business-plan, investors, young-entrepreneursAlright, Ive read several books by entrepreneurs and of course I know it is different for every individual, but I wanted to see if there are any obvious, advantageous steps to be taking while in the process of physically building your product.
Most entrepreneurs/stories focus on getting your product out there, making cold calls and getting investors - I have 1 investor right now, but I am currently about 5 months from actually having a product to advertise. I am in a partnership and I am doing 90% of the actual building (coding, design, etc) so (as in most of my past projects) Ive focused all my time on actually building.
My business is not growing, however, with me sitting by coding and 1 investor checking in. I would think to advertise because publicity is good, but Ive called some magazines and they want a close to shipping product before writing a story or something.
Im a minor and definitely still learning how business works, but is it disadvantageous to focus solely on building our product if you are the leader of a very small team? Should you be taking other, more administrative steps WHILE in development phase? What are some of these steps?
Have you heard of MVP?
Minimum Viable Product
This is working out what is the smallest thing you can build that makes it viable to launch - i.e. do you need the automated bot that handles queries before launch or can you fake it by running queries manually? that kind of thing.
Until you launch you don’t really know if anyone wants your product or service. So launching late and then finding out no one wants it has wasted much of your time and your investors money. Far better for everyone to ‘Fail fast’ as then you have enough money left to recover and ‘pivot’ into a new market or direction - or alternatively succeed and grow, building those supporting systems after the fact.
In other words - just f**king ship it
(I know a number of businesses who have that written on their walls in big letters)
We are in the same position right now, I am doing 90% of the development work in my business. I am the most suited to the role and at this stage it makes no sense to hire someone and increase our costs, it just needs to get done. My business partner in this case is building out our social media presence and finding suitable product testers as well as creating marketing materials
Your responsibility is to ship it, get it to market. Put meetings in once a week to talk strategy and big picture with your team so that you are involved and to make sure that during development you haven’t just gone off in an alternate direction without communicating it
Keep your focus on getting your product to market. If someone put a gun to your head and said get it done as soon as possible, what would you do?
How easy/difficult would it be for someone with more resources to replicate what you are doing? 5 months is a long time.
If you have an investor, what are you using the money for? You should hire a developer. You should also consider taking on other founders or people who will work for equity/shares. These could be developers, sales/marketing people, etc…
Not having the right market fit is a major reason that companies fail. You should be doing market research - get out there and talk to people about the problem you are solving. Ask them how much they would pay, what features make sense / which don’t etc. You could save yourself a ton of time by eliminating features or solutions people don’t care about. Never assume what your “market” needs. Just ask and research!
You should not be looking for customers until you are closer to launch. There should be a build up of excitement, but not so much ahead of time that they forget about you. I would also make a list of potential Beta users - offer them the product/service for free or steep discount in return for feedback. Your customers are your best source of input.
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