How Entrepreneurs Can Leverage AI for Prototyping

I think the world of prototyping is taking a turn for the better. The days of dreaming of your new business and wishing you could afford a full development team are over. You can now test product market fit and primary market research without having to hire a team of engineers and woo a technical founder.

Here is how I think the Software Development Lifecycle is about to change for new products

Currently, in many places,

(Agile waterfall)

1. Ideate and Committee Design

2. Business Requirements gathering and definition

3. Prioritization

4. Planning

5. User Story distribution to development team

6. Sprint execution (2 weeks at a time for a few months)

7. Milestone Demo Day - usually completely misses the mark

8. Repeat steps 1 through 7 for a year and then engage customers

The way it will be post-singularity of the AI revolution:

1. Ideate - dream up the art of the possible and document requirements

   1. Frame the problem

   2. Frame your solution

   3. Business Requirements

   4. Technical Requirements

   5. Visual Requirements

2. Develop a prompt encapsulating the framing above

3. Share your framing with a tool like Bolt.new

4. Test and Iterate for 24-48 hours with Bolt.new

5. Launch to people you think would enjoy the tool you’ve built to get feedback

6. Iterate on steps 3-5 until you’ve found the right answer or disqualified your business

All of the above can be done for tooling that costs less than $100 per month. Here is what I learned while trying to develop a CRM I call NRM (Network Relationship Manager) that will help me solve a problem I have in the real world today.

My REAL problem: I am leaving my job and I’ve met a ton of amazing people. I want to catch up with everyone before I really leave in a few weeks and spend a few minutes with as many of them as I can. I want to make sure I keep up with our conversations and I’m tired of using spreadsheets and notepads. I’m a programmer for God’s sake, why not build a tool. So I did.

Ideation to Launch

I started just as I proposed above I framed and ideated around a prompt, here is what I used:

I need to build an NRM (Network Relationship Manager) to help me manage my personal 
and business connections. 

The problem I want to solve is that keeping up with my interpersonal connections at 
work and in my personal life is becoming challenging. The ways in which we 
communicate with each other varies from SMS, Slack, MS Teams, Discord, Email, 
Phone Conversations, In Person conversations and any other means of communication 
that come up through the course of technological advances. 

Given all the different methods of communicating I want to maintain a list of my 
network connections using a Master List and Detail approach. The Master list should 
show all the pertinent information about my contacts like First Name, Last Name, 
Phone number, Work Number, Personal Email, Work Email and LinkedIN URL. I’d like to 
keep up with family details about people as well like their kids names and Significant 
Other’s name. Knowing my contacts birthday is also helpful as it’s always nice to 
remember people’s birthdays. 

Features
+ Show a list of contacts including the pertinent details for my contacts 
+ When clicking on a row it should load the detail screen, please make sure the URL includes a unique identifier for each contact record
+ When viewing the details for a record I want to see the explicit full details of the contact and in addition to that I want to see communication summaries from our prior communications
+ I want to be able to associate my GMAIL API credentials for one or many GMAIL accounts to my User Profile, that way I can summarize prior communications with my contacts into this interface
+ I want to be able to initiate new Email conversations with my contacts directly from the Details interface or from the Master List interface easily. 
+ I’d like a beginning of week view gives me contact and outreach goals to push me to network better with my connections, it should make recommendations based on who I am actively speaking with regularly and also who I haven’t communicated with in a long time. Additionally if a contract has a birthday in the current week it should give me a list of those contacts to help me reach out to people. 
+ I’d like to know the system has pulled in all my latest communications from my GMAIL Accounts and associated them with the requisite NRM Contact Records (people I am engaging with). 
+ I should see a Daily Summary of Contacts to help me engage with people I am actively conversing with to drive towards actions or close loops. If someone reaches out to me it should show up in my Daily Summary of Contacts. 
+ I should be able to reprocess the Daily Summary to re-check my inboxes for new communications 

Visual Requirements
+ I’d like to have an overall dark look and feel by default. Know that I really enjoy Green and Purple on Black backgrounds. I also like varying colors of gray where needed. 
+ Please include iconography where it makes sense, and things like font awesome or other icon sets like Evil Icons are great 

Data model Requirements
+ NRM Users are the authentication User Profile objects so it should contain First Name, Last Name, Email (which serves as Username) and should have a NRM User Settings object as well where we can store preferences for the interface like System Mode, Dark Mode or Light Mode. 
+ NRM Contacts should encapsulate all of the data around the Master List and should have one to many relationships for things like NRM Contact Physical Address where a Contact may have a Work Address and a Home Address and Secondary Home Address (folks do live in multiple places after all)

Technical Requirements 
I’d like this system to be built using React and Vite with Tailwind for styling. 
I want the persistence layer to be using Supabase. 
Ideally I’d like some migration scripts to be managed, if at all possible in a Javascript friendly fashion that can live inside my Javascript project. 
Please be sure to setup Supabase Authentication

As you can see I tried to put a lot of thought into this prompt, and a good chunk of it was handled in the one-shot Bolt.new generative step.

Things it got right

1. It got my visual styling perfect enough for my programmer eye, which was great I really struggle to find UX and Visual Design people that move fast enough for my desire to build something and engage users

2. Supabase - nailed it. Perfect.

3. Deployment - had it up on Netlify in minutes

4. Basic features like Contact List and Details existed

Things I had to build on

1. A lot of stuff was missing or non-functional but kind of there, for example it was missing a few navigations to the Contact Details screens.

2. Lots of buttons were placed on the screen but when you click on them nothing happens. This was fine, it just meant we got to pair program together for a few hours (and by that I mean I just told the AI what I’d like help changing).

Things that required me actually being a programmer to resolve

1. GMAIL Integration ate at least 2 hours of my life making sure the API Handshake and OAUTH setup was working right. If that sounds technical, it was, I had to actually debug things that would have been problematic without my skillset.

2. CORS Setup for Edge Functions - I wanted to encapsulate some features of GMAIL into serverside code and the approach I chose was Supabase Edge functions. This was not seamless and getting Netlify to properly handle CORs from the ever changing domain names of Bolt Deploy to Netlify and running inside of Bolt was not immediately obvious.

Things that I’m ok with but would fire a programmer over

1. Performance of expensive API Calls: I have a feature where I fetch the last contact date for each of my contacts. This is an API call to GMAIL and is something I’d expect a good programmer to cache by default. I had to explicitly work through this with Bolt and it never really generated a great solution, but I’ll live with it because it reminds me of the type of thing I’d task a programmer with and they’d work on for a month anyways.

2. Constantly overwriting things I like for the new thing I’m ideating on. I’ll frequently be adding a feature and cool features that I liked suddenly disappear. That’s because there is no version tracking using Git. I really wish Bolt.new had git integration so I could check in a state of the code and move forward knowing that I can roll-back. They have checkpoints but they are magical and don’t make sense to me. I curmudgeonly just want Github and SCM integration.

So here are the handful of screens we built together to get up and running. There are a few other things going on as well to help me add entries and manual communication notes. It also lets me import details so I can upload lists of people I want to engage with (which is huge for me given most of my CRM and internal networking was managed in spreadsheets).

If you are even remotely interested in trying this out I’d welcome a chance to talk with you about it. I’m doing it out of passion for a problem I have right now, and if you have the same problem I’d love to talk with you about it. I know CRMs exist, but they never get it right “for me” and I just think with tooling the way it is now, there is no excuse not to build the tools you need when you need them.