MVP Prototyping: Notes from the Raise Deep Dive Panel

CTO, developers or no-code? Where I stand after a year as both studio owner and founder. From Raise Ventures’ Deep Dive on MVP prototyping.

Published on November 16, 2022

How do you build the first version of a product when you can’t code and can’t afford someone who can? That was the question at Raise Ventures’ latest Deep Dive, on MVP prototyping, and I was on the panel, billed as “Invisible Building and Sugar Financial Technology”. Studio owner and founder. Poacher and gamekeeper.

The panel

Deep Dive is Raise’s series that takes one hard topic and gives it an hour. This one had both sides of the argument on it: James Nesbit of Myth Digital and Ali MacFarlane of Sugar Rush from the agency side, Connor, a software developer of twenty-plus years, founder advice from Lee-Anne Scott, Eva-Jayne from the Raise team on the community around it all, and me, somewhere in the middle. The full session is on YouTube, with chapters.

The discussion, in Raise’s summary, came down to the three options a founder has: bring a CTO into the team, hire software developers, or explore low-code and no-code yourself.

Where I stand

Use no-code to learn, not to launch a unicorn. I have been making this case since a Tech for Non Tech talk in 2020: a landing page, a form, a database and an automation will tell you whether anyone wants the thing, for the price of a few subscriptions. Myth made the fair counterpoint with a case study of a no-code MVP that kept going well past the prototype stage. Both are true. The mistake is only ever spending developer money to find out something a form could have told you.

When you do build, build on boring, open technology. I talked about Laravel and open-source tools for a reason. A non-technical founder is, at some point, going to have to put their trust in a developer. Open, well-documented, widely-used technology is what makes that trust safe. If the relationship ends, someone else can pick the code up. Ali made the developers’ side of that case well: building is genuinely hard, things change along the way, and documentation at the end matters.

A prototype is the best pitch deck you will ever make. Lee-Anne spoke about raising money from a prototype, and it matches everything I saw this year on Catalyst’s Co-Founders programme with Sugar. Judges, investors and customers all respond to the same thing: something they can see and tap. Every conversation gets easier once there is a screen to point at.

Raise Ventures’ takeaway from the Deep Dive on MVP prototyping: Don’t try to do it all at once — Raise Ventures’ summary of the session.

The takeaway

Raise’s own summary of the session is hard to improve on: “Don’t try to do it all at once! Focus on the fundamental functionality for version 1. Be clear in what you want to achieve. Communication and managing expectations are both key.”

I would add Reid Hoffman’s old line: if you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late. If you’re a founder staring at that gap between the idea and the first working version, that gap is most of what we do. See web app & MVP development.

From the archive: written up in 2026 from our notes and records of the time, and dated to when it happened.