#Startup Recipes - Learn How to Build an MVP

[tak4hir0]

Learn how to build MVPs without coding knowledge Remember, we are not telling you how to build your MVPs! (yet) We are giving you a set of instructions to create MVPs to find product-market fit ASAP! Nothing matters when you don't have a product-market fit! You should buy the full version if you are saying;

[ratishpandey]

Entrepreneurship and the Lean Start-Up

Are you tired of pouring time and money into a product that may not even work? One common mistake startups make investing heavily in a product idea before verifying its market viability or success. Don’t let this hold you back any longer – by embracing the lean startup approach, you can validate your product and make sure it has a solid foundation before moving forward. So what is the lean startup approach, and how can you use it to make a business plan for a startup?

What is the Lean Startup

A lean startup is an innovative business model that uses rapid experimentation and iteration to validate new ideas and approaches quickly. It allows startups to be agile and adaptable in an ever-changing market. By quickly testing and refining their ideas, lean startups can stay ahead of the curve and avoid the pitfalls of traditional business planning, which often involves a lot of upfront investment and long-term commitments to strategies that may not work out in the end.

Let’s use an example to understand this. Suppose you are the founder of Nutribar, a startup looking to create a new line of healthy, plant-based snack bars. Most founders spend several months/years on manufacturing, research & development, and packaging, launching it on the market, only to fail halfway through due to having a lack of funds for development or finding out that the snack bar doesn’t have the right product market fit. After all, according to a study by CB Insights, 38% of startups fail as they run out of funding, while 35% of all startups find that there is no market need for the product. Rather than spending several months/years building out a fully-featured product that may fail, Nutribar can quickly test and reiterate the idea until they achieve its desired results.

Essentially, this starts with a hypothesis – in this case, it is the need for healthier, plant-based snack bars that are convenient and tasty. Once a hypothesis is developed, Nutribar should look to develop a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), which in this case is a small batch of snack bars with just a few flavours and packaging options. This MVP should then be tested with a small group of potential target customers, enabling the company to gather feedback & data to see how well the snack bars solve the problem first outlined in the hypothesis. Once the feedback is gathered, Nutribar can tweak the recipe & packaging, adding or removing the flavours as needed. This rapid experimentation, testing & iteration should continue until Nutribar is confident that the snack bars are refined and ready for a wider launch.

Thus, by using the lean startup, Nutribar will be able to minimize waste and maximize efficiency. The company will also avoid risking the time and resources that go into developing a product that nobody may want or need and will be able to quickly pivot its trajectory based on the development of the current market.

To successfully apply the lean startup methodology, it is important to understand the underlying principles involved. Visit us to learn the five main principles of creating a lean startup.

[mobileapplicationupdates]

Common Mobile App Development Mistakes To Avoid in 2021

With the invention of smartphones, mobile applications have greatly simplified people's lives. This has led to the mobile apps development company in bangalore industry emerging as the most lucrative of all. Especially with a melee competition between iOS and Android, you can see new applications arriving on the scene every day.

Both game stores have more than 1 million applications each. In such a scenario, companies struggle with each other to create first-hand applications than others. In such a case, it is clear that many common errors occur that are not seen.

Have you ever thought why some applications are better than others even though they are very similar in terms of application?

This is because some apps are perfect in terms of functionality and features, while others are trapped by common bugs.

This differentiates successful applications from unsuccessful ones. After having hands-on experience with both types of applications, I list common mistakes to avoid in your future projects.

Not adapting to market changes

Imagine a mobile application that allows you to make 6-second clips and share your life moments with others. Sounds familiar? No, I am not talking about Instagram, Tik Tok, or Boomerang. I mean Vine.

Vine was a free mobile app founded in 2012 that allowed users to record and share an unlimited number of short looping video clips with a maximum length of six seconds.

it became the fastest growing best mobile app development company India in the world.

Vine was used by actors, singers, and celebrities, but also regular users. Thanks to Vine, many people who are famous celebrities today got their initial fame.

So what went wrong? Ankur Thakkar, Vine's managing editor, said the network did not send anything for a year. So the main problem was that the application stopped following new trends and attracting users, in addition to not developing new functions.

It's critical to adapt your product to market conditions and keep track of your competition. The new functionalities increase the participation and the user experience of the mobile applications.

You can see from the Vine example that even if your product is great and gaining popularity, you need to remember to constantly take care of your top-notch user experience. Failing to adapt to market changes is one of the most common mobile application development mistakes to any avoid.

Have ambiguity about device and operating system compatibility

Providing small details about your proposal can jeopardize the relationship you want to build with your clients. If you avoid specifying your estimates, including iOS development only, for example, your customer can expect costs to include Android.

If it is not intended to work for iPad, it is your responsibility to repair it, free of charge, without deviating from the contract. Now, that can kill the project entirely, regardless of how close the deal is.

Therefore, you must ensure that the contract indicates the version, operating system, and device compatibility.

Have an application that lacks a clear purpose

If your application lacks a purpose, who will it be for? Not having a well-defined purpose to develop an application is the biggest mistake. Too often, apps are created as competitive tools to generate some curiosity just because others are doing it.

However, an mobile app development companies in bangalore without a real reason is not a recipe for more success. It only indicates an infallible failure.

Only when your application responds to some genuine concern can it be successful and rated as useful. When your app is unique and useful, it can serve as a definitive bookmark, especially for loyal users.

Build quality control throughout development cycles rather than leaving it for last. Compare the purpose of the application with the development process and run concurrent tests during development to avoid errors.

Not building an MVP

Making an MVP is a useful idea that can prevent your application from being a fiasco. An MVP or Minimum Viable Product offers you the opportunity to progressively test your product in economic situations, where you have day-to-day users to assess the exposure of the application. It is one of the trends in the mobile application market, used by most of the companies.

With a minimum viable product for startups, you'll spend the leanest assets possible to attract your first users, receive criticism, and understand your target market.

No mobile app monetization

Before spending money, time, and effort to push apps, set aside some work to plan mobile app monetization models. Building an app is one, however, interacting with target people to download apps is an unmistakable game. This is one of the crucial mistakes to avoid when developing an application for business.

There is an important test in the app stores with the argument that numerous applications are downloaded every day. It's pretty much infinite the app will download in case you don't have a solid app getting started plan.

