If your idea is just a twist on a social network, don't rebuild the platform - build the twist.
Someone an idea with me recently for their MVP. You might describe it as a niche social network with one special feature which made it unique and gave it value. I won’t go into the details of the feature now because it doesn’t matter, my point is that essentially it was a regular social network.
The entrepreneur had built his app using one of the vibe coding tools and started out by developing all the typical social network features; adding a post, making a comment, following friends, etc. Once that was done they attempted to add on the special feature, and that’s where progress stopped.
Although the AI code builder was reasonably good at doing the regular social media features, integrating the custom feature was just too much. It was too complicated and it never worked right.
I think in this case it’s useful to ask if you are reinventing the wheel, and go look for a more economical way - both in terms of time and money - to get your MVP off the ground. Instead of building a custom social media platform with more custom code on top, a better solution would be to use an existing pre-built social media platform and use the AI to build a plugin to perform the special feature.
This approach probably can’t be completed using a no-code builder so you’ll have to use an AI code editor such as Claude or Cursor, but it’ll almost certainly be a more sustainable solution than building the entire app from scratch with a no-code editor.
A good analogy is e-commerce. Imagine you want to open an online shop selling custom widgets. You have 2 options;
The first option will take weeks, or months, or just never happen. The second option could reasonably be completed in a couple of days. And once it’s completed it’ll be easier to maintain, and extend, and scale.
It’s very tempting to build everything yourself, especially when the AI app builders promise that it’ll be perfect and easy, but re-inventing the wheel is a common trap in software engineering and you’d be very wise to avoid it when you can.
20 Mar 26