Prove Your MVP: The Founder Playbook for a Strong First Launch (with Angelo Zanetti)

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Nur podcast, where we work on getting better step by step, professionally and personally. Let's get started. Hello and welcome back. We are continuing our season of Building Better Foundations. We are the Building Better Developers podcast, also known as Develop-a-Nur. I am only known as Rob Broadhead, one of the founders of Develop-a-Nur and also the founder of RB Consulting, where we help you assess your technology, clean out your junk drawer there and build a roadmap for success. Good things, bad things. Good thing is by the time I, we are, when you're seeing this, because we record this a little bit ahead of the game, I am going to be past a flurry of doing a lot of crap to simplify my life and go down to about nothing and travel with simply a suitcase and a laptop. And probably by now I am really enjoying that because right now towards the end of it, I am tired of it. It is exhausting. The good thing is as we record this, we are getting into towards the end of the year, very full year, very much looking ahead and just really enjoying like what life has to give me at this point. Every day is full. It is exhausting to get to the end of it, but in a good way, sort of like getting to the end of the introduction that Michael is about to give us. Go ahead and introduce yourself. Hey everyone, my name is Michael Moulache. I am one of the co-founders of Develop-a-Nur. I am also the founder of Ambition QA, where we create and test custom software that solves real world problems. So your business runs better and scales smarter. Good thing, bad thing. Good thing, as Rob said, we are recording this a little before the end of the year. We will be able to spend time with family and kick back and catch up on some video games and just relax a little bit, maybe watch some more Christmas episodes or feel good movies. Bad side, every day in Tennessee, it is a different weather day. It can be snowy, icy, warm. Yesterday was a gorgeous afternoon and of course this morning I go outside and it is like 25 degrees. So I am ready for spring. Today we are back with another interview and we are going to start into a conversation with Angelo. Why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself. Hey everybody, thanks for the intro, for having me on the podcast. I am Angelo Zanetti. I am the co-founder of Elemental. We are a web and software development company based all the way out in Cape Town, South Africa. A lot of you know Elon Musk. He is our fellow countryman. We build a lot of custom web apps, mobile apps, software. We have been doing that for about 20 years. I originally was a developer but no longer. I leave it to the skilled people in my team. I can touch on a little bit of a good thing and a bad thing. I think the good thing is it is great to be on this podcast. It is good to share some insights with you guys and some discussions and I am looking forward to that. I think the bad thing is we are kind of winding down to the end of the year but it is full steam ahead still. People are always asking how are you going? Are you preparing for holiday? Are you winding down? I am like, that seems like a very far place right now. There are a lot of positive things and there is good reason for that. I think that is the sort of bad thing. There will be a break at some point which is much deserved. Rob, it sounds like you are going to have an amazing trip as well. I think we will need to kick off a little bit at the end of the year. Yeah, that is the thing. That is the challenge of being in technology it feels like. There is always that push at the end of the year. If you are lucky, if things work out, then you earn that week or two or however long you can get that little bit of a quiet period or maybe just a long weekend and then go from there. This year, 2025 is just one of those that at Christmas and New Year's fall, sort of in the middle of the week and I think that just messes stuff up a little bit more. It just feels like there is not enough time to prepare and there is just too much stuff that has got to get done between now and the holiday season. Let's dive right into the whole web and application world. This is something that has been around now for a few decades. Mobile apps have been around and a big thing for a good 15, probably 20 years almost. It has gotten full. There are just certain areas. There is just a lot out there. If you go to an app store or Google Play or something like that, there is just so much stuff out there. All you see a lot of times is almost like the tip of the iceberg because there are all the top ranking apps and you can go down and you can find just such a broad range of stuff. Particularly if there is stuff you are developing or for your customers, what are some ways to distinguish yourself within that busy and loud market? I think for the app stores, there is even a service that certain marketing companies offer where they offer app store optimization. I don't know what the exact term is. I think it is really difficult to compete in those verticals on the app stores. I think you need to be driving downloads directly to your user base and your customer base. I think it just comes down to the old adage of solve problems and really add value. I am sure you guys also hear and see it. There are so many new startups and tech products. A lot of these products fail because there is no product market fit. They are solving problems that don't really exist and there is a little bit of an ego play there. If your product is really solving a problem and adding so much value, they are going to want to find your product or you are going to market to that audience and directly get people to the app stores to download your app. Obviously, web as well, SEO and AI optimization also plays into that sort of role. We have had a couple of conversations about that in recent discussions as well about really solving a problem. Make sure that you are actually giving a solution for a problem that people need to solve. Otherwise, they are probably not going to pay a lot of money for it. When you are working with your customers, how do you enforce that? How do you work with your customers to help them vet their product and make sure that they are solving useful problems? That is more on the UX and usability side. That is not something that we are involved with, but we do know that there are companies that will do user-based research. They will go and find sample sizes. They