Examine your objective requirements, advance to the app home page, get studies on your app, bundle it, use influencers to increase the promotion of your app, and distribute it effectively across multiple platforms. The implementation of this strategy is also responsible for the trends of the mobile application market in the current scenario.

Complexity

Another common user design mistake includes application complexity when it is difficult for the user to understand the functionality and usability of the application. Similarly, as a designer makes use of the best visual imagination and various color codes to deliver a message, it is also necessary to have a UX list of mobile apps development company India that makes use of significantly fewer steps to reach any other part of the application. When there is a lot of text or a complex flow that puzzles the user, it will cause them to exit the application and go somewhere else.

Spam notifications

Let's be honest about it, getting a lot of notifications from an app is annoying. Yes, you need to communicate with the user via notifications about new feature updates or subscriptions, but you should also refrain from spamming your users. You should try to build a proper balance between being aggressive with notifications and maintaining your presence. Focus on reporting relevant and important information rather than just spamming.

Partner with an inexperienced company for application development needs

This could be the biggest mistake of all those discussed above. Handing over your mobile app development requirements to an inexperienced or inexperienced company can be detrimental to your business. The decision may not only affect your customer base, but also your bottom line.

App development requires deep business understanding, analysis of customer requirements, development and design experience, best testing practices, etc.

Centimeter by centimeter imitation of competitors

When a successful business idea takes the form of an application, it attracts a lot of new competition in the market. There is nothing wrong with taking a page out of your competitor's book, but deciding to imitate your competitor inch by inch can be a huge mistake on your part. You need to instill some new ideas and approaches into the app, and try to bring a fresh experience to your users that none of the competing apps offer. Blind imitation of competitors is one thing, most people end up doing despite knowing that it is a glitch.

Too much feature stuffing

An application created by a reputable application design company should not have too many functionalities and features. If you are loaded with too much stuff, you can end up giving the impression that you are not clear about what you want to present to users. If users do not understand the specific reason for the application, there is a possibility that it will be uninstalled very soon. It is always better to be clear and concise about the content of an application.

Neglecting compatibility with other applications

There will not be just one application on a mobile or smart device, there are many applications installed. Sometimes one is too focused on developing an application that the compatibility factor can slip. If the application is not properly compatible with the rest of the applications or the device, a problem may arise for the user, such as device lag or abrupt closing of applications. If these things happen too much, the user will think carefully about getting rid of your app.

Summarizing…

With many opportunities in mobile app development, you can capitalize on and gain access to your own market, as long as you avoid common mistakes that have not been seen before.

If you have any kind of problem with mobile application development, you can get to know us by completing the following form. We will communicate with you with the smartest solutions that you will praise.

FuGenx is one of the Android application development company India for iPhone app development companies and the best Android apps development companies for devices in Bangalore. We are proud to be one of the iPhone apps development companies India due to our old projects and satisfied customers. Experienced top 10 mobile app development companies india developers who can run your mobile app without bugs or glitches. Contact us at sales@FuGenx.com for a free quote

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[svonava]

Senior Googler Quits to Join a Startup Fixing VC

I'm out ❤

After six great years building forecasting systems for Google Ads worth billions of dollars, my yearning for the startup world took over again. Just like after the university, when I decided to start a company instead of going for a PhD, it happened again and this time we got the recipe right: a kickass team with tight networks, deep domain and tech expertise; a maturing problem space; and a product that will transform the way companies engage with their networks.

Let's be friends on Twitter @svonava, we are hiring!

But first, let me explain how I got there:

Heavy heart

A job at Google should be a compulsory part of every software engineers curriculum - it’s just the neatest package of inspiration, learning and networking one can wish for after school. Despite the free food and beanbags, Googlers often quote ‘the colleagues’ as the biggest work perk and I’d have to agree - for my Goodbye email I’ve assembled a list of 94 people with whom I have been through an epic story…

Engineers from my orientation class now at the helm of hugely impactful & insanely complex systems. Product managers that crushed intern parties with me now spinning up 50 person teams to topple whole industries. Salespeople who actually care about long term sustainability of a business and the entire ecosystem around it…

We must have drank a hectoliter of Goodbye coffees during my last month. Some tried to talk me out of it. Some looked into the distance and muttered ‘One day I too will fly out of this nest’. Throughout the six years and in their parting words, they have given me a heap of knowledge nuggets, TOP 10 of which I’ve summarized in another post here.

From outside of the company, most naysayers (‘Are you crazy leaving Google?!’) use a monetary argument. Being the quant nerd that I am, I ran the numbers. My analysis shows that the cost of job safety eats into the value you generate, making it an irrational decision to stay at Google for more than about seven years. (Check out the appendix at the bottom.)

Value capture

How does one capture the value they create? In finance, there are jobs like buy-side quants in hedge funds, for whom the bonuses are tied to their impact on profits and losses - you get approached by these a lot if you work at Google.

However, you will have a tough time grabbing more than 1% of your value minus trading fees and the salary of your boss. It’s similar in other roles in finance and elsewhere; your boss will always pay just enough to dissuade sufficient percentage of people from leaving.

I believe that timing is key - if you can, wait for the right chance and then jump on it with both feet. I have always wanted to own a large chunk of what I’m building. After over six years at Google, I can afford to face the startup mountain with a smile and I’d be crazy not to.

What's next?

When I realized that the AI winter (or a ‘slowdown’) is upon us, I figured it’s time to expand my horizons back in 2017. At the time bitcoin and blockchain entered mainstream. I got my feet wet writing a HFT bot in Rust with a few colleagues for one of the crypto exchanges (they had FIX protocol and looked legit!).

After we realized that the exchange technology is not ready for HFT yet (even though having a fully off-chain order book sets them up right), I switched to a market index-like portfolio automation and played with a bit of real money.

Eventually, through a Crypto group within Google and through Google Ventures I stumbled upon two cool folks I’m now proud to call co-founders. We set out to build infrastructure for investment funds of the future, where capital gets allocated to innovation efficiently, regulatory compliance is a feature of the technology and the access to a previously privileged asset class is democratized. The vision is incredibly ambitious (as we are reminded of regularly by our amazing advisors), but our vision of the MVP is bite size. We will change the way early-stage investment has been done for the last 60 years or “die trying”.

