Case Study: Zinc turns incubator teams’ ideas into testable app prototypes with Marvel

Why Zinc introduces Marvel to their incubator startups

Zinc is a London-based social enterprise incubator launched to reimagine social impact entrepreneurship; from about 800 applicants it selected 55 diverse professionals for a six‑month programme focused on improving women’s emotional and mental health. The core challenge was getting strangers from varied domains (clinicians, designers, developers, researchers) to form teams, rapidly user‑research novel product ideas and explain concepts that had never been seen before—many lacked design or prototyping skills and struggled to make ideas tangible for users and investors.

Zinc introduced Marvel as an intuitive prototyping tool so non‑designers could wireframe, build interactive prototypes and run rapid user tests. Startups such as Amble, Bold, Leika, Squad and Zone used Marvel to make concepts feel real, uncover unexpected usage patterns, validate core features and iterate more quickly—resulting in clearer product direction, stronger user feedback, faster execution and easier recruitment based on domain skills rather than prior design experience.

Zinc

Julia

Zinc