Thoughts for a Start-upper - Product

PRODUCT/SERVICE:

Be passionate about what you do: You are passionate about internet, entrepreneurship, start-ups and what not. But if you don’t internalize your actual products and services that need all and more of this passion to succeed you would never be able to market, adapt and sell. For example one may be passionate about internet and internalize how it would change the world but has no freaking idea about or even interest in expensive art or journalism. The start-upper still starts an online retail for art or starts a web portal for journalists - only to find she/he doesn’t actually have a feel of the service, what the market is and deep down is not even passionate about what the startup delivers.

A lot in tech bubble has to do with the passion for technology but not the actual product/service.

Fascination doesn't always translate into cash: Business is ultimately driven by economics, and economics is driven by incentives. Entrepreneurs, and in particular web entrepreneurs, are often driven by a myopia that says "if I like it, so will everyone else." Some people say go with your gut. Others say trust the numbers and the research. Find an idea where the two line up. 

Technical vs. market: Never base a business decision on what you can do. Decide first what a good market idea is and only then figure out if you can pull it off. What the consumer wants, may want because of historical trends and nobody sells or you could do a better job in quantifiable time, money terms.

Is your product Just Nice to have? A nice to have feature (although novel is easily replicable by other industry competition) may be (just may be!) a start but you will have to plan and execute much beyond that to even have a chance. A lot of business in web and tech arena just struggles with this. Hypothesizing that a business model would emerge somehow to support a nice to have or a free service is a fatal risk - do the analysis now. Refer b-model part of the series.

You may start top-down by ideating and brainstorming, but then switch to bottom-up thinking once the initial plan is done – immediately jump to action by a real evaluation about the need and willingness to pay for what you are trying to solve. 

I still have a lot of ideas! – Having read everything about the product pre-requisites above, if you have still got a lot of ideas and you want to pick the best one to start with – You got to make your pick on the basis of what surrounds the product – the business model. Refer the business model section of the series

Near-term vs. Long term: Open source, preserving users’ privacy, helping users actually make positive change in their lives — all of the long-term things are great and rational reasons to pursue business. But none of them matter if the product is harder to use, since most people simply won’t care enough or get enough benefit from long-term features if a shorter-term alternative is available.

How much is enough? Please Don’t wait till all the lights go green. Shut your pie-hole; make a core working version first. And get people to use it, even if you have to beg or force people. And keep iterating. After the first few iterations, you will figure out what is the interesting part that makes it work for the user, you, angel, prospective partners and VC. Focus on that, not on the list of features. Building less initially is ok, but the most important thing is that the minimal developed product (you can deliver in near-term, no pipe-dream) should be viable for customer and consumer (value, time, money wise etc). 

Validate, incorporate and be bold: Learn as much in quantitative terms about your product, about your market, their perception, usage and interest patterns. Initially one starts with a set of assumptions (which based on research could be close to reality) but they have to validated before long.
Learn from others and your metrics and incorporate into new versions.
The user/customer doesn’t have the idea of what could be – you have to catch their imagination and differentiate among your competition- the red ocean.

A Real Product versus a Science Project:  release late vs. release often: Should choose the latter. This helps in bring intimacy with the customer, demand, industry and build a commercially scalable product versus a science project in the former.

Note: Quick publicity could unintentionally turn your company into seeker of earth shattering science project. The weight of perceived expectations to deliver a perfect product that would do justice to the publicity could blind one and could keep you away from the consumer. Since the market continues to evolve, in the end you may disappoint yourself, your investor and your consumer. Plain stupid. 

Sales: Start selling now, you don't need a product to start selling. When people really want to buy your product, start the company.

Related posts: 

Previous parts in the seriesThoughts for a start-upper - People

Next parts in the series:

Thoughts for a start-upper - Business model

Thoughts for a start-upper - The rest