Without it, you’re just taking shots in the dark.

For our current project, we’ve chosen to use Ionic combined with Nuxt3 and TailwindCSS to build our prototype. Why Ionic? Because it’s fast, and it allows us to create a web-based prototype that users can access from their browsers. This might seem counterintuitive—after all, a native mobile app would be more polished and potentially offer a better user experience. But here’s the irony: Ionic is actually better for us at this stage because it allows us to observe our users in a way that a native app couldn’t.

The Advantages of a Web-Based Prototype

One of the biggest advantages of using Ionic is that it enables us to conduct screen-sharing sessions with our users. They can show us exactly how they interact with the app in real-time, which provides us with invaluable insights. If we were using a native app, this kind of detailed observation would be much more difficult, users have to learn how to share their phone screens, or we need to be physically in the same location as them. Not to mention that creating actual native app is more time consuming and requires multiple steps to get going.

The ability to see where users struggle, where they hesitate, and how they navigate through the app has allowed us to iterate much more effectively. We can make informed decisions based on actual user behavior, rather than guesswork. This feedback loop is what drives real progress, and it’s why our choice of technology, though not the most advanced, is actually the best for our current needs.

Nuxt plays a crucial role here as well. Its features like auto-import and folder-based routing mean we can build out new pages and features rapidly without getting bogged down in boilerplate code, NextJS works fine as well here. Both offer full-stack development but we’ve opted to have no backend at all at this stage for obvious reasons.

TailwindCSS, while it does sometimes conflict with Ionic’s built-in styles, is another example of choosing the right tool for the job, even if it’s not perfect. I’m deeply familiar with Tailwind, and that familiarity translates into speed. In the context of fast prototyping, speed trumps perfection every time.

The Right Tech for the Right Stage

The takeaway here is that sometimes the best tool isn’t the most sophisticated one, it’s the one that lets you gather the insights you need to move forward. While Ionic may not offer the same performance or capabilities as a fully native app, it’s far more valuable to us right now because it facilitates real-time user observation and feedback. This is the kind of insight that can make or break a product in its early stages.

In my previous project, I was so focused on building that I forgot to stop and see the big picture: something that people actually wanted. This time around, we're using tools that allow us to iterate quickly and gather real feedback, we’re building a product that’s grounded in reality, not assumptions.

Final Thoughts

In the intersection of tech and entrepreneurship, success hinges on your ability to learn and adapt quickly. Fast prototyping and iteration aren’t just technical processes, they’re strategic advantages. They allow you to stay nimble, respond to user needs in real time, and avoid the costly mistakes that come from overcommitting to an untested idea.

As you navigate your own projects, remember that the right tool isn’t always the most powerful, it’s the one that lets you move fast, learn quickly, and iterate effectively. Choose the tools that align with your current needs and focus on gathering insights that will drive your product forward.

And if you want to dive deeper into these concepts, books like Zero to One offer valuable frameworks for thinking about innovation and progress. But at the end of the day, it’s your ability to apply these principles in a real, fast-moving environment that will determine your success. Keep moving, keep learning, and never be afraid to pivot when the evidence tells you it’s time.