A website for your startup: what an MVP site needs

For a founder, the first website is an experiment, not a brochure. Its job is to find out whether the people you think have a problem agree, and whether they will take a step to have it solved: join a waitlist, book a demo, pay a deposit, download a beta. Everything on the page should serve that one test.

That changes what good looks like. A good MVP site is fast to change, honest about what exists today, and clear enough that a stranger understands it in one read. It does not need to look like the company you will be in three years.

• A headline that says what it does and for whom, in words your customer uses. "Payroll for restaurants with tipped staff" beats "The future of work".
• One sentence on why it is better than what they do now.
• One call to action, repeated. Not three competing buttons.
• Proof, as much as is true: a screenshot of the real product, the team, a pilot customer who agreed to be named. Nothing invented.
• A short answer to the obvious objection: price, security, "is this real?".
• A way to reach a person, so early users can tell you what is wrong.

A blog with three posts from launch week. A pricing table with four tiers when you have one customer. An "About us" page longer than the product page. Animations that take a week to build. A careers page. Each of those costs time you should spend talking to users, and most of them will be rewritten once the product finds its shape.

What you should not skip: a fast page on a phone, a real domain, a privacy page if you collect emails, and analytics that tell you how many visitors took the action. Without the last one, the experiment has no result.

Founders usually choose between four:

• Code it yourself. Full control, but every hour on the site is an hour off the product.
• A DIY builder. Quick if you know one, and you will update it yourself.
• An AI builder like Lovable or Base44. Fast first drafts if you are comfortable prompting and fixing; you publish and maintain it.
• Built for you. Describe the startup in a sentence and get a finished, checked site, then change it by email while you work on the product.

Our builder is the last of these. It builds the site in about 20 minutes, a designer checks it, and it costs $99 a month with no contract, so you can stop when you outgrow it. If you need a web app prototype rather than a site, the comparison page is honest about when an AI app builder is the better tool.

Decide the one number before you launch: waitlist signups, demo requests, deposits. Then send traffic you can count, such as a post in a community where your customers are, a small ad test or a list of people you have spoken to, and watch the share who take the action.

Keep the test honest. Change one thing at a time (the headline, the offer, the audience) and give each version enough visitors to mean something. If nobody takes the action whatever you change, that is a result too, and a cheap one to learn in a week rather than after months of building.

If you plan to spend real money on ads, tracking matters more. Custom builds can include ad tracking set up properly on the server side; it is not part of the standard plans.

When the site has done its job. Once you know who the customer is, what they respond to and what they will pay, you have the brief for a real site, and the MVP has earned its replacement. That is the moment for a designed, custom build with the pages, integrations and polish a growing company needs.

Our studio does that work from $3,250, to a fixed scope and price agreed before anything is built. Many founders keep the fast site live while the custom one is made, so the experiment keeps running.

With us, seeing it is free and costs no card. Live, it is $99 a month or $1,499 once to own it, with every plan on the pricing page. Write the one sentence that says what your startup does, and start building.