We are still semi-quietly building but if you are itching to jump off the corporate wagon and try your luck at a startup reach out!

If something seems possible, that's probably because someone is already doing it. When something seems that it can't possibly work, nobody tries it. Real innovation happens when someone tries anyway, overlooking an obvious flaw, and finds a way to make an idea work.

-- Joel Spolsky

Appendix

Job safety vs. upside on value generated over time at a big high-growth company:

As a fresh grad, during the first years at a company like Google your net worth is increasing by a substantial fraction year by year (blue line).

However later on, the % net worth increase diminishes (even if you keep getting promoted, which I have been but it gets harder and harder as you progress).

On the other hand, if you are not working at a hedge fund with a revenue-share comp model, you are not really participating on the upside created by your work (red line, risk adjusted).

From the figure above, we see that ~7th is the optimal year to leave Google (spreadsheet - check all my assumptions there).

A key point is that to get promoted to trace the blue line, your value-add more or less has to trace the red line - these are strongly coupled.

Eventually they just flip and you are better off chasing the red line, instead of staying comfy on the blue line. Furthermore, due to the marginal utility of money, the blue vs. red line battle matters less for getting out of your bed in the morning. One has to work on something inspiring and impactful to keep the fire burning.

Combine that with coming across a great new opportunity and leaving “the mothership” does not seem as crazy anymore:)

[topicprinter]

We turned a business idea to $100k product (see me launching it above). Here are our learnings covered in this case study: — how we picked the right business idea; — why starting with one developer is counterproductive; — how important is it to talk to your target audience and ignore the rest; — successful bot criteria; — bonus: a product launch checklist;. . .In April 2018, Standuply broke $100k in annual run rate. We reached 500 customers and $19k in revenue working from Siberia and without funding. That’s challenging ⛄Before we got to that state we experimented for nine months in 2016; changed the concept three times and at some point, we were almost ready to give up.Eventually, we found the right track. A beta product we built led us to hundreds of customers and $75k in sales so far.This post is about the first year in the works, which was full of uncertainty, mistakes, and learnings. What a CRAZY year it was! How we picked the business ideaArtem Borodin, Standuply co-founder, is a Project Management veteran who also teaches Project Management classes. Artem saw how Agile teams have evolved and felt their pains with managing processes.It was 2016 which brought up the chatbot hype. I was EXCITED about the new opportunities and shared my business ideas with Artem.Together, we envisioned a Scrum Master bot that could be helpful for Agile teams. As a platform we chose Slack – it was the right choice that made us thrive.We hired an engineer and with the team of three started our long journey. New platform brought new challenges for our engineer. Thus, our team was moving slower than expected.Unsurprisingly, it took us a couple of months to build the first MVP. This is how SprinterBot (a bot that helps running Agile sprints faster) met the world.Lesson learned Have at least two developers to keep going faster. One person can get stuck coding something new.If you don’t have a business idea yet, here’s my dedicated post how to come up with the internet business opportunity: Techniques to Find Your Billion Dollar Idea.Did we follow that advice? Yes, to some extent. These techniques really helped us:Talk to Professionals As I mentioned above, Artem is a project management professional who witnessed many challenges in Agile teams. Later we proved that by talking to other managers.Talk to people who work in the area of your interest or where you see the highest potential. Without any doubt, most of them face lots of challenges in their professional life and know the details that make sense.Ask questions, listen carefully and write down their answers. Here are questions you may use.— What tasks are you responsible for doing in your business day to day? (Listen for response) — Which of those tasks take the most time and which do you like the least? — Tell me about how you go about doing (insert task from the response above). Stop and listen for 60 seconds. — If you could wave a magic wand and do anything related to (insert task from the response above), what would it be?After a dozen of discussions, you may spot some repeating answers. It could be what you are looking for. Ideally, 25–30 talks of this kind are needed to gather enough data to start seeing repetitive patterns.What Drives You?I always wanted to work on something meaningful for the likeminded people. That’s why our business idea of a bot for Agile teams INSPIRES me from the day one.Time flies when we enjoy something. These are the moments that can bring in new opportunities. To find out an inspiration, you can follow this simple plan.List activities which you truly enjoy doing. Select three or five the best ones.Talk to yourself in detail: what do you really like in each of those activities.Find one or two most painful problems about these activities.Describe in details how to solve these problems if you had all the resources.Tell your friends and peers about the solution and get their feedback.Describe in detail the minimal viable solution. How would it look like?Determine what you need to build the prototype and proceed to actual work.Decide what should be your next second step and schedule it for tomorrow morning (if necessary, wake up earlier).Looking for Complaints Every time someone complains, write it down. It could be about customer service or how expensive bath towels are. Listen for phrases such as ‘I hate’, ‘I wish’, ‘thats so annoying’. These are queues for potential startup ideas.Search on Twitter can also be very insightful. And we did that a lot.Twitter is often used to post complaints addressed to companies or share thoughts aloud. Here are some more phrases that can take you closer to insights.“I wish I had” “is the worst product” “that’s so frustrating” “does anyone know how”You can also read feedback sections on different websites with users ideas and comments. From time to time, you can find something interesting.. . . Brought to you by Standuply, the Slack bot that manages standup meetings. Need a Scrum Master in Slack? Hire Standuply for that. How we got our early adoptersAfter publishing an upcoming page (see below) on Betalist.com, 300 people subscribed to our waiting list. Not bad.We planned to ship within a week but eventually shipped Sprinterbot in 4 weeks. It often happens this way, right? 😜Invitation emails were sent, and we’ve been waiting for our first users. But, we got fewer signups than expected. Not good.Most of the subscribers left interest due to silence from our side. Still, 50 teams signed up. Half of them tested the bot, and a dozen of teams started using it.Lesson learned Keep in regular touch with your subscribers before delivering the beta. Warm up their interest.Then we decided to look for new users and feedback on Slack communities. We had over 150 talks< in two months. But it didn’t help ¯_(ツ)_/¯We defined criteria of a person from our target audience: IT manager of a software development team on Slack. Then Artem and I approached those people via DM with a short and personal message like “Hey Jane, could you do me a favor?”1/3 would talk to us, and those talks may have lasted up to 30 minutes. People are open and helpful if you ask gently. Here’s a useful article about networking on Slack communities.Most people were skeptic about our concept and our bot, but we did get few signups and some pieces of advice.Moreover, we found that both our unknown bot and other popular Slack bots got the same reaction — skepticism, and disapproval.It turns out we were talking to people who were slightly different from our real target audience.Later we found users and then customers who had no skepticism, but a strong need for our product. They were IT managers from remote software development teams and were using Slack bots.A slight difference made a huge change. Incredible!Lesson learned Know who's eaxactly your target audience. Talk to them and ignore the rest.Pivot, pivot!To decide what to do next, we summarized all our customer development talks. Yes, including those from people outside our target audience. Oops.Some people didn’t like the concept of a Scrum Master bot. Half of them didn’t follow Scrum. However, many liked that a bot can ask questions and gather answers, e.g., for standup meetings.To embrace that, we decided to provide a user ability to change questions allowing a broader set of use-cases.We redesigned our webpage and changed the product’s name (not a good move). It became ReportChef (like a chef that serves reports based on various recipes).It was launched on Betalist and social networks. This time we put up a referral system with perks based on Tim Ferris post, but it didn’t work out. Nobody wanted to invite their friends before trying a product.However, it wasn’t the only pitfall on our way.After we made our positioning wider, it became unclear to visitors what we were doing. Ouch.At that time about 50 teams were using ReportChef, and it didn’t feel like a strong demand. We were STUCK.Inspiration found I went to Bits & Pretzels conference to talk to people, find inspiration, and drink beer at Octoberfest 🍻But ReportChef didn’t catch any attention when I was talking about it. I felt FRUSTRATED and started to think whether I should quit…With those thoughts in mind, I went to a men’s room. Locked the door, I noticed a written text right in front of my eyes — “Never ever give up”.THANKS, man! It was an inspiration I needed in a place I barely though could be in any sense inspirational 😀I decided to do my best and get our product going WHATEVER it might take me in the next six months. A bit later things started to shake up. Getting to the saunaWe certainly needed a detached view. But there are only a few startup teams around in Siberia, and no-one was in SaaS business. If you’re drilling oil, it’s the place to go.So, we decided to apply for Startup Sauna acceleration program in Helsinki. It doesn’t take equity and provides a wide network of experts — just what we needed.Our team was lucky to be among 15 teams chosen for the Fall ’16 program. Yeah!The program was very useful, intensive and fun. What a GREAT time it was! I will share our experience in a dedicated post about Startup Sauna later on.During the program, we came up with Standuply brand and concept. Then we launched it at Startup Sauna demo day and on Product Hunt at the same time.In a couple of days, we received over 200 teams on board. A week later we published the bot in Slack App Directory. There Standuply began its steady growth.Later we decided to automate other Agile processes — retrospective meetings, burn-down charts, etc.So, the story started with building a Scrum Master bot, pivoted and came back to the original concept. Was that a 3rd pivot? 🙂In the next posts, I will share insights about our growth and how we built a successful product based on our initial business idea.Speaking of growth, check out our latest relevant post:Successful bot criteriaWe have a criteria list of a successful bot in our internal wiki. It’s our point of view, so don’t consider it as rock-solid truth.I’d like to share it hoping it will be useful to you.1. Replacing a process altogether. A bot has to replace a process altogether to achieve full adoption across the whole team.If a user has to keep the old workflow occasionally, it will hurt bot’s adoption. Also, it will raise the question “why should we pay for the bot if we’re still doing things the old way?”That’s why it’s practical to start with a tiny process and then expand the functionality.2. Added value A bot should bring added value to a process compared to the old way of doing things. Sounds trivial, but we saw many examples of making a bot for the sake of a chatbot.3. Solving the pain In the best scenario, a bot not only brings added value but solves the real pain. For example, it notifies when an app crashes right where all the team communicates.This way it quickly becomes the part of the workflow.4. The ease of use It should be easier to use a bot then solving a task in an old way. Typing too much isn’t cool.Compare ordering UBER in a couple of clicks via the app with typing your full address to a chatbot.5. Clear value proposition People are choosing and using bots because of their value. Thus, the value proposition should be clear and solid.It could be applied to any product, though.6. Scalability Bot’s features should be scalable within the same value proposition. In the perfect example, several joint processes can be automated via a bot.It can be applied to features or client sizes. I.e., starting with SMBs and then going to Enterprise.Original post

