Case Study

DodonLabs: $50K MVP in 10 Days, not 6 Weeks

DodonLabs prototyping client — founder Alexandru Dodon — AI tools for indie devs. Dodon came to ProtoForge needing a working prototype of his AI tooling concept fast enough to put in front of real users before the consulting market priced him out of validation.

Founder · Alexandru Dodon Sector · AI developer tooling Stage · Pre-seed prototype
Problem

A $50K consulting engagement was the default path

Dodon needed a working prototype to validate his AI tooling idea with indie devs. The conventional route — a three-to-five-person consultancy at roughly $1,200 per day each — would have run four to six weeks and cost somewhere on the order of $50,000 before he had a single line of code in front of a user.

That timeline didn't fit the validation window. Every extra week was a week of runway burned without learning whether the idea was real. The PowerPoint-at-the-end-of-an-engagement model is the wrong shape for a prototype whose only job is to answer one question: does this work for users?

ProtoForge Approach

Spec → build → deployed prototype, on a 48-hour clock

Three steps, no workshops, no stakeholder decks, no requirements docs. The same pipeline applied to every ProtoForge build:

01 · Describe

Dodon described the business challenge in plain English: indie developers needed AI tooling that did X. What process is broken for them, what tool is missing, what would ship value in a week.

02 · Generate

In about twenty seconds ProtoForge produced the full prototype spec — tech stack, feature breakdown, database schema, architecture, build timeline, and risk assessment.

03 · Build

On spec approval, ProtoForge built and deployed the prototype — a live URL, a real database, a real API, working in front of real users within 48 hours.

Outcome

The numbers that mattered

£50k
Saved vs. consulting engagement
10 days
vs. 6-week consulting timeline
10×
Cost reduction vs. £60k–240k consulting PoC
< 48 hrs
Spec-to-deployed prototype delivery

A working prototype, deployed to a live URL with a real database and a real API, in front of real indie developer users — for roughly one tenth the cost of the consulting engagement Dodon would otherwise have bought.

Your Turn

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