Build Your Startup with Replit AI

So I have a question for you. Would you describe yourself as someone with a ton of really great startup ideas, but you've always struggled to bring them to life because, like myself and a million other people, you don't know how to code? Or because you felt like it's way too much work building something out only for nobody to use it a couple of months down the line? Well, guess what? I have something super interesting for you. Today I'm going to show you how to build an MVP using Replit Agent. Daniel here with the Founder Institute, and before we get into it, what exactly is an MVP? An MVP, or a minimum viable product, is the most simplest functional form of your application that that you built to solve your customer's problem. So within MVP, there are two things you need to remember. Number one, you don't have to build everything all out at once. And number two, the goal really here is to learn and iterate. And something like Replit Agent is honestly perfect for that. Of course, to actually use Replit, you do need an account and making one is super easy. You have a couple of different options when it comes to account creation. All you have to do is head on over to replit.com/login. So to actually get access to Replit's AI builder, Replit Agent, you do need a Replit Core account, which is about $25 a month. In my opinion, it's a pretty good deal because $25 a month gives you $25 worth of credit. And these credits are used up in various parts of actually building out your app, whether it's deployment, whether it's the fact that you're using the AI builder, whether it's various checkpoints that you reach while you progress through the app creation process. Okay, so let's get into it. Right now we're on the Replit homepage. I know you see a ton of really confusing things here. What I would recommend is for now, you just ignore all of that and focus on the text box and the prompt that you want to create. As far as prompts are concerned, my personal recommendation is you go simple and you focus on one feature that you feel confident in Replit being able to build out for you. One of the really cool things about Replit is that it gives you the ability to improve prompts. So the button's literally called improve prompt. All you have to do is enter in your prompt, you hit the button, and it actually adds a bit of context to it so that it makes more sense to Replit. So let's add our prompt here. So today what I want to do is create a web app where users can quickly create and share event invites, and it's designed to be casual and mainly for small events. For me, this is a part of a bigger project that I'm I'm thinking about, but I feel like because I want to test out the MVP and whether or not people would actually respond to my idea, I want to focus on just this one feature. So what we'll do is we'll hit the improve prompt button and see what Replit gives us. Okay, so what we have here is a bit more context for our prompt in terms of features and a style. And I think right now it looks much better than what I had initially come up with. Okay, so let's start building. What Replit is doing now is analyzing our prompt and then coming up with a proposal on what exactly it should be creating. So So here we go, we have the proposal here in front of us. So you can see that Replit also recommended a bunch of additional features, but I don't really want those at the moment. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to stick to the initial idea that we had. What's really cool about Replit is that you can follow along as it creates your app in real time. Whenever Replit wants to recommend an additional feature or do a check, what Replit will do is it'll actually ask you in the chat. So basically what you're doing is you're actually a part of entire creation process. One of the other really cool things is Assistant. So basically Assistant is a quick chat where you can actually ask Replit about the code, debugging, or any additional features that you should perhaps be adding into it. And one of the other really cool things about Replit is that it actually identifies errors and bugs and goes and corrects them itself. You don't really need to do a ton of things other than actually test the app. Let's test out our app and see if we can actually create an event. It's also a good time again to identify any issues or errors the app might have and ask Replit to correct them. So we've actually identified an error. When we hit the create event button, nothing actually happens. So what we'll do is let Replit Agent know. Replit Agent went ahead and made a couple of fixes. Well, let's see if we can actually create an event. And it works. Amazing. Let's try to RSVP to the event and see if that feature works. Jane Smith. That's not actually my name. And comment. Yay. And RSVP. And amazing. Confirmed. I really love the confetti, to be honest. Okay, cool. So it seems like our app is actually working. So now Replit's basically given us two choices, whether or not we want to deploy or whether or not we want to build more features into it. I'm actually pretty happy with where we are right now. So I'm going to deploy and deploy basically means publish. You can either hit the publish button or you can deploy by clicking the deploy button right at the top of your screen. What I'll do is I'll hit the deploy button and let me just show you. So when we head into deploy, we'll see a couple of different deployment options. I recommend really using the resources that Replit has to better understand what each of these options mean. But for now, what I would recommend is going for Auto Scale. That's primarily because I know a ton of people really won't be using my app, so I'm not too worried about the cost of it. So let's go ahead and set up deployment. All of this looks good, so I'll just hit approve and configure. So Replit's done deploying our app and it's now live. But what we can do now is actually check to see what it looks like on the internet. Awesome, there we go. Invite, join, create an event. You have all the features that we had before. I actually like what it's built for me, so I really don't want to change anything. But when Whenever you're building your MVP, you of course have the option to ask Replit to change things, whether it's visuals or features or anything. That's entirely up to you. One of the other things to be mindful of with Replit, in my opinion, is that I don't think it can actually build out super complicated apps. There's a ton of debugging and errors that occur, and for that, I think you need to be someone who's well-versed in code. And if you're not, I would recommend probably sticking to simpler applications and features, you know, things that allow you to actually test out your MVP. Hope you found this video useful. If there's another AI tool that you want us to try Let us know in the comment section. And if you want to turn your startup idea into a fundable business, check us out at fi.co.