Building a tech prototype when you have no tech background: Learning the art of (paid) delegation
This is my fourth post in a series where I share my personal journey launching my startup, Mayven. Head here to view all previous posts in this series.
If you are a returning reader, thank you for coming back. Excited to continue sharing my journey with you.
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Last week, I signed off on an overwhelmingly positive note. My head was full of ideas from having just completed Selfmade, a 10-week online course dedicated to entrepreneurs who identify as women.
Motivation: check ✅.
Inspiration: check ✅.
Stunning website of my dreams that attracts millions of visitors and inspires them to completely overhaul how they’ve been shopping for their entire lives: very much not check ❌! Well, not yet, anyway…
Selfmade helped me realize that the time had come for me to launch an MVP (minimum viable product)* of Mayven into the world. However, as is par for the course with starting a business for the first time, I now had more questions than I had answers.
How can I find someone trustworthy to build the website?
Where do I source talent — freelance or agency?
How much will it cost?
Oh, right. I should probably remind you all that I was coming at this project with zero tech experience. HTML? PHP? Backend? FRONTEND?! Give me a pivot table and I’m your person. Building a website? Not a clue.
Tip: *If this sounds jargony, don’t worry! A minimum viable product (MVP) is essentially an initial test version/prototype of your idea.
Rolling up my sleeves, I tried to begin building a prototype of the Mayven website myself in GoDaddy, a marketplace for purchasing domain names (like shopmayven.com) that also offers a website builder. Despite my best efforts, I quickly realized that the functionalities I needed (filtering, searching, custom-builds, etc.) weren’t easy to implement in GoDaddy. It was clear I would need someone not only to build Mayven on a new platform, but to provide direction on which platform to use.
When talking with one of my financial services coworkers who also had a side hustle, she mentioned how she had leveraged Upwork to help find influencers in the beauty space.
“Upwork?” I asked. “Tell me more…”
Upwork, she explained, is an online platform where you can find freelancers from the U.S. and all around the world who provide a wide variety of services — from personal assistants to researchers to web designers and everything in between.
It sounded like a great place to start, so I figured why not give Upwork a try? I created a profile and started exploring the site. Initially, I placed a job posting asking for help transferring my GoDaddy site onto a new platform with more customizable features.
To my surprise, within 24 hours I received multiple responses from people containing cover letters and quotes for the work. After carefully reviewing all the messages, there was one freelancer who stood out. He had great reviews and did a nice job explaining why starting with WIX, a different website builder tool, would be a better choice for me.
This was exactly what I needed! Someone who could hold my hand through the process as I had little knowledge about technology and building websites. As I was still entirely self-funding Mayven at this stage on a shoestring budget, I could easily wrap my head around the $300 price tag for the work. Plus, I had just opened a Chase bank account for my business that featured a great sign-up bonus which amounted to exactly $300. Worst case scenario, if my experimentation with Upwork proved to be a total bust, I wouldn’t be out any of my own money.
Fortunately, things went great! In just two days, the WIX designer and developer was able to convert my GoDaddy website into a WIX website that was exactly what I had envisioned: a Pinterest-esque view of brands that provided a delightful user experience when scrolling through the site.
With the main look and feel of the site down, the next challenge was designing a navigation and filtering menu that would allow users to easily select brands by value. This is the core purpose of Mayven, so I needed to get it right! As I began to sketch out ideas of how this could look, it occurred to me that this was potentially another task I could delegate to an Upwork freelancer who excelled in something called User Interface design, or UI.
I opened up a blank Excel file and mapped out all the basic information.
Using the above, I created a job posting for a freelancer to bring this design to life on my newly-created WIX website. Similar to my first job posting, I received a flood of responses within the first 24 hours. As I sifted through all of the proposals, I settled on a full-stack developer and web designer who provided me with a portfolio of websites and mobile apps he had designed. Within a week (and a very reasonable $60 later), he was able to deliver the result below:
While all this web development work was underway, I continued researching brands with strong environmental and social credentials and adding them to Mayven. As the brand portfolio grew, I could see that I would need to integrate even more advanced search and filtering capabilities to keep up.
One of the benefits of Upwork is their community message board where you can post questions and receive suggestions from others on the platform. Unsure of whether to hire yet another developer to integrate these more complex filters, the feedback I received was I’d be better off moving Mayven to another platform altogether with more room for customization than WIX — it seemed Wordpress was the crowd favorite. After a little research, I learned that a third of the internet is powered by Wordpress and it is widely used by Fortune 500 brands. If it is good enough for them, it would certainly be good enough for me!
Now that I had a basic understanding of how to build a website and some practical experience in actually developing one, I decided the time had come to move on yet again. “Third time’s the charm.” I thought to myself as I created yet another Upwork job posting. At this point I had over 50 brands on the site and wanted someone not only to transition the site from WIX to Wordpress, but make enhancements to ensure it presented as professionally as possible.
Luckily for me, the Web Designer who designed the UI for my navigation and filtering menu in WIX agreed to transition the site to Wordpress and propose new designs. You can see some of his initial designs below.
Over the next six months, I worked closely with this developer on website updates and additions to the brand portfolio. As part of our contract, I requested the developer record his screen while completing routine tasks such as adding a brand or updating tags to ensure I could replicate those actions on my own.
I’m not going to lie; the conversion to Wordpress took way longer than I had anticipated. I’d also be lying if I said that the process was “smooth sailing”. Many times, deliverables were delayed, data wasn’t input correctly, and internal links were broken. While these hiccups definitely stressed me out, at the end of the day, it was all worth it as I could finally see my vision for Mayven coming to life.
I am so grateful to have come across platforms like Upwork and Fivver on my startup journey. While it is normal as a founder to wear lots of different hats, there will inevitably be some things you won’t know how to do or have the time to learn. Bringing in experts to handle these short-term projects is not only more efficient, but is a great first step before taking the plunge of hiring someone full-time. Upwork helped me tap into value for Mayven that I otherwise wouldn’t have had the resources to access without external funding. If you are reading this and are bootstrapping a new business, I cannot recommend these platforms enough.
Just when the development of the Wordpress website started to wind down, an incredible opportunity presented itself. An opportunity for further validation, credibility, and investment into Mayven. Thank you for reading, and I’ll tell you all about this exciting opportunity next week!
