Most web application projects don't fail because the development was bad. They fail because the planning was wrong. The budget gets committed to building the wrong things — features nobody uses, a technical architecture that can't scale, a scope that was twice the size it needed to be for version one.

Step 1 — Define the Problem Before Defining the Product

Before writing a single feature, write a clear problem statement. Who has this problem? How are they solving it today? Why is the current solution inadequate? What does success look like? A tight problem statement produces a tight scope. A tight scope produces a product that can be built, launched, and validated inside a sensible budget.

Step 2 — Map the Core User Journey, Not the Full Feature List

Map out what the primary user needs to do from the moment they arrive to the moment they've accomplished their goal. Every feature in version one should map to a step in that core journey. If a feature doesn't appear anywhere in the core journey, it belongs in a future release. This single filter eliminates roughly 40% of the features in most initial scopes.

Step 3 — Choose Your Architecture Before Choosing Your Tools

What layers does your application need? A frontend, a backend, an automation layer, and potentially an integration layer. For most startups and SMEs, this maps cleanly to: Bubble or Webstudio.is for the frontend, Supabase as the backend database, and n8n for automation and integrations. Making architecture decisions by starting with tools produces systems where tools constrain the architecture rather than serve it.

Step 4 — Decide What You're Building vs What You're Buying

Authentication, payments, email delivery, document storage, analytics — these are solved problems. Build only what creates competitive differentiation. In a no-code stack, this is largely handled: Supabase handles authentication and file storage, Stripe handles payments, Postmark handles transactional email, n8n handles integrations. The application focuses entirely on what's unique to your product.

Step 5 — Build a Realistic Scope for Version One

Version one should answer one question: does this product solve the problem well enough that real users choose it over their current alternative? For every proposed feature, ask: would the absence of this prevent version one from being tested with real users? If no, it goes on the backlog.

The Planning Document Nobody Writes But Everyone Needs

Before any development begins, every web application project should have a single document covering: the problem in one paragraph, the primary user journey mapped step by step, the architecture and tools, the build vs buy decisions, and the version one scope. Projects that have this document finish on budget more often than projects that don't.