will actually go and identify them. They will do proper interviews. They will record them and then essentially gather that information and basically determine from the output, is this actually something that people are willing to pay for? Is it a solution that they are looking for? It is not something that we do. When we speak to people, I spoke to a guy today, someone I know, he wants to build some sort of app in the new year. I said to him, we can build you the best app. It can look great. It can do all different types of functionality. If you are not solving a problem, and keep it simple as well, if you are not solving a problem that people are willing to pay for, or if you had to take your app away, would they feel a bit of pain? Would they miss it? That is the test. It is really difficult. Even these interviews, you can also go down a rabbit hole. You can interview 10 people, you can interview 100 people, you can do 1,000 people. At some point, you have to put something out there and really test, is there a product market fit? Is there demand? Is there positive feedback? Or is there no traction whatsoever? One of the things that you mentioned, one of your strengths, I guess, with your company, one of the things, values you add, is building scalability from the start. I am really curious about that because there are a lot of people, especially in the app market, it feels like there is a lot of us, there is just that rush to market, there is just the like, let's get our website out, get our app out there, get in front of people, and then we will come back later and worry about things like maintainability, scalability, and even stability. How do you do that and how do you work that in with your conversations with your customers or your projects as you step into them? That is a great question. For me, scalability is two things. It is the ability to be able to add more features to a product without the product having to be re-engineered. We are definitely not fans of building something quickly, get it out, get some traction, spend money on that, and then after six months or a year, can it and then rebuild the product. I think it is a waste of money for founders or whoever these tech product owners are. I think that even if the app is small, it is an MVP, I think you still need to have a lot of best practices, build a solid foundation, still think big in terms of how this thing can grow, how the features can evolve, and build it properly. Have a solid foundation to build on from the start, and then in a year or two or three or five years time, it is still going to keep evolving. I think that deals with the feature and functionality, scalability and growth. The other side of the scalability is the data side, the usage. Obviously when you start, maybe you have a few hundred users, a few thousand users, but we need to think about how does this platform look when there are hundreds of thousands or millions of users? What does that data look like? How does the database handle? What sort of cleanups do we need to do? What sort of technology and architecture do we need to do? I think that is also very key to plan from the start as well. Having that solid foundation and having that mindset and those best practice upfront, how you specify the project, how you think about growth from a data point of view, I think really helps the app handle growth from a data and a usage point of view down the line. Sorry, just one more point. You can always add more in terms of the hosting, more scalability, more resources, because you also don't want to over engineer the hosting component because it costs money. You want to have a good fit for the start, but as the app and the usage grows, you can always increase the hosting resources and scalability from that point of view. Sorry, Michael, over to you. No, it's okay. I'm glad you explained it on that. How would you approach those founders or those people, developers with ideas that want to build a digital app or start a product? But they don't really necessarily have the technical foundation. I think that it's all about taking that vision that's in their head and extrapolating that somehow. You can even use AI tools these days. I think it's actually quite nice to visualize your products, things like replatable. We've seen a lot of people come to us with those. They've bought something unlovable. And it's taken their idea further than just a concept in their head. And it's expanded that to something visual that they can play with. It's a little bit tangible. They can run through different steps, but it's not really production grade ready. I wouldn't go to market with it. So I think that if we had this conversation maybe a year or two ago, I wouldn't have said that. But I think that's a good way for founders. We help clients scope out their project in terms of we do discovery. So we'll workshop their idea. We'll challenge them on certain things. We'll suggest certain things that they haven't thought about based on their experience. And we basically architect the scope of work, the MVP and future phases in a discovery engagement that happens at the start of the project. So I don't know if I've answered your question, but I've given you two different ways of tackling that. Oh, definitely. So to expand upon that, with your years of experience with this and dealing with the project, with your years of experience with this and dealing with technical and non-technical founders, what are some of the biggest mistakes you see them making at the start? And then what are some of the successes you've seen as well? Some of the mistakes I would say are that they try and pack too many things into their MVP. So founders are very proud. They're very passionate about their product. And sometimes they're a little bit ego driven and they want to have these little bells and whistles and these nice to haves. And it's not always needed. Right. So I think really keeping it simple, you know, this whole MVP principle, you know, minimum viable product. If it's not going to add, if it's not going to solve the core problem that you're trying to solve, don't include it. You know, you can always bring it in later, but, you know, keep it simple. It's going to keep the founders costs down. I think other things are. I think. Yeah, I think also maybe even, you know, we kind of touched on it at the beginning, you know, getting validation from their potential user base, you know, are they actually validating their idea? Or are they just kind of building something, hoping, you know, that if I build it, they'll come. And