How to launch a mvp and validate your idea with no-code

What is it:

"Plant your forest on this website
it will be planted in real life"

What did I learn:

1. Product Strategy: How to launch a v1. Paul put on a clinic for perfectly executing this. He used this tech stack as his first product:
Plant My Forest v1.0 [No-Code]:
Carrd: 30 min
Zapier: 45 min
Stripe: 30 min
Google Sheets: 30 min
Email Octopus: 15 min

You can see how fast he was able to create this. When he first launched his product I thought that it was ugly. It was literally just a google sheets page launched on a webpage and it allowed you to make a donation to plant trees and if you did he used Zapier to send that information to a scoreboard (google sheets) that displayed dynamically on the web page.

The design was not great but that is the point of your first version. Is that you can always make design great later, your goal is validation over building in your v1. He was able to validate his concept because if people use it while it is ugly they are going to use it when its pretty. But your goal is to find out the essence of why someone activated and your goal is to launch something as early as possible so that you can make that feedback loop as tight as possible.

The principle here is you need to learn and validate your assumptions of what people want. The fastest way to do that is create a product with just the core functionality. And if people look past it, then that is an even better indicator that you are on to something. But the real focus is launching something rapidly, getting that early feedback so that you know what to focus on and you don't waste time on features that people don't care about.

THIS is how you increase your chances of success by developing and launching lean and iteratively. The Lean Side Project teaches you how to do this and paired with the database is an unbeatable combination so you can see exactly how to start. There is no guess work you can see exact tech stacks without having to spend time figuring it out yourself or risk creating something that does not work.

2. Product Strategy: Cost of the no-code tools - If you are not careful the one negative about no-code is the cost of the tools can eat you up. Selecting tools that are free or able to use at a low cost is essential so that you can figure out and validate the product that you are making. In the database for The Lean Side Project you will see a column labeled Skill level. Generally all the tools that are used in stacks that are starter stack are going to be more cost effective. This is not true for each stack. But I would recommend that for example you want find a cost effective form or single web page for the landing page of your project. Use the filters for the airtable base to find the different landing page builders and then discover which are the lowest cost. Carrd will normally be the best starting place. there are a few web page builders that have generous free plans like brizy.cloud that was used in TIMS project By Quentin V.

3. Product Strategy: Checkout - I thought this was one of the better checkout experiences that I have seen and is worth modeling. Here are some elements that I learned that are really important to include to help have the user convert:

1. Show what the outcome of their actions are:
A. save the planet and biodiversity
B. promote your brand
C. get a certificate of plantation
D. do a philanthropic action

2. (I dont know how he did this part) Show the actual affect of the contribution that a user is about to purchase. When you toggle the amount of trees that you want to purcahse, to the left the image and the impact changes dynamically.

This is super cool. I have no idea if he used code to create this. This was not part of v1. But I would encourage you to check this out because if you can show what super powers your user will get when they purchase your product, that is the goal of communicating what your product can do.