Top tips to consider before you start developing your application
Jeff Mann, Programme Director of the Centrality Accelerator powered by Lightning Lab shares insights from his wealth of experience running startups. To stay up-to-date on the progress of Centrality’s ecosystem, follow us on Twitter and our Telegram Announcements channel, plus join our community on Centrality’s Official Telegram, Instagram, Reddit and Facebook.
It’s not always possible to join an accelerator programme — sometimes it’s important to get your idea to market as quickly as possible. We’ve taken the key points from our accelerator programme and created a guide on how to growth-hack your dApp.
- Do your analysis
Understand the problem you’re trying to solve and for whom. Perform customer discovery interviews with those audiences to test your assumptions. Study how the competitors and market in general is currently solving this problem and identify the unique opportunities that exist for a new entrant.
2. Come up with an innovative solution
Develop your initial solution/product idea and test and iterate it with the right customer audience, ultimately identifying a ‘Unique Value Proposition (UVP).’
3. Engage with customers
Look for early traction with customers willing to pay to have this solution operating as a fully commercial product/service in the future. Continue to test and iterate the value proposition with the customer base.
4. Attract partners and capital investment
The sooner you can attract distribution partners, the quicker you’ll be able to gain customer traction and investment.
5. Take your product to market
Build a marketing strategy and business model that delivers immediate value to your customers. Develop an effective distribution model and or partnership that achieves customer traction and growth. Monitor and measure your customer satisfaction levels at every touch along with maintaining a close eye on emerging trends and competitors’ activities.
As an example let’s take a look at the NZ based fintech company Genoapay, who launched in Aug 2016. Genoapay did what we see many startups not do, and that is they took the time to conduct thorough analysis of the competitor landscape, which included amongst other things interviewing in market customers of the competition and investigating their key success factors, including their sales and distribution systems. Genoapay spent a great deal of time ensuring they really understood the market trends, and with that knowledge, developed a clear strategy to do a deep dive into the insights of a target audience they identified within the validation process. This knowledge ultimately provided insights into the key ingredients that would later become a sustainable UVP in a rapidly emerging competitive environment. The founding team from Genoapay were able to achieve a satisfactory exit in Oct 2018.
6. Optimise your team makeup
Ideally you need to attract a team that has a balanced skill set. We recommend you aim to have a minimum of three people that have one or more of the following skill sets:
- Technical founder
- Growth hacker/hustler
- UI/UX customer engagement