[gailatfullsail-blog]

Product Design & Development

Course:  Product Design & Development 

In this week course on Product design & Development, there was a lot of focus on the design of a product.  Some of my original goals for the course was to focus on developments of new products, focus on products that customers need and want and create plans to launch new products for new business.  My goals were met because of what I learned from the course content.  The course covered above and beyond what I was expecting.  In the readings on “The Product Design Sprint:  A five day recipe for start-ups focused on a five day exercise which uses design thinking to reduce the risk in bringing products to market. Other readings included 10 Principles of building great products at forbes.com.  

In watching this week’s video, on Ron Cook Interview, I found two interviews to be a great inspiration.  Ron Cook was on the panel and he made some interesting points about being a business owner.  He stated how one would solve a problem in their company by asking yourself if your business had a voice; what’s important for you to know and what should it tell you. The panel on the second interview focused on Lean startup meets design thinking.  I learned several things in this area and one was how to take your hypothesis and turn it into an experiment and make your learning live. The other point I learned was about how a startup is an experiment; we don’t know what is going to happen.  The major focus on what I learned came from the course content on Developing your MVP (Minimum Viable Product) and how we can use it to get feedback from potential customers.  In the course we had an assignment to create an MVP using an Explainer video and explore several formats to be used to produce the video. This was very informative as I learned a lot more about my product.  

I can apply all these lessons learned in my personal and profession life by first, applying Mr. Cook’s advice from the interview and also continue to work on my MVPs for my product.

