Over your startup career, you have probably been no stranger to failure. Running a business is all about trial and error and finding what works best. What you learn from those failures is critical to your future successes. However, there’s more that you can do to prepare before delivering a significant investment to the market. For example, starting with best practices and avoiding repeating other people’s mistakes.
These six steps will guide you in the right direction and show you which moments are key to your success. Let’s talk about those steps and how they can make or break your business.
1. Conduct Market Research
A fatal mistake many entrepreneurs make is hyperfixation on a product idea instead of the market’s needs. Consider if there is a market need for your product. Trying to materialize a market need after you’ve already invested in product development is a dangerous game. Instead, first understand your audience, what problems the product will solve, who your competitors are, and how your product can help that audience.
Gathering demographic data and surveying your potential customers can help you gather critical insights. It’s also important to consider what communication channels they use and will respond to best, as this will help you better target that audience during the marketing stage. Additionally, studying your competitors will help you look for opportunities to deliver unique experiences that set you apart from the rest of the market.
2. Create a Product Vision
Once you have a better understanding of the market, it’s time to create a detailed description of your product. Define the value your product brings to your customers and understand your business strategy. From here, a business analysis specialist can help you compile all these elements into a clear list of requirements for your development team. Let’s use software products as an example:
- Purpose: Specifically define the problem that the software intends to solve. The previous step should have helped you with this.
- Target users: Describe your target audience, their needs, pain points, and expectations.
- Value proposition: Why should your audience care about your product in particular, and how does it solve their problems?
- Features: What functionality of your product will help your audience meet their needs?
- Long-term goals: Will you add more features to the program and publish updates?
- Business objectives: How does your product meet business needs, like revenue generation, market share, customer acquisition, or strategic partnerships?
- User experience: What impression should your software have on your audience? Think about how your product can be made easier to use, its aesthetics, and other design principles.
- Technology considerations: Discuss any constraints and requirements that will shape the development process.
- Success metrics: How will you track the success of your software product? Define the key performance indicators (KPIs) that you can use to evaluate your progress.
- Impact: What positive impact are you aiming for your software product to achieve for its users?
Your product vision must be concise and inspire its stakeholders and the broader community, guiding your team throughout the development lifecycle.
3. Build a Go-to-market Strategy
Creating a plan prior to starting development is critical. Investors will want to know exactly how you envision achieving your goals. A go-to-market (GTM) strategy will demonstrate how you will successfully bring a product or service to your customers.
First, identify effective distribution channels. Consider what your customers use most, like direct sales, online marketplaces, partnerships, resellers, or combinations of these channels. Also, understand the cost and reach of each channel. Then, prepare your sales team with the right information and resources that they need to sell your product. Product documentation and scripts are invaluable tools to help them communicate your product’s value proposition to customers.
4. Find Funding
Even if you start with your own funds, you need to make sure that your project has the financing it needs to make it through the MVP stage and beyond, so you need to consider the future of funding for your product. Some options are:
- Angel investors
- Venture capital (VC)
- Crowdfunding
- Incubators and accelerators
The work done in the previous steps will allow you to form a pitch deck for investors and provide them with all the necessary information.
5. Choose a Reliable Tech Partner
Finding the right engineers for software development projects is crucial for your success. Depending on the nature of your product, it will have different technical needs, like mobile or web development, API development, or the creation of innovative features with artificial intelligence. Make sure that the team you partner with has experience in the needs of your project.
One of the main tasks of creating a product from a technical point of view is choosing an architecture and technology stack that meets your requirements. This will lay the foundation for your software and your long-term success. The best architecture will allow your product to evolve over time, saving resources when responding to changing market demands.
Only experienced developers can help you make the right choice. Depending on your specific needs, you might consider employing a traditional approach such as implementing a monolithic architecture. Alternatively, if your project is more intricate and calls for greater flexibility, breaking it down into microservices with independent services could be the appropriate choice.
Assess the qualifications, experience, and knowledge of developers, designers, testers, and other team members. This assessment will help you ensure that they have the necessary resources and capabilities to effectively meet the requirements of your project.
6. Test and Improve Your Model
You will only truly know how your product performs for your audience once they get their hands on it. So, bring in some of those customers to test your product. How you do this is up to you. You could set up a formal survey, or you do it more informally. A/B testing is another option that is helpful for testing different approaches to your product.
Based on these tests, you can make changes and plan further development tasks. The insights you gain can also help you improve your marketing strategy.
Wrapping Up
Doing your research, understanding your product vision, and forming a comprehensive strategy to take your product to market can vastly improve your chances of success. Instead of rolling the dice every time, you can take greater control of your business journey, giving you an edge in gaining funding for your product and having success with the communities you engage with.
This will also empower you to take more decisive action on the tech partners and technologies you choose, as well as guide you through the testing and evolution of your product. Mastering all these elements will help you take products to market more efficiently, confidently, and with greater success.