Depending on who you listen to, ideas are either bulletproof, cheap, and powerful or like an unmentionable part of your body. Everyone has ideas. Every conference, meetup, hackathon, startup weekend event is filled with people who have ideas but lack the ability to build them. Countless people are trying to raise funding or get a technical co-founder with little more than a few bullet points on a piece of paper. It's pointless. Ideas without execution aren't worth the paper they're written on.

The difficulty for a lot of people is getting from that idea to something more tangible, and it can seem impossible if you don't have any technical or design skills. But in fact, it's a lot easier than you might think. Using one, or a combination of the tools below will allow you to create a tangible prototype, and build something you can use to show a potential co-founder, colleague, customer or investor what your idea is and how it works.

These tools will allow you to create everything from a clickable version of your sketches to a more fully featured, proper prototype which can be used to raise funding, gauge interest or validate a potential market. They're all things that anyone can download or load up and start using in minutes - no technical or design skills are necessary.

1. Pop

Almost unbelievably simple, Pop can sketch out your idea on paper, take photos and then make those images clickable within the app. It makes it simple to add transitions and export a version so that people can get hands on and start messing around with your idea.

2. Balsamiq

Only slightly more complicated than Pop, Balsamiq is a simple wire-framing tool. In a nutshell, it allows you to mock up the user interface of a website, app or idea in a few minutes. The joy of Balsamiq is that it has pre-built widgets that you can just drag and drop onto a web or mobile template. As a first step in figuring out what your idea should look like, you can't go wrong with this one. It's usually my first port of call when I'm trying to figure out how an idea could work or look.

3. Keynotopia

This is another personal favorite. Keyntopia is basically a collection of templates for Keynote or Powerpoint. Using these templates and the design components that you get as part of the package will allow you to create a pretty sophisticated-looking mockup using nothing more than rudimentary presentation design skills. If you're more technically minded (i.e. you know how to do a screengrab) you can do a lot more. Best of all, you can add clickable areas to your 'presentation' and export it as a clickable prototype in multiple formats.

4. FluidUI

If Google and NASA are using a tool, it stands to reason that it must be good. That's definitely the case with FluidUI. As with Balsamiq and Keynotopia, there are thousands of built in widgets and components that you can drag and drop onto your design. It's easy to share mockups and give people an idea of how your product will work and feel. It's also really easy to bring your own elements into the mockups to customize them even more.

5. AppCooker

AppCooker allows you to prototype ideas on your iPad. Import flat images from Dropbox, Box and other services, make them clickable with a few taps and export them for people to test. Perhaps most interestingly, AppCooker also includes modules that allow you to test revenue assumptions around the app - which is always a helpful thing to do.

6. Proto.io

Not only is Proto.io unbelievably fast. It also has some of the best demo videos in the marketplace at the moment. Their tool is similar to the apps mentioned above, but it also allows you to animate certain elements of the UI, which makes for a far nicer looking prototype. It also gives the option of getting feedback from testers, colleagues and guinea pigs - who can annotate your designs and help refine them. Check out some of the examples on their site to see just how powerful this can be. It's particularly worthwhile if you're looking at prototyping something that functions on multiple devices - from cameras to consoles through to phones and tablets.

7. Invision

Similar to Proto, Invision is a more focused on rapid prototyping for designers. It allows them to put their designs into a clickable, scrollable format and share it with colleagues and others to get feedback. It might not be one for a total beginner, but as you get bigger and better and start working with more collaborators, it could be a very valuable piece of software to have.

8. Demonstrate

Similar to Pop, Demonstrate allows you to pull in images from your Dropbox account, make them clickable and add transitions to give you an idea of how an idea might work as an app.

There are dozens of similar and more complicated tools out there. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it represents a selection of the ones that anyone can use - regardless of their technical/design ability. Happy prototyping.

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