[manage-management]

Novel and methodical approach to startups! The book is good and interesting. Steve gets all his experience on the table, and makes a wonderful case for "Customer development" and "Product development" going in parallel. I have been through a launch of a product, and much of what he mentions in the book have also been my reasons for failure - and that's truly insightful! Many of the situations in the book has had happened in my case - primarily because we've been majorly "product development"- centric and worked on "customer development" after the product had reached the MVP state - when we figured out that things don't work the way customers like. Go to Amazon

Here is "a radical reexamination of the entire new product introduction process"...and almost everything that precedes it Note: The review that follows is of the Third Edition, published in 2007. Go to Amazon

A Must Read Book to anyone who want to learn Customer Development and Lean Start Up An excellent introduction to anyone who wants to implement the Customer Development and Lean Startup. The book clearly explain the theory and the incentive for it. Next, you will be able start practicing with companion (and more practical) books such business model generation (the canvas model), the The Startup Owner's Manual. my recommendation is also to find mentor on this area. Enjoy the book. Go to Amazon

Stunning content (and yes, hard to read) Content-wise, this is hands down the best book I have ever read on entrepreneurship. However, it is not lite reading. It reads like a step by step playbook (or textbook) and has little in the way of entertaining narrative. You need to be prepared for a degree of repetition in content and in structure since the author is making the case there there is a rigorous, repeatable process to building a startup. I devoured every page, including the appendices, and discovered insight after insight. Go to Amazon

Detailed "How To" Guide for an Iterative Approach This book was recommended to me by a friend when I told them that I had enjoyed reading Lean Startup. He insisted that Four Steps to the Epiphany was far more detailed, instructive and thought out. This is pretty much an iterative recipe book, walking you through steps in detail with specific recommendations to return to earlier steps if milestones aren't achieved. Go to Amazon

Five Stars useful guide to those that want to build a business Go to Amazon

Excellent book Great book, very easy to read and with great tips Go to Amazon

Five Stars One of the best road maps that address the real and right issues for success. Go to Amazon

Fundamental read Too many words customer market assessment before product development Fantastic Book for entrepreneurs and company builders Number one book to read on entrepreneurialism Fresh thinking Value for Your Money Five Stars Four Stars

[darrellkmartin]

Four steps to flesh out your product development

Most startups fail. Whether it’s due to an overly saturated market, a premature product launch, or just an expensive ping-pong table. Yet some of the most costly mistakes are often on the product side, be that due to a lack of concept definition, little expertise, or over-engineering.

Everyone has ideas, yet not many know how to execute them well. This means first defining your product development process – as building a product without one would definitely be a recipe for failure.

Product Development in Four Quick Steps

A well-structured product development process will force you to answer the tough questions that will better define your product and your overall strategy. Here are four steps to help you flesh out your product development process.

Stage 1: Setting up your project

Your first step is to decide on the type of product you want to make. Many teams tend to focus on Scalable Minimum Viable Products (MVPs). These are MVPs with an architecture that’s easy to build on top of. Yet in the early stages, they only have the essential features needed. While Scalable MVPs lack the completeness of a finished product, they forgo the bugginess of Disposable MVPs (such as a DIY landing page made with Unbounce).

Before moving on to build your user experience, be sure to have a clear understanding of your timeline and budget. You should always be diligent in trying to stick to both of them.

Stage 2: Building up your user experience

This is where most founders go wrong. They often get lost in the big picture and forget about their users’ experience. Creating user stories can help to visualise who are your users and what their needs are. It’s as simple as filling out this template: ‘As a <who>, I want <what>, so that <why>’. For example, ‘As a freelance developer, I want to see a map preview of the co-working space, so that I know how to find it easily.’ This clarifies for us that the app should feature a mini-map for the co-working space. While this is quite specific in shaping the user’s’ experience through features, we may also create user stories for validating larger concepts. For example, ‘As a freelance developer, I want to work remotely, so that I can travel the world.’ This is a broader way to verify why a co-working app would be useful for freelance developers.

The next step is to bring your user stories to life! The best way to visualise your potential features is through actual sketches of the user’s experience, also known as wireframing. When creating MVPs it’s crucial that we prioritize our features. Use a simple ranking system, rank each mockup based on cost, complexity, and impact on your initial goal (the bigger picture) – it’s as simple as that. A ranking system helps us to prioritize features so that we avoid the common problem of over-engineering.

Congratulations! You should already see your product taking shape, with the highest ranking features clearly defining your concept.

Stage 3: Designing ‘Quick & Dirty’

While it’s tempting to spend a considerable amount time designing your product’s branding, you need to hold back that instinct. The key to this step is speed – you need to get your MVP out fast – so go for the ‘quick and dirty’ yet efficient design process.

‘Quick’ means choosing a few key design elements to define your product; a font, two colours and the type of imagery you want to use. The ‘dirty’ part of the process involves learning from your competitors and replicating a few of their best aspects. Sometimes creating target personas can make the ‘quick and dirty’ process easier, as it helps in establishing who you are designing for. Need to fill in those wireframes? Then some useful image banks for copyright-free images are pixelbay and unsplash.

The design process should ideally be overseen by someone who is an expert in your target field and can advise you on integrating a good user experience into the designs. This individual can help optimise your process by reducing decision-making time, as they instinctively know the type of FAQs to include and the ideal position of a CTA button.

Stage 4: Developing in an agile way

Many founders are not diligent enough with this stage. Choose your tech stack and start with the backend development process. It is important, especially if you outsource your tech, to maintain clear and explicit communication during the development phase. Remember to heed the advice of your developers and take into account what they have to say. Hiring a project manager can also be good option as it leaves founders with the time and resources to further develop other aspects of their business.

Remember to develop agile – keeping in mind that (ideally) there should be no major changes afterwards. As soon as you have the software developed, start testing. You cannot avoid bugs, so prioritise which ones to fix and focus on those – ideally, you should create a standardised process for dealing with them to save a lot of time.

Also, if you lose a couple of minor users along the way, don’t let it deter you. It’s important not to get fixated on retaining every one of your initial users, remember that this is an MVP and not your final product.

Final tip: Remember the ‘30% Rule’

From the inception of an idea to the launch of the MVP, you’ll probably struggle with deadlines at every step of the way. The ‘30 per cent rule’ is often used by agencies to better estimate their projects and it’s a quick and effective rule to keep in mind. Simply overestimate the amount of time and resources for each project by 30 per cent, and you’ll save yourself a lot of unneeded stress and frustration.

Lastly, iteration after iteration, bug after bug, you will never succeed unless you diligently work your way through every setback. Get comfortable with continuous development long-term.

Marc Clemens is the founder of CodeControl.io, which matches top-tier freelance developers and designers with companies. As a Berlin-based serial entrepreneur, Clemens loves building products, and everything related to tech and the future of work.

