Prototyping
From Post-it to Product: How Our 5-Day Prototype Turns Ideas Into Working Software
Andreas Melvær
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7 min read
Mar 2, 2026
SmplCo's managing partner Andreas Melvær has helped build over 125 digital products — from scrappy start-up MVPs to enterprise innovation platforms. Here he explains the process behind SmplCo's 5-Day Prototype, how new AI tooling has supercharged it, and why seeing really is believing.
Why Seeing Is Believing
Most digital projects fail before they start. Not because the idea is bad, but because the gap between "what if" and "here it is" takes too long to cross. Six months of discovery. Three rounds of stakeholder alignment. A deck that gets shelved.
We created the 5-Day Prototype because of a simple truth: people don't buy ideas. They buy what they can see and touch.
A slide deck describes what something could be. A prototype shows what it will be. That distinction matters when you're trying to win budget from a board, convince an investor, or align a team that's been arguing in circles for months.
"I've sat in boardrooms where a six-month project just got green-lit in twenty minutes — because the prototype made it real. You can't get that from a PowerPoint." — Andreas Melvær
After five days, you walk away with a clickable, high-fidelity prototype that lets you bring your idea to life and move rapidly towards your next strategic goal. You can explain your vision and win buy-in from investors, partners, and stakeholders by showing them what you're going to deliver — not just telling them.
You also get clarity. The kind of clarity you can't get from a brief or a requirements doc. You see new opportunities that weren't obvious before. You spot pitfalls you couldn't see on paper. And you end up with a foundation that the entire team can rally around.
Mapping out the user journey during a workshop session — where ideas start taking shape.
How the 5 Days Actually Work
Day 1: The Workshop
This is where it starts. Not with wireframes or a Jira backlog — with a conversation.
We sit down with the customer and run a structured workshop. We interview stakeholders, ask hard questions about what the product actually needs to do (not what someone's specification says it should do), and start sketching the user journey live in the room.
"The workshop is the most important day. Bring the people who know the problem, not the people who think they know the solution. That's where the real insights come from." — Andreas Melvær
By the end of Day 1, we have a shared understanding of the problem, the users, and the first rough shape of the solution. Everyone's seen it take form. Everyone's had input.
Days 2–3: Design Sprint
Now our design team takes over. We translate the workshop output into high-fidelity Figma designs — real UI, real flows, real interactions. Not placeholder boxes. Actual interfaces that look and feel like the final product.
Midweek, we run a check-in with the client. This isn't a formality. It's where we pressure-test the direction, catch misalignments early, and make sure we're building what matters most, not what's easiest.
Days 4–5: The Visionary Prototype
By the end of the week, we deliver what we call the visionary prototype. This isn't a static mockup. It's a clickable, interactive experience that communicates the full vision of the product — what it looks like, how it flows, how it feels.
This prototype is central to everything that follows. It can be put in front of investors, users, or internal stakeholders and immediately communicate what you're building.
From sketch to screen — the design system and UI components that come together during a prototype sprint.
From Prototype to Product: The New Playbook
Here's where things have changed dramatically in the last year. The 5-Day Prototype used to be the starting gun. Now it's becoming the first leg of a relay that's getting shorter every month.
Once the prototype is validated, we move into frontend proof-of-concept builds. We run focus groups with stakeholders and end users. We iterate on real feedback, not assumptions. And then we build.
This is where the tooling revolution matters. With the Figma-Claude MCP (Model Context Protocol), we can take our Figma designs and generate production-ready code that's deployed directly to GitHub. The classic friction between product designer and developer — the endless back-and-forth of "that's not what I designed" and "that's not technically feasible" — is dramatically reduced.
"The Figma-Claude MCP has changed how we work. I can land code directly from a design file, deployed to GitHub, in minutes. The old designer-developer friction? It's basically gone. And for clients, it means their data can start flowing into the tool almost immediately via APIs." — Andreas Melvær
Figma recognised this shift when they wrote about our work with Saddle, a Norwegian SaaS platform for M&A decision-making. Using Figma Make combined with our 5-Day Prototype process, we took Saddle from concept to a working, deployed MVP in two weeks. Their CEO Simen Sanna put it plainly: the equivalent process previously took six months and cost eight times as much.
That's not a marginal improvement. That's a fundamentally different economics of building software.
Why This Changes the Build-vs-Buy Equation
If you've read our piece on auditing your SaaS spend, you'll know that most organisations are paying for software they barely use — typically only 5 to 10% of the features they're paying for. The 5-Day Prototype process makes the "build" side of build-vs-buy dramatically more accessible.
When you can go from idea to interactive prototype in a week, and from prototype to working product in another week or two, the maths changes. You're no longer choosing between a £50k/year enterprise subscription and a six-month custom development project. You're choosing between a bloated tool that does 200 things (when you need 12) and a focused, purpose-built tool that does exactly what your team needs.
"The conversation has shifted completely. Clients used to ask 'can we afford to build?' Now they're asking 'can we afford not to?' When you can replace a £2,000/month subscription with something purpose-built in a fortnight, the economics speak for themselves." — Andreas Melvær
With tools like Claude Code handling code generation, and the Figma MCP bridging the gap between design and development, it's now possible for clients to make data available and start populating tools via APIs almost immediately. The technical barriers that used to justify sticking with off-the-shelf SaaS are disappearing.
A Process That Keeps Getting Better
We've been running 5-Day Prototypes for over 125 products now. The core process hasn't changed much — workshop, design sprint, deliver. What's changed is the velocity of everything that comes after.
A year ago, the prototype was a powerful communication tool. Today, it's the seed of a production system. The Figma designs that come out of Day 5 can be loaded into a code generation pipeline that same afternoon. Frontend components that used to take weeks to hand-code can be generated, reviewed, cleaned up, and deployed in days.
This matters because speed compounds. Faster prototypes mean faster feedback. Faster feedback means fewer wrong turns. Fewer wrong turns mean lower costs and better products.
And the tools keep improving. Every month, the Figma-Claude integration gets more capable. The gap between "design" and "deployed software" is shrinking in real time — and it's been improving especially fast since Figma wrote about our process last year.
Start With Five Days
If you're sitting on an idea — whether it's a new product, an internal tool, or a replacement for a SaaS subscription that's been draining your budget — the question isn't whether you can afford to prototype it. It's whether you can afford not to.
Five days. One prototype. A clear path forward.
Get in touch and let's build something.
