Coming up with a minimum viable product (MVP) is core both for startups and corporate innovation projects. Whether you’re about to start your own business or if you work at a large corporation and want to explore new business opportunities, minimum viable products help you measure interest in your product and it is a great first stage to later iterate from.

At Corporate Lab, we’re experts on corporate innovation and we have created several successful startups and innovative projects from scratch. Today, we share our 9 favorite tools to build your own MVP, even if you don’t have coding experience or don’t know where to start.

Building an MVP for startups or innovation projects

Minimum viable products allow you to draw the first functional sketches of your product. Using them helps you define your business lines, audiences, market and it should also be a first layer upon which you will be building further stages of your product (hopefully).

The more elaborate and accurate your MVP, the better it will catch early adopters and it will gather feedback on how to continue to next stages. But elaborating a good MVP can be costly, which is a huge obstacle for startups. That is why choosing the right tools can help you save tons of resources, both time and money.

1. Designing prototypes and mockups: Figma

Figma is the preferred tool to create prototypes and to coordinate work between designers and developers. Figma allows work across teams, allows big iterations and works on every platform. But Figma is not only useful for designers - at Corporate Lab, we love its FigJam (currently available in beta version) to brainstorm on new products, features or campaigns.

Pros

🙏 Collaborative. Figma streamlines work across teams, especially between Design and Development. It is the perfect first tool to start a project, right before getting your hands on it.
✨ Easy to use. While designers can take advantage of the most advanced features, Figma is easy to use for the rest of the team too, which leads to great organization and planning of new sites and products.

👉 Figma is also way more than a prototyping tool. Discover how we use Figma for everything at Corporate Lab. 👈

2. Building a website: Webflow

Webflow is a no-code tool to build websites in a visual way. With it, you can create landing pages as well as fully functional websites of (almost) any kind. It offers well-designed templates as well as a CMS to manage dynamic websites.

Pros

💻 No-code, visual editor. Webflow has designed a product as easy as it can get. You can design web pages from scratch if you have the time and the skills, or simply part from a template.
💫All included. Even though this tool doesn't offer a free plan, pricing includes the domain name and hosting.

3. Building a website or blog: WordPress

Probably the most famous CMS for the last decades, WordPress is a highly-customizable webpage builder. Often neglected to blogs, its plugins offer immense personalization and functionalities.

Pros

🗨 Great support. Being so popular for so many years, it is no surprise that WordPress has one of the biggest support communities. Whatever the issue you may be facing, we’re sure you’ll find quick help without effort.
🛒 Functionality. Contrary to other webpage builders, WordPress is suitable for ecommerces and almost any other type of website you can think of.

👉If you're building a website and you're not sure which tool to choose, learn more about React, WordPress and Webflow, and their pros and cons when building a website.👈

4. Creating signup and login flows: Arengu

The one and only tool to create your signup or login processes (among others). Arengu allows you to create forms and the flows behind them without coding and allowing high escalation.

Pros

🎨Personalization. Arengu allows you to build the most complex signup flows, including multi-factor authentication or passwordless flows.

💻 No code. Dragging and dropping and connecting APIs is all it takes to get Arengu working. It is easy to use for marketers and product managers, and escalable and customizable for developers.

5. Organizing a sales pipeline: Pipedrive

Managing your sales pipeline is easier when you use CRM softwares like Pipedrive. With it, you can optimize, organize and coordinate every sales process.

Pros

✨ Easy to use. A visual panel shows progress in your sales pipeline, so tracking sales processes is easier than ever. Plus, forecasting becomes easier too and facilitates planning new strategies.

⚙️ Automation. Pipedrive allows workflow automation and easy integrations with other tools.

6. Creating and sending emails: SendGrid

SendGrid is an email marketing and email sending tool, a crucial tool for any online business. Easily create neat email with templates, share them with your team thanks to cloud-based storage, and personalize the analytics dashboard easily.

Pros

🗨 Support. Even though SendGrid may seem costly and doesn’t offer a free plan, it includes premium support so you will able to overcome any obstacles you may encounter.

📃 Templates. When design experts are not available, SendGrid’s templates are a great alternative for startups and MVPs.

7. Managing and executing payments: Stripe

Stripe is the payment infrastructure for any startup. Being a good alternative to PayPal, it allows execution of every kind of payment, including recurrent payments or donations, among others.

Pros

🔐 Security. Stripe obviously handles the first level of security compliance (PCI) - a mandatory condition before you decide which payment platform suits you better. But on top of that, Stripe offers great live support, which is a neat security net for your developers.

👨💻 Cross-team platform. Stripe is a developer-first platform, but it is easy to create and manage payments for other team members too.

8. Closing contracts: Signaturit

Signaturit is an electronic signature that allows sending documents with legal validity and signing contracts online. Nevertheless, we recommend checking its legal terms in your own country to make sure it covers it too.

Pros

🔐 Security. Signaturit features the highest security standards, so you can take care of other aspects of your business.

🌐 Online. Paperwork might be one of the biggest obstacles when it comes to creating a new business. If yours functions fully online and you need users to sign documents with legal validity, Signaturit is the best choice to save time and money and be fully covered.

9. Plugging in all the above: Integromat

Integromat is described as the glue of the internet, since it allows integrations between all kinds of apps and products. All you have to do is choose your apps, drag and drop them, and add the correspondent API keys to create integrations among them and automate workflows.

Pros

✨Easy to use. Integromat is intuitive and easy to use, and it also offers templates for the most popular scenarios, so you can save as much time as possible.

🔌 Integrations. This is one of the most popular platforms for integrations, so no matter what app you’re using, we’re sure you’ll be able to add it to your workflows.

At Corporate Lab, we're experts in building fast MVPs. Using no-code tools is our secret weapon to be fast and effective. If you run a company and want to include corporate innovation in your roadmap, send us a message. We can detect new business opportunities and build new businesses to complement your existing ones.