Photo via VisualHunt

from Startup Tips By Darrel http://theheureka.com/four-steps-to-flesh-out-product-development-20170507

[t-baba]

Pivot or Persevere? Find Out Using Lean Experiments

The Lean Startup approach is gaining popularity in organisations of all sizes, which means teams must adapt their processes. More and more, UX professionals are being asked to take on Lean experiments – which are fantastic – but differ slightly from traditional UX research.

To recap, “Lean Startup” is a business approach that calls for rapid experimentation to reduce the risks of building something new. The framework has roots in the Lean Manufacturing methodology and mirrors the scientific method. It calls for very UX-friendly processes, such as collecting iterative feedback and focusing on empirical measurement of performance indicators.

One of the core principles is to iterate through a cycle known as Build-Measure-Learn, which includes building a minimum viable product (MVP) to test, measure what happens, and then decide whether to move forward with the suggested solution (persevere) or find another (pivot).

Simple in theory. But it can be challenging to figure out what MVP to build, how to interpret the data collected and what next steps should be after completing a lean experiment. These guidelines will help you get the most out of your experimentation cycles and understand whether you should pivot or persevere.

Consider the context

The most important part of data analysis starts before you’ve gathered any data. To help you decide what type of research to do, you first need to consider where you are in the progress of your product, what information you already have, and what are the biggest, riskiest open questions.

In the conceptual stages of a totally new business or feature idea, you first need to understand enough about your potential user base and their needs to make informed hypotheses about the problems they have and how you might be able to address them. Any idea for a new thing is an assumption, and doing some generative research will help you shape and prioritise your assumptions.

The Lean Startup approach advocates for starting with a process called GOOB – Getting Out Of the Building – and looks a whole lot like a condensed version of traditional ethnography and interviews. The goal is to talk to a small number of people who you think fit your target audience and understand their current needs, experience gaps, pain points, and methods for solving existing problems related to your idea.

Run these interviews just like any other UX interview and use the data to create a list of assumptions about your target users, potential problems to solve, and ways you could address those problems.  Start with a period of exploration and learning before you build anything.

Prioritising what to explore

Your list of assumptions can serve as your backlog of work. Rather than creating a list of necessary features to build, treat each item in the list as a separate hypothesis to explore and either prove or disprove. Then, prioritise the hypotheses that are the riskiest, or would have the biggest impact if your assumption is wrong. Assumptions about what the problem is and for what people should be higher in priority over assumptions about how to solve any problems or build any features.

Typical assumptions might look something like this:

I believe [___] set of people are facing [___] challenge.

I believe [___] solution could help address [___] problem better than my users’ current workaround.

I believe [___] solution could generate money in [___] way.

For instance, let’s say that you’re trying to create a new application to help busy parents plan meals. You’ve interviewed a dozen busy parents and have some insight that says the two biggest issues they face are deciding what to cook and finding time to buy all the ingredients/groceries.You might have a hunch about which direction to go, but your first test should be centred around figuring out which of these issues is more compelling to your users.

Setting hypotheses

The next step is to craft a precise hypothesis that will make it very easy to tell whether you’ve proved or disproved your assumption.

I like to use the following framework for creating hypotheses:

The do, build, provide section to refers to the solution. This could be as high-level as deciding which type of app to build, or as specific as the type of interaction to develop for a particular interface.

These people should represent your assumed customer archetypes, derived from your initial interviews and other data.

The desirable outcome should be something that correlates to business success, such as sending a message or ordering an item. Keep in mind that it’s easy to come up with outcomes that look good, but don’t really tell you anything. These are called vanity metrics. For instance, if I want people to make a purchase on an ecommerce site, it’s not really that helpful to know how many people decided to follow us on Facebook. Instead, focus on identifying the pieces of information that help you make a decision and that give you a true indication of business success.

The actionable metric is whatever will tell you that your investment into building this item will be worth it. Actionable metrics can be a little tricky, especially early on, but I like to try to set these metrics as the barometers of the minimum amount of success you need to prove that the investment will be worthwhile. You can look at both perceived cost of investment and perceived value to gauge this.

Let’s say you work at an ecommerce company and you’re proposing a new feature that you hope will increase last-minute additions to a cart. You could ask the development team to estimate how much effort it would take to build out the feature, then work backward from that cost to see how much the average order size would have to increase to offset the costs.

If the team estimates something would take about 5 weeks and will cost $25,000, you’ll need the change to make at least that much money in that amount of time. So then let’s say you also know that the company usually has 1,000 sales a day and the average order size is $20. That means that right now, the company makes $20,000 a day. In order to offset the $25,000 estimated development dollars over 5 weeks, the change you make would have to bring in an extra $5,000 per week. This means that your average order size would have to go up $5 to $25. All the additional money earned after the offset is additional profit for the company.

That was all a lot of math, and you don’t always have that much information at your fingertips, especially when you’re very early on in the product development process. You might have to just make an educated guess about what sort of number would be “good enough.” The point is to try to pick a metric that will truly help inform you about whether or not you should invest in the new change or not.

Sometimes it’s easier to conceptualise this as a fail condition, or point at which it wouldn’t be worth moving forward. In other words, you can frame it as: “if we don’t make at least x% more on each order after, we won’t implement the full version of the feature.” Then you can work backwards to craft a testable hypothesis.

Of course, this framework can be adjusted as needed, but you need to clearly define the exact question you’re exploring and what success looks like. If you can’t come up with a clear hypothesis statement, go back and re-evaluate your assumption and narrow it down so you can run a successful experiment.

Design your experiment

Once you have a clear single question to answer and hypothesis, deciding what sort of experiment to run should be fairly straightforward.

Let’s revisit the meal planning application example. Say that you’ve decided your riskiest assumption is which of the two core problems is more compelling to users.

A hypothesis might look something like this:

If we build an app that automatically generates 5 recipe ideas per week,

Then busy parents,

Will be interested in downloading this application.

We’ll know this is true when we present them with a variety of food-related apps and they choose the recipe generation app at least 15 percentage points more often, for example, than any other choice.

Now you can focus on designing a way to test which apps a user would be most interested in using. There is no one exact way to do this. You could create fake landing pages for each potential solution and see how many people sign up for each fake product, or create ads for the different apps and see which one generates most actions. You should focus on finding the smallest thing your team can build in order to test your hypothesis – the minimally viable product.

