What technology or language to use when building an MVP

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Summary:

Marie is at the idea stage, but she already has an offline business with more than a thousands clients and a few dozens coaches. Her goal is to industrialize her coaching program and create personalized training plans based on each individual’s medical capacity. She is currently brainstorming multiple algorithms on how she could store her clients' information on her application.

Today I’m going to answer a question from Marie, the founder of a sports coaching app. Her question is...

What technology or language should I use to build an MVP?

Before answering this question, let’s add a bit of context.Marie is at the idea stage, but she already has an offline business with more than a thousands clients and a few dozens coaches.Her goal is to industrialize her coaching program and create personalized training plans based on each individual’s medical capacity.She is currently brainstorming multiple algorithms on how she could store her clients' information on her application.After defining the basic data structure in a Google spreadsheet, the next step is to connect the actual data with real customer interactions, and then find a way to generate beautiful reports about each client's progress.The best way to do all of this is through online tools that happen to be a bit more advanced than a Google spreadsheet.

Recommended tools

The tools I personally recommend to create a basic MVP, a minimum viable product, and to handle your data simultaneously are:

Airtable and Coda are to me the most advanced and flexible tools out there to handle not only advanced spreadsheets, but also forms and notifications.And by the way, you can also extend the functionalities of these tools by combining them with Zapier to interconnect everything.You could send emails, generate PDFs, manipulate files on Dropbox, create templates, etcetera, all of it fully automated. It’s practically limitless.By the way, this is not a sponsored content. I’m sharing these tools with you because I know them, I work with them, and I genuinely recommend them.

Airtable

So let me give you a taste of what you can do with Airtable.You can create spreadsheets with beautiful views. You can use their application to manage your clients’ data on the go.You can also have calendar views, which you can connect to any booking system, thanks to Zapier.If you want a more visual approach, there is the gallery view as well.On that note, one of the amazing features this type of tool has to offer is not only being able to store information in a database, but you can also store files directly on your table, in your database. That’s super convenient, if you ask me.You even have the Kanban project-style view. So like Trello, but much more flexible.In fact, I know many startups that left other project management tools for Airtable, simply because it’s much more flexible, easy to use, and you can create as many automations as you want.Last but not least, you can also design beautiful forms like you would with Google Forms or Typeform.If you want to give Airtable a try, you don’t have to start from scratch.There are dozens of templates for project management, CRM, sales pipeline, etcetera.But that’s enough words. Let me show you an example of something you can do with it.In Airtable, I can design, for instance, some sales pipeline.I can create a client’s cart with as many information as I want, it’s like a Google spreadsheet, and I can move them.I have access to different information and different views. I can see “All Deals” in a spreadsheet format, and I can add as many columns or customized fields as I want. That’s very convenient.The best thing is that with Zapier, I can generate some automations with it. As an example, I will move a prospect, “Toto,” from Prospect to Mentoring, or maybe to Applied, and it will generate automatically files, templates and emails.Watch the video for a demo using a Typeform form.

Conclusion

So to conclude and answer Marie’s question, after figuring out how to structure your data in an Excel Worksheet or a Google Sheet, you can make it more dynamic and put your entire structure in an online tool like Airtable or Coda to enable real customer interactions with forms, emails, automations and more.Now if like Marie, you have a specific question for your project, just go ahead and ask on myctofriend.co/ask.I will do my best to answer your question by video or redirect you to any existing content that will answer it.I publish a new video every week, so subscribe now and learn how to be better at tech management and build your startup successfully.Also be sure to go through our other content here at myctofriend.co to learn more from real startup growth experiences.I’ll be waiting for your questions, and I look forward to seeing you in other videos. Cheers.