Honestly, how much would you pay for someone to design/build your MVP? (if anything) - e.g. brand, website, and application

[abdulmasih]

@4beasts By going out there, finding ecom owners in a niche /
Domain and talk to them. Which subreddits do they hang out ? Go drop in on those subs and just listen, watch, learn. What are their top challenges, what’s their email open rate , what’s specific about ecom emails ? What are best practices in that industry.

Go deep. Deeper than you think .

 

[devaofprayze]

@despreate Somebody always has a larger budget than you expect.

 

[despreate]

@devaofprayze Yeah I've seen some crazy projects for MVPs, kinda impressive tbh. Ballers!

 

[godsdaughter50]

@despreate I’m in the business of building SaaS apps for many years now. Currently running two SaaS products of my own. The first version of a SaaS product that looks and feels like a finished product and can handle serious traffic takes at least $100k to build. It has been true for our own products as well as products that we have built for others.

Validation of your idea doesn’t need you to write a single line of code. Reaching out to your hypothetical user segments to test their interest and getting commitments requires a landing page and a deck only.

When we are contacted by founders who got a “$40k MVP”, we usually have to start from scratch. The artefacts that we receive are typically useless.

Building apps is not cheap. Validation should be done before building. I hope that gives you some ideas.

 

[despreate]

@godsdaughter50 Nice! Is that an agency? or just building the apps for your own businesses? Wow, $100k seems like a lot, but then like you said if it's build to handle everything and scale then probably totally worth it. Surely that's a big bet to make early on though? Or guess it was jsut your time invested.

Yeah totally agree with the early stage validation (landing page, speaking to people).

Oh really?! Do those founders usually come to you post product-market fit then? Guessing that's your target market?

That's super helpful, thanks! And awesome to hear your success!

 

[godsdaughter50]

@despreate We do both - build SaaS products for others and build and run our own ventures. We specialise in building scalable and finished apps, our dev services are not for founders who are yet to validate their ideas.

We do offer a discovery workshop for these cases which doesn’t involve any coding and therefore is done pretty cheap. In that workshop, we build product info in our product management process framework that we have built in-house and work towards idea validation in a methodical way. For SaaS products, we collect at least 30 commitments before we put a stake in the ground and say the idea stands validated. This is done before any code.

 

[ibcym]

@godsdaughter50 @godsdaughter50 How much does it cost to build a B2B maketplace app or extension with 3 features max. Any ballpark number?

 

[godsdaughter50]

@ibcym That is really hard to estimate with just this much information. The cost is proportional to time that needs to be spent and that depends on a myriad of factors. Please DM me and we can take you through some steps to come up with a scope and hence the cost.

 

[eagle57]

@despreate $30k for 2-3 months is the right budget. The dev shops bring prebuilt UX designs and it’s equivalent react code. This takes away a lot of time and can focus on the core app.

 

[lisalogs]

@despreate I've been doing this for 10+ years. Let me tell you about the costs and risks.

First, my studio is based in Italy. We support startups and scale-ups to build digital products. We work with people that want excellent quality UX/UI. So I'm biased from what I know. As everyone else.

Costs:

- Brand identity & simple MVP: we charge at least 15-20k. More frequently, 35-40k.

- Brand identity & complex MVP: 100k or more. No fixed budgets but sprints (see Agile Contracts).

Benefits:

- Work with a top-notch team from the start (= excellent output if part of your positioning is a strong brand and quality)

- Temporary team instead of long-term hiring contracts (in Italy and other European countries, employee terminations are very strict).

Risks:

- Product-Market fit is a long way to go. Especially if your product is purely digital (i.e. SaaS), you risk spending all your budget on your first MVP to realize it's not what the market was looking for (very likely), and you won't have enough resources to improve or change your product.

- Vendor lock-in. For a non-technical founder, it will be challenging to switch contractors. So you better choose well.

Success story: we've built an MVP for ~35-40k (e-commerce, pet food). The client got some initial traction with ads with an agency (we don't do marketing). Then got money from VC / angels. Then hired internal dev team. Now they're growing and happy.

Failure story: a client spends considerable money on the first MVP, but there's not enough market demand. The client has not enough money to iterate on the product and test with different target segments. He can't get money from VC. End of story.

I've seen more of the former than the latter. But that's how startups work. For an agency like us, the most frequent success stories are about more mature startups that come to us to improve their product's UX or launch new features/products.

Hope this helps.

 

[zvikisum]

@despreate Can you share who's charging that much?

I'm planning to start a "dev agency" and charge a one-time fee of 5k and deliver the MVP in 4 weeks at most, and this MVP would include everything: website frontend and backend + deployment to AWS. Maybe I could get some customers

 

[jassy]

@zvikisum Then be ready to do some serious scope control. The number of times I've heard "This feature should obviously have been included" or "You're the expert in Dev, you should have included this feature" or "I assumed that analytics was a part of it".

Plus many first time founders blow with the wind, changing scope every time they see a new opportunity.

 

[zvikisum]

@jassy Yes, absolutely, I wouldn't take the payment and commit myself to building the MVP before having the scope completely analyzed and approved by the client

 

[despreate]

@zvikisum Sure. Few examples: neverbland.com, z1.digital, significa.co, ninetwothree.co. I look on their Clutch.co profiles to see how much their projects were.

Nice, yeah I think with the rise of these Productized Design agencies I've been seeing devs wanting to do something similar. Got any examples of MVPs you've built in the past?

 

[zvikisum]

@despreate Nice, thank you for the examples!

Got any examples of MVPs you've built in the past?

Yep, the most recent one is my own last product PDF Parser that it's currently working and even has some revenue, but the scope of the MVP I'm willing to offer in 1 month for 5k would be something like that

 

[despreate]

@zvikisum Yeah those examples are maybe top tier, but still.

Wow, that's a great MVP, nice work! For 5k that seems like great value, and much more inline with what I imagined an MVP of that scale costing.

 

[zvikisum]

@despreate Great to know it! Thank you

 

[thegirlwhoswaiting]

@despreate The reason people spend so much on an MVP is because they are doing it wrong. It's a discipline in the industry that most have yet to master.

It's as common as sliced bread for people to spend too much.

 

[nigey777]

@despreate $40k for a website is a lot. Unless they do cover ads, SEO or any strategy that would give you actual users. You don't need a beautiful website (or an optimised one) if you don't plan to get traffic, whether organically or advert.

The biggest mistake I see when validating idea is the market research.

The best products are those that solve business connectors. (ie. someone lose time or money on a manual work but your product automates this which gives them an additional $$$)

If I'd had $40k, I'd spend it on hiring a good market researcher. Someone that can get real data about my market. Then, I'd hire a salesperson to write the copy. Once the copy is ready, I'd build a simple landing page and run some ads to quickly validate my idea and scale up.

A business without distribution is just an idea. You want to get users first, then scale up.

Elon Musk and his cybertruck is a great example. A lot of apps do wishlists and small MVP demos just to validate their ideas.

 

[deepwound]

@despreate If you are non-tech, why you don’t find a co-founder to do it. 40k is too much money if no idea validation