In this case, a good MVP might be a mockup of a page with blurbs of a few different fake applications you haven’t built yet. Then you could use a click-tool like usabilityhub to ask participants to choose a single app to help them with meal planning and then monitor how many clicks each concept gets. This way, you don’t even need to launch live landing pages or ad campaigns, just create the page mock-up.

Frequently used lean experiment types/MVPs include:

Landing page tests

Smoke tests such as explainer video, shadow feature, or coming soon pages

Concierge tests

Wizard of Oz tests

Ad tests

Click tests

These are just a few suggestions, and there are many more experiments you can run depending on your context and what you’re trying to learn. Use these suggestions as starting places not step-by-step directions for figuring out the right experiment for your team.

Analysing your results

If you’ve set a clear and concise hypothesis and run a well-designed experiment, it should be clear to see if you’ve proved or disproved your hypothesis.

Looking at the meal planning app example again, let’s say you ran the click test with 1,000. You included 4 app concepts in the test, and hypothesised that concept A would be the most compelling.

If Concept A receives 702 clicks, Concept B receives 98 clicks, Concept C receives 119 clicks, and Concept D receives 81 clicks, it’s very obvious that you proved your hypothesis. You can persevere, or move forward with concept A, and then focus on to testing your next set of assumptions exploring that concept. Maybe now is the time to tackle an assumption about the app’s core feature set.

On the other hand, if Concept A receives 45 clicks, Concept B receives 262 clicks, Concept C receives 112 clicks, and Concept D receives 581 clicks, you obviously disproved your hypothesis. Concept A is clearly not the most compelling concept and you should pivot away from that idea.

In this case, you also have a clear indication of the direction of your pivot – choice D is a clear winner. You could set your new assumption that concept D is a compelling direction and run another experiment to verify this assumption, perhaps by running a similar test to compare it against just one other concept or by setting up a landing page test. Or you could do more customer interviews to find out why people found that concept so compelling.

While sometimes there’s an obvious winner, it’s not always clear which way the scales tip. 

But what if Concept A receives 351 clicks, Concept B receives 298 clicks, Concept C receives 227 clicks, and Concept D receives 124 clicks? There’s no clear winner or direction. Did you set up a bad test? Are none of your concepts compelling? Or all of them? What next?

The short answer is that you don’t know. But the great thing about lean experiments is that the system is designed such that your next step should be running more experiments. In failing to find a winning direction, you succeeded in learning that your original assumption was incorrect, and you didn’t need to invest much to figure that out. You now know that you need to pivot, you just may not be sure in which direction.

Which way to pivot?

If you know that you need to pivot but are unsure what direction to take, my first suggestion is to run another related experiment to verify your initial findings.

In the food example, you could try a similar test with just 3 options and see if the outcomes change, or try running landing pages for all 4 concepts. While you don’t want to be falsely optimistic, you also want to be sure that there wasn’t something about the way you ran your test or a fluke in the data that is giving you a false impression. Since lean experiments are intentionally quick and not robust, they can sometimes lack the rigour to give you true confidence. If you have a true finding, you should be able to replicate results with another test.

If you run another test and get similarly inconclusive data or truly have no idea what direction to go next after running an experiment, try stepping away from lean experimentation and go back to exploratory research methods.

A successful pivot can be any kind of change in business and product model, such as a complete reposition to a new product or service, a single feature becoming the focus of a product, a new target user group, a change in platform or channel, or a new kind of revenue or marketing model. A structured experiment is not going to teach you what direction to go, so you need to do some broader, qualitative data gathering.

I recommend running interviews with two subsets of people. First, talk to people who love your product/service and are most often taking the option that you want, such as purchasing frequently, and find out what they love about you and why. Then, if possible, talk to the people who are not taking desired actions, to try and find out why, or what they’re looking for instead. These types of interviews will be just like any other discovery interview, and you’ll be looking for the participants to guide you to new insights that can lead to your next set of assumptions to test.

Conclusion

Lean experiments are a great way to get any organisation learning from their customers and poised to make valuable changes. Getting used to the ins and outs of setting clear hypotheses and learning whether to pivot or persevere can take some time, but luckily those of us in UX already have the skill sets to do so successfully. Go forth and experiment!

Got a question on running lean experiments? Ask Amanda when she joins us for our next Ask the UXperts session in our Slack Channel, 3pm Thursday 25 May PDT or 8am Friday 26 May AEST: http://ift.tt/2qyEPtZ

The post Pivot or Persevere? Find Out Using Lean Experiments appeared first on UX Mastery.

by Amanda Stockwell via UX Mastery http://ift.tt/2rQHUUn

[topicprinter]

