How to Go from Idea to MVP as a First-Time Founder
The path from “I’ve got an idea” to “I built something people actually use” isn’t linear and it rarely looks like the pitch decks make it seem.
There’s this moment every first-time founder hits, usually late at night, with too many tabs open and a half-written Notion doc: What exactly am I supposed to do next?
You’ve got an idea that makes sense in your head. Maybe even a few sketches or a name. But moving from vague concept to something real, like a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), can feel like stepping into fog.
So, I did what most people who build in isolation don’t get to do. I spoke to early-stage founders in Nigeria and India who’ve already been through that first leg of the journey. Some are still iterating on their MVPs. Others used theirs to get into accelerators or raise early funding. And what they shared was refreshingly honest – nobody knew exactly what they were doing when they started, but there were clear patterns in what worked.
Kelechi Edeh
Here’s what that journey looks like when you're building your first MVP from scratch.
/1. Stop obsessing over the product
The biggest trap new founders fall into is building too soon. Everyone I spoke to said they started with the wrong thing: features, branding, even UI mockups, before they even understood the actual problem.
One founder, working on a B2B tool for African logistics companies, admitted he spent two months building dashboards before ever speaking to a customer. “I had assumptions. Lots of them,” he said. “I didn’t realize how wrong they were until I showed it to someone and they said, ‘This doesn’t solve my problem.’”
Instead of starting with the product, most experienced founders now start with something much simpler: conversations. Specifically, talking to the people they’re trying to build for. That doesn’t mean launching a survey to your friends. It means talking to real potential users—asking how they currently solve the problem, what frustrates them, and what they’ve already tried.
/2. What’s the smallest version of your idea that’s still useful?
Once you’ve grounded your idea in a real, painful problem, the next step is figuring out the minimum you need to build to test it.
This is your MVP, not a buggy prototype, but the simplest version of your product that delivers value.
In India, one solo founder building a peer-to-peer tutoring app skipped development altogether. Instead, she launched with a landing page, a Google Form for bookings, and WhatsApp to manually match students and tutors. It wasn’t scalable. It wasn’t sleek. But it worked. And within two weeks, she knew exactly what her users cared about and what they didn’t.
In Nigeria, another solo founder working on a marketplace for secondhand electronics started with a Telegram channel and an Airtable database. He manually verified listings and shared them daily. That low-tech setup helped him validate demand before spending a single naira on development.
/3. Tools don’t matter as much as learning fast
A lot of first-time founders feel stuck because they think they need a developer, or a big budget, or a “technical cofounder.” But what they often need is momentum, and that usually starts with no-code or low-effort tools.
Some of the tools founders I spoke to used at MVP stage:
- Webflow or Carrd for quick landing pages
- Google Sheets or Airtable for internal workflows
- Zapier and WhatsApp automation for basic logic
- Typeform or Tally for onboarding or lead capture
What they all emphasized wasn’t the tech; it was what they learned. One founder said, “Our first users couldn’t even complete the form. That taught us more than a month of planning.”
/4. Launch early. Like, earlier than you think.
Here’s the truth: most first MVPs don’t flop because the product is bad; they flop because they never launch.
Founders overthink. They polish. They wait until it’s perfect. But every founder I spoke to who made progress launched early, often within a few weeks of shaping the idea. The launch wasn’t always public. Sometimes it was a quiet rollout to 10 users or even five. The point was to get feedback fast.
One early-stage edtech founder said she shared her MVP with just six students from a local school in Ibadan. That tiny group gave her enough insight to realize she needed to completely rethink her onboarding process. “If I had waited for 100 users, I would’ve built the wrong thing.”
/5. Use feedback to decide what not to build next
Most MVPs aren’t magical. They break. They confuse users. That’s the point.
The difference between founders who make it past this phase and those who don’t? The ones who iterate based on feedback instead of defending the product they spent weeks building.
After the first launch, smart founders treat feedback like data; not criticism. You’re not trying to please everyone. You’re trying to find patterns: where users drop off, what features they’re asking for, and what you assumed that turned out to be wrong.
Sometimes that means removing features. Sometimes it means throwing out the whole thing. It sucks but it saves you six months of building something no one wants.
What success looks like at the MVP stage
It’s easy to get distracted by what success looks like on tech Twitter. But none of the founders I spoke to measured MVP success by virality, downloads, or press. Their benchmarks were simpler and way more practical.
For some, it was 10 people using the product more than once. For others, it was someone willing to pay. One founder’s success metric? “When someone I didn’t know messaged me asking if they could invite a friend.”
That’s traction. Not in the flashy, venture-backed sense, but in the real, messy, you’re onto something kind of way.
Kelechi Edeh
Conclusion
The idea-to-MVP stage is where most startup ideas go to die, not because they weren’t good, but because the founder never made it real enough to learn from. They waited. Or overbuilt. Or got overwhelmed.
But the founders I spoke to who got through it all had one thing in common: they started small, launched early, listened hard, and kept going.
So, if you’ve been stuck in your head with an idea that hasn’t seen daylight, here’s the truth: you don’t need a perfect product. You just need something people can try and a way to learn from how they use it.
That’s how the real building starts.
