How to start small to validate your idea

What is it?

The Maker of this app, Tony: "A bit of an all in one for my friend’s trivia hosting business. Carrd is the front end tying together a couple different things. A “live game” portal that can used in person or for zoom hosted trivia. Airtable is the backend for this portion. The other part is an e-commerce store selling to those who would want to host their own trivia. Gumroad is the backend of this portion."

What did I learn from this stack?

Too often I see Maker's overbuild solutions without any validation. I think we can all (including myself) take a page out of Tony's book about creating the initial version quickly and as functional as possible. For example, I don't think anyone would disagree that visually the UI is not polished. But that's the point. If it is polished and you are launching something without validating your idea, then you're making guesses on assumptions without validation and at risk for building the wrong thing. Every minute you spend overbuilding will take twice as long re-building it.

There is nothing better than minimally building it because it proves out if users can get past the first version ugliness you remove false positives.

Secondly, Tony does a great job of using Airtable in a way that I had not seen before. Airtable forms works seamless with Airtable base that the can act as a scoring sheet. If you're playing virtual, this sheet is something that all can access with a shared link or display through a zoom call.

I also really like the approach that Tony built this for a friend. And the functionality is created so that really only one customer at a time can use it. This is the fastest way to validate what you need to learn and also build into the product. So that when you're ready to build a more complex project, you can do so without wasting effort building the wrong thing. This solution may have poor scaleability, but thats a principle that no-code empowers with. Because instead of a prototype and designs, this is a workable solution. Which gives a much higher validation fidelity.