A few months ago, I had a brilliant idea for a website. Then, I had an even brillianter idea: build the website, but outsource all the work.Every great website starts with an MVP: the minimum viable product. It demonstrates the idea in its simplest form to test whether anyone is interested. When Twitter launched their MVP, you could only tweet pictures of Russet potatoes. Slack famously launched with language support limited to pig latin. Netflix is now so synonymous with instant streaming that you may have forgotten its first version, which required you to select a movie, then wait several days until Reed Hastings arrived at your house to act out the plot himself.I had a simple plan to build my MVP:Write a quick design specification.Find a rock star freelance developer with 10 years of experience in whichever web framework is the trendiest and most bleeding-edge.Offer said freelancer $4/hr so that I can maximize site profits.Watch the MVP blossom into a thriving web property frequented by millions of passionate users demanding that I take their money.You may be surprised to learn that this plan did not work. I'm not writing this from my luxurious $200 million Silicon Valley two-bedroom apartment. I didn't grab headlines with an outrageous buyout from Facebook. Instead, I'm writing this from my regular one-bedroom apartment after receiving a half-finished product and somehow becoming my freelancer's freelancer.The ideaI follow the keto diet and like trying new recipes. There are plenty of good ones online, but they're spread across dozens of blogs, each with a different structure. These blogs tend to be slow and hard to navigate because keto bloggers rarely have experience with web development.My idea was a keto recipe directory. It would aggregate recipes from across the web into one easy-to-use website.Initial sketch of siteFinding a freelancerMost of the site's heavy lifting was web scraping -- crawling recipe blogs and pulling out the relevant data. This is a common job on freelance developer sites like Upwork or Fiverr. I could probably find someone for a low price, but I might end up with code that crumbles to pieces if I try to iterate beyond the MVP.Oh, wait! This would be a perfect job for my friend Ferngully (who agreed to let me write about her under the condition that I assign her a silly pseudonym). She recently quit her job to travel but was due back in a few days to look for full-time work. She would probably have time to freelance in the meantime. We had worked together in the past, so I knew she was a solid developer and that we work well together.I reached out to her, and she was immediately on board. She knew from our past work that my code reviews are pedantic and whiny rigorous. She told me she was excited about the challenge of meeting my tough standards.I wrote a design document that laid out the components of the website at a high level. Ferngully would handle the backend scraping tasks, while I would build a simple web frontend to display the recipes.Architecture diagramWhy aren't we live?When I was initially discussing the project with Ferngully, she asked if I had any deadlines. "No deadlines. Just focus on writing good code."It's the same thing I tell any developer working on a side project with me. I'd rather receive high-quality code on Thursday than hastily slapped-together code on Monday. I estimated that Ferngully's portion would take 30-50 hours to implement. We'd be done in about a week. Maybe two or three if my estimates were off or if she worked fewer than 40 hours per week.At the time, I was in a busy period with my day job. It could be months before I'd have time to build the frontend. Certainly, I'd be the bottleneck.After I finished the design document, I thought about how anticlimactic it would be if Ferngully delivered the scraping code only to have it sit in a drawer for months. I spent a few evenings putting together a basic frontend. It displayed some sample recipes I scraped by hand. We'd be ready to add in the full recipe data and launch as soon as Ferngully completed her work.Screenshot of website MVP, populated with data scraped by handThat's when I started getting anxious.It took me a week to complete the web portion, but I still hadn't seen any code from Ferngully. What was she doing?Before I built the frontend, the project was stress-free. Now that we had a site ready with dummy data, it felt like we had a living thing that we were keeping caged. With each passing day, my code was withering into obsolescence. I just wanted to show my site to the world so that I could get to the part of this process where Mark Zuckerberg invites me for champagne on his personal-information-collecting superyacht.Working under low bandwidthFerngully sent me her first code review at the end of the second week. It was a partial implementation of the first backend component. She had averaged 15 hours per week, but she was starting her full-time job the following Monday. Her hours were sure to go down after that.I revisited the design document to see if I could trim anything out. It called for the backend to programmatically upload recipe data to the website's data store. I could reduce Ferngully's work if she just wrote data to a local filesystem instead. Then, I'd use existing command-line tools to upload that data to the website.Okay, maybe the limited time was a good thing. If I could trim elements out of the MVP and still achieve the same thing, it wasn't really in its most minimal form.I was optimistic that we could wrap this up in a few more weeks.Becoming my freelancer's freelancerUnfortunately, Ferngully's job reduced her availability even more than I had anticipated. Over the next month, she averaged less than five hours per week on development. At this rate, it would take us months to finish.If this was another freelancer, I would have just thanked them for their work and found a new developer. But Ferngully was not only my friend but a friend going through the stress of a new job. I didn't want to add to her plate by pushing for more hours or overhauling the project plan. Nevertheless, I was kicking myself for how lax I had been earlier when she asked about deadlines.Maybe I could reassign some of her work to me. No, I'd be annoyed if someone hired me for a job, then did it themselves. I revisited the design document to see if we could simplify it further, but I couldn't find anything to cut out. Then, I began thinking about whether I could adjust our development process to shift some time expenses from her to me.Wait a second. What was going on? I outsourced this work to save myself time, but now I was restructuring the project to optimize for Ferngully's time in place of my own. How did I become my freelancer's freelancer?Simplifying code reviewsRegardless of who was freelancing for whom, I wanted us to complete the project, and quickly. The biggest time expense I could cut was my famously picky code reviews.The reviews were expensive for both of us. I put a lot of thought into my code reviews, and it took time for Ferngully to implement my suggestions. With days or weeks of latency between review rounds, we were also burning cycles just remembering context for where we were in the review.To save time, I decided to stop giving Ferngully notes. When she sent me her next changelist for review, I merged it in, tweaked it a bit to match my standards, and boom -- we had our first complete backend component. Only two left!This doesn't make senseFerngully was less enthused about my clever new time-saving technique. The tough reviews gave her technical growth. Without those, this project was just work, and she had enough of that at work.I debated whether I could keep doing notes. Even when I was skipping them, I wasn't sure I was actually saving time overall with a freelancer. If I started writing them again, I'd definitely be in the negative timewise. I'd be paying a freelancer a nontrivial hourly rate, and it would cost me more in time than writing the code myself.We talked it over and decided it no longer made sense for Ferngully to help build the MVP. With the first component completed, it was a convenient time for her to transition off the project.Implementing it myselfThe Saturday night after I wrapped up with Ferngully, I continued where she left off and resolved to keep going until the MVP was live. By 2 AM, the first version was complete. I was embarrassed by how plain it looked, but it was done.Screenshot when the MVP was finally completeI quickly realized that I should have done the project solo from the start.A prototype requires so many small decisions about tradeoffs. Do I spend an extra hour to fix a bug that only affects 10% of recipes? Which modules should have automated tests? It would be impossible to specify these answers ahead of time to a freelancer. Working solo, I can just follow my intuition.Building it myself also made it so much easier to fix weaknesses in the design. Even on a team of two, design flaws incur high frictional costs. When Ferngully spotted an issue, she had to confirm it with me, I'd update the design document, she'd read it, throw away some work, then finally reimplement it according to the new design. When I work solo, that whole process is almost instant.Finally, by outsourcing the backend, I was obscuring a core part of the business from myself. When I got my hands dirty with web scraping, it sparked ideas for recipe data I could use in future iterations of the site and gave me better insight into the site's design constraints.TakeawaysDespite the issues, this process taught me important lessons about creating new websites and working with freelancers. The biggest lesson was: if you're a developer, build your own MVP.If you choose to work with a freelancer:Discuss target completion dates.You don't have to set rigid deadlines, but figure out up front if you're in the same ballpark.Agree on weekly bandwidth.Your freelancer may have other clients or priorities. Find out how much time they'll be able to dedicate to your project.This article was originally published on my blog.