An unusual way of building a high-quality startup, super fast.

In this article, I will show you how you can build your startup from scratch. In high quality and no time. By no time I mean a couple of weeks.

We will be talking about an MVP web application.

The best thing is that this idea came to me from our clients who use it in real-world applications. So it’s not a theory — it’s REALITY.

So what is that magical idea?

Ok, I will cut to the case right away. The idea to speed up your startup delivery time is to…

use an auto-generated admin panel as an application framework — your application backbone.

As simple as that.

So instead of creating an entire UI along with all the basic functionalities from scratch you just need to adjust what is already there and focus on adding more specific business logic.

Which admin framework can you use?

The answer is simple: use AdminBro, one of the most powerful open-source admin panels. But you have to know one thing…

I haven’t introduced myself properly. My name is Wojciech Krysiak and I’m a founder of a software house called SoftwareBrothers. And SoftwareBrohters created and open-sourced this particular admin panel, which is free and used by thousands of people every week around the world.

So now you know that this article is a tiny little bit opinionated.

The clients I mentioned earlier are companies which have built their ideas on AdminBro and they came to us so we could help them even more.

Should I always use AdminBro?

AdminBro is built with JavaScript (Node.js and React to be exact), so it can be difficult to use it with different technologies, e.g a Ruby on Rails project (but it is possible).

Fortunately, almost every programming language has their own admin panel so there should always be an alternative.

For Ruby there are at least two:

• Rails admin (they even have a store where you can buy themes)
• activeadmin

There are also preetty good so you can apply all the remarks from this article to them.

How exactly will this speed up the delivery time?

There are a couple of things which help a lot in the MVP phase. I will point out those with the biggest time impact, aka the most crucial time savers.

Build-in authentication

Every startup needs some login system with user management. When you start with the admin panel you have an email/password authentication out of the box, so your users can log in immediately.

And this is what the login looks like:

You can easily change colours, logo, texts etc.

Installation and the setup takes couple of minutes — and this is what you have right away.

Auto-generated CRUD with data validations

User Interface in every web startup is based on some kind of data management. If you allow your users to upload videos and then you process them in some unique way (as an example) you will need to give them the ability to:

• Create new videos and describe them by adding metadata
• Edit videos metadata like tags etc.
• Filter videos so users can find what they are looking for
• Sort videos
• Delete them

These features are also called CRUD (an acronym from Create Read Update Delete). AdminBro gives you this out of the box.

Further, you can add new specific business actions like

• video approval
• video rejection logic.

You focus only on what is unique in your application, nothing else.

Design System

If you don’t know what the design system is, to put it simply, it is a set of rules and components which speeds up the UI creation process for every startup.

With the design system, designers have a blueprint from which they compose entire views. Developers, on the other hand, have components, already implemented, which they simply use instead of writing everything from scratch.

AdminBro comes with a complete Design System which is well documented and customized — meaning that you can speed up the design process and at the same time modify the components where you have to.

Take a look at the preview of all the components which you can use:

• https://adminbro.com/Button.html — example button componentt

Production deployment is fast and cheap

Usually, you would like to deploy your app (in the MVP phase) somewhere, where it doesn’t cost much and can be easily scalable. The perfect solution for that is the so-called cloud function (aka serverless)

One of the easiest serverless services to use is Google Firebase Functions (IMHO).

AdminBro has a plugin which allows you to deploy your app there, so in a couple of minutes, your application will be live and ready for your customers.

But you are not bound to use Firebase. Later you can easily switch to some other plugin and deploy the app somewhere else.

Installable Features

In AdminBro v3 SoftwareBrothers added something called AdminBro Features. This is an external plugin system from where you can install popular functionality and simply add it to your project.

The best example would be a file upload feature. Uploads are usually problematic, but the desired feature in almost every startup. With addon: @admin-bro/upload you can set up AdminBro to upload files right to the cloud and again save lots of time.

Features are quite a new thing in the admin-bro world so be prepared that lots of new features will emerge soon.

Modifications, custom look and feel

As I mentioned before, AdminBro gives you the ability to totally change its look and feel. I don’t want to dive into the implementation details here by writing what is possible.

Let me give you an example of one of our client’s app instead. This is the dashboard users see after login.

And this is the default dashboard you see after installing AdminBro:

So as you can see possibilities are limited just by your designer’s imagination.

How to get started

These are the steps which will help you get started:

1. Visit the AdminBro Demo page so you can see how that feels: https://admin-bro-example-app-staging.herokuapp.com/admin/login
2. Next, open the project page https://adminbro.com and visit the tutorials section. Alternatively, there is a screencast series showing how to install AdminBro from scratch on a new project: https://jscasts.tv
3. In case you need help, join our open source slack channel (link can be found on https://adminbro.com ). You can find me there as well as our core team and contributors. Feel free to say “hello” after joining.
4. Follow me on @wojtek_krysiak where I often post the latest updates in our open source libraries.
5. Finally subscribe to our OpenSource Software Brothers newsletter — it’s a monthly update about what we added to the open-source projects.

Conclusion

I hope that this article will help you, and other entrepreneurs, to deliver their apps to the market faster than before, and new exciting ideas will emerge.

The funniest thing is that when we created AdminBro we didn’t think about this use case — it came to us from the market.

We are always available to help on our slack open-source Software Brothers community, which can also be found on https://adminbro.com.

The last thing I want to mention is our professional help. In case you like the idea and want to launch your app quickly, but don’t necessarily want to do this yourself — contact us and we will try to help.