I think that's, you know, then you've got to kind of pivot or change direction during development or after the MVP. And that's more costly and time consuming. And I think a really big mistake that I see is that a lot of founders, you know, they've. They've seen a niche problem or a niche problem, as you say, in the States, they've come up with a solution. Hopefully, they've been in that industry and that that's always, you know, a lot more success guaranteed from that. But they think that they are building a product. And once it's launched, the floodgates are going to open. And I've seen that where founders that have allocated a lot of budget, they've thought about marketing, they've thought about how we're going to acquire customers. They do really, really well. And others that think that, OK, I'm just going to launch this to the world and I'm going to get lots of clients. And users and subscribers that generally is doesn't work. And, you know, inevitably, the product fails. So I think marketing is really, really important, you know, and to think about it even before development. Yeah. So if you could sum all of that up and say the top three things founders should do when starting to build a product, a mobile app, what would be your top three picks? Yeah, I think it's I think it's what I said, you know, I think product market fit, you know, are you really building something that's going to solve a problem or are you building something for a problem that doesn't really exist? Keep it simple. So, you know, keep it MVP. Keep it as you know, launch as easy as possible and don't launch with bugs. I don't like that. You know, I think a lot of there's this it's a little bit common in the industry to go, let's launch, get it to market. Even if it's full of bugs, then we'll fix the bugs as it's live. I'm not a fan of that. I think you've got a really good opportunity to make a very strong first impression. And if your impression is not good because of bugs and, you know, errors and things like that, I think it actually blow your chances of wowing that that user. And then I think the marketing thing, you know, I think that's a big thing. Yeah. So I have one more call up and I'll pass it back to Rob. So I'm a big QA guy. I like test driven development myself. And in the world of mobile apps, there's a lot of different tools out there for doing mobile testing, A, B testing, things of that nature. Any suggestions that you have or any of the particular tools you like to help test your mobile apps? So there are quite a few different tools. I think we've we were using like Selenium. There's some other tools that we're using. We're still also doing quite a bit of manual testing. I think these tools don't pick everything up. And I think there's a lot of intricacies that need to be thought about from a user's point of view. Yeah. And you can obviously write things like unit tests as well. But, you know, that takes a lot of time. You know, it's almost as much time as it is to build the product itself. So sometimes doesn't from a value and cost point of view doesn't warrant it. So I think it's a balance of human based testing and that sort of functional testing and visual testing and interface testing and then using some sort of automated testing as well. But keen to hear from your side, you know, like what what's working for you and what you know, what tools you're you're prescribing to your clients. So a lot of the tools I use kind of depend on which device like if you're doing Android, the Android studios has actually a pretty good test we built into it. Ketelin is another one that's pretty good. I've used Selenium in the past and there's a couple other ones. It also depends on the language I found. Like if you're using React, Expo is really good. It has really good test tools in it for testing a lot of mobile apps along that nature. The biggest thing that I struggle with, especially with mobile development, I don't know if you run into this, but when you build mobile apps, do you pick a language like Android or iOS or do you tend to go for the more open platforms where you build once and deploy anywhere? Yeah, we typically go more the hybrid, the hybrid app route or the progressive web app route. So we're not building a native. So it is typically built once deployed to iOS, to Android and in South Africa. We've got Huawei, which is a Chinese operating system, but I don't think it's very popular in the US. A lot of people look at me when I tell them that and they don't even know what I'm talking about. But it's it's actually similar to Android, the app store and the operating system. Let's come back to swing back a little bit on the ideas of talk about MVPs and stuff like that, because you touched on something that's actually something we've run across many times is where you're building an MVP. You're working where we're working with somebody on MVP and it's just keeping the M part of that becomes very challenging because they're they want to push something else in. They're like, wow, what would it take to just like, let's just put this one extra feature in. And you've also mentioned that something I'm starting to see as well is sort of a rise of the the no code MVP kind of thing where like a founder or visionary or somebody has sat down and they put something together that is, you know, it's not production grade, as you mentioned, but it's it sort of works. It's a it's a clickable demo, maybe a little better than that. Have you found that there's more pushback now that there's people sort of gotten a little bit gotten their hands dirty. Do you see a little more pushback and a little more of a how hard can that be to like, just let's go add that feature in or is it still has it still managed to be roughly the same kind of conversations you've had in the past? I think it depends on a case by case basis. I think it's also depends on the feature and if it makes sense to include it and how big is that feature or how small it is and what impact will that have on on the launch or the value to the user. And then in terms of your question about the people getting their hands dirty. Yeah, I think a lot of people are getting their hands dirty. So they're playing with these tools, these AI tools, you know, lovable and replete. And, you know, they're taking their idea to a certain point, but they're not developers or engineers by trade. So there's a lot of things they don't know to think about. Right. And they don't know to even prompt these things, you know, let alone will that be correct or not. So I think that's our job as