The number one startup mistake is building something nobody wants. We need to find out whether there is customer demand for a business idea before investing big money.
Pre-validation
How we do it:
- Conduct surveys
- Read reviews of competitors
- Talk to competitors’ users
- Talk to founders who’ve tried to build something similar but failed
- Develop a pre-launch landing page and do cold outreach and pre-sales.
Defining MVP
After we get first positive feedback, we list all the product features.
Then we segregate all the features and put them under each of the four heads:
- Must Have
- Should Have
- Could Have
- Won’t Have
We avoid everything except Must-Have.
Development
In development we use Scrum methodology. We split the project into sprints with 3 activities:
- Sprint planning
- Daily scrum meetings
- Sprint review
We use sprint review to identify and eliminate bottlenecks throughout development.
Once the MVP is ready, we deploy the product and implement the CI/CD pipeline.
Promotion
After launch we choose channels that suit your product and customers:
- Research your audience and where they spend their time
- Investigate competition and see what is working for them
We measure progress and results and adjust as needed.
Improvements
Once we get first users we get feedback from them, analyze it and look for patterns. We build new features based on feedback and behavior.