saas, minimum-viable-productI’m 25 years old wantrepreneur, working full-time as a freelance graphic designer / web developer (self-taught), recently I noticed that “remote jobs / gigs “ isn’t really a good career choice, especially for this industry. Plus, I have a hard time make a decent living and pay my bills, yet, I’m living in a poor country.
My dream is to be a successful founder, so long story short, I’ve done some research about AI and machine learning and I strongly believe that is the future of CS. I’ve been working on this project for about 2 months, first as part-time, then full-time, for now I have a fully functional proof-of-concept/mvp that apply sentiment analysis on both news headlines and tweets to help traders and investors evaluate topic’s sentiment and monitor changes over time, and also it help to collect data that are so large and complex because it can no longer be processed adequately by traditional methods (I assume that is technically painful).
My problem is that I only have a high school degree and my college years was a succession of shameful failures (I studied Physical chemistry and then switched to Public law but never graduated) so actually, I’m pretty sure that any investor / incubator will not take me seriously.
The app was built using Python (in 2 months with no prior experience) and multiple APIs so the truth is that I didn’t built any NLP algorithm or done some advanced classification / regression but the app solve a problem. (I start to doubt that I’m just naive and it’s not a real world problem or more precisely I just imagine that my target market has this problem. I didn’t do any market research.)
I have few questions:
Should I devote more time by adding more features?
Should I launch it as beta version and ask for feedback?
It’s worth to invest in ad campaigns to measure the viability?
If I find a couple of paying users, can I apply for fund investment?
Is my lack of experience an obstacle?
Any sort of feedback is welcome. At this stage I’m looking for ideas as much as critique. English is not my native language, sorry for any typing errors.
Lack of experience is generally an obstacle, however it’s an obstacle we have all had to get over as none of us are born with experience. There are ways of making it less of an issue though; You can surround yourself with experienced advisors and mentors and you can research and read as much as you can on all of the given topics. You can also just keep going and roll with the punches, as there will be many.
Start ups tend not to fail because of lack of innovation or lack of ideas, they fail because of everything else - environment, timing, money, location, real life getting in the way etc.
Your idea is not going to all of a sudden become popular by adding new features. Adding new features will take up your time with something that you believe is a good idea but have no proof that anyone wants it.
Right now you should be aiming for efficiency. What is the smallest amount of work you can do to prove that people are willing to pay for this service? The most basic form of validation for this is a survey or questionnaire. Telling people about the product and asking if they can see a user case for it and if/how much they’d be willing to pay. If no one responds they would pay for it then it may be that you are not describing the product well, or it may be that it is not something others see as valuable to them.
You are already beyond the point of a survey though, i think. You have something you can put in front of people. Ideally, if you can get someone to pay to use it then that would be tremendous validation at this time. You can then build the product outwards from them and others like them, advertise, market and on-board people.
Your best bet is an accelerator programme though. In my experience they are ran by experienced people who have a good eye for things that will work and can guide you through the process towards making money/gaining investment. Myself and my business partner got onto an accelerator with only a PDF picture of what we might be building. So there are programmes out there for everyone. It would usually mitigate a lot of your inexperience also as you would be surrounded by others. I don’t know what country you are in or what incubators and programmes are available to you.
So to go through your questions:
No more features until you have validation of the core idea itself.
You need to gather feedback either through beta testers or some other way, but stop programming in a vacuum
don’t put money into ads until you have validation and know who your audience is (chances are it’s not who you think at this point)
if you can find paying users then you are in business. However there are investors willing to invest at most stages to viable propositions (we got investment based on a pdf)
lack of experience is overcome through gaining experience…
Good luck!
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