developers is to think of, you know, the exceptions, you know, what happens when something fails? What happens when there's this strange possibility and how does the user journey get impacted by that? You know, so from a functionality point of view and a user journey point of view. So I think that's where there's a lot of shortcomings. And yeah, so it's got its place. I think these kickable prototypes or these proof of concepts are good. And I think it's good to help them, you know, as I mentioned earlier, to to take their vision and to sort of visually see what they can do and maybe take it to some stakeholders, get some feedback, you know, get some buy in or push back. And, you know, that's maybe a way to to validate, you know, if I had to build this properly, would you use it? Would you pay for it? What would be comfortable paying to subscribe to this kind of platform? Yeah, I was wondering if that because that's, you know, in the past, we've had situations we'll do like a clickable demo or a proof of concept. And it's it looks good enough that they're like, well, why can't we ship it now? You know, it's it's one of those where they there's a disconnect between production grade software and, you know, something that you rip together over a weekend or anything like that. I'm wondering, are you seeing them particularly because this gets in the concept of, you know, AI and people thinking that AI is going to take all the developer jobs and some of those kinds of, you know, fears that are out there. Are you finding that founders and owners are more respective, I guess, respectful of software development now as they sort of get into it and realize that like they they sort of they're like, OK, I'm ready to hand this over to you because I know I'm beyond my depth. Or is it is there more of that like, well, you know, I could probably do this myself, but I'll let you guys do it because you may do it a little bit better. Yeah, I think there is a lot of respect for for developers, you know, especially if you don't have a tech background and you kind of vibe coding this application and then you change something in some place and then something else breaks. And, you know, we've seen that a lot and it's quite frustrating for for the founders. But what I think it's done is it's actually created more opportunities, you know, so people who would never sort of entertain the idea of building a product and trying to take it to market. Now they can actually do that or take that concept, you know, out of their head and and kick the can a little bit further down the line. And then if they're getting traction, you know, maybe they'd go to an investor and say, listen, this is what I put together. I've spoken to these 20 people. They've shown interest. Do you want to back me with some money? And then they know they need to build it properly. Yeah, I think the other thing to consider is the security, the cyber security of these web applications. I don't know if you've seen these videos of these hackers and then how they just, you know, these AI lovable, whatever these vibe coded tools, these hackers are just having a field day. It's like a little playground for them where they can just get API keys and, you know, break these apps. And there's quite a few videos about that as well. So that's obviously a massive concern, which, again, a non tech founder has got no idea about that. And they can find out the hard way and the painful way. Yeah, which is kind of sad, but it is the reality of the world that we live in. You've got to watch out. I mean, that's the whole challenge with security is that there's people out there trying to get you even when you don't think they're you know, you think you're too small or you're not a target. There's still it's easy to get a target on your back and especially stuff like that. It's it's too easy for them now to put together like what together a little app and then have a little back door in it or something like that. And the next thing you know, you've you've put this out there and taken taken advantage of some people that aren't really paying attention enough. So it's sort of the using the the traditional the tried and true methods to get your apps and things like that are probably going to be more important than than ever. And that is where we're going to pause right now. So that is part one of our episode and we will be our part one of our interview and we will come in coming back next episode with part two. Continue our discussion with Angelo and get into actually even more of the esoteric parts of web and application development. Definitely get a little geekier, a little more detailed this time than we have in a couple of the prior ones. Well, I guess we did geek out a little bit on a few of those, but definitely down into a little bit more of the coding side of this. But there are definitely some really good entrepreneurial points that get brought up along the way as well, particularly if you're thinking about building some sort of a solution and whether you're thinking like, oh, an app would be really cool versus a web application. We will talk about that. And if you stick around after the next one, there might be some bonus material that has something to do with that. And again, it's one of those I think is very important for you to think about that before you dive in, because we all know once you start writing a lot of code and sort of building something out, it's hard to just say, no, I'm going to trash this and start over on a completely different platform. That being said, we're going to wrap this one up, let you get back to your day. So go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next time. This was sponsored by RB Consulting, your partner in building smarter, scalable tech. From startups to established teams, RB Consulting helps you turn tech chaos into clarity with proven roadmaps and hands-on expertise. Visit rb-sns.com to start your next step forward. Also sponsored by Envision QA, they help businesses take control of their software by focusing on what matters most, quality, reliability, and support you can count on. Find out more at EnvisionQA.com. Thanks for tuning in to the Develop the Newer Podcast, where we're all about building better developers and better careers. I'd love to hear your thoughts or feedback, so drop a note to info at DeveloptheNewer.com. Be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you listen. And remember, a little bit of effort every day adds up to a great success. Keep learning, keep growing, and we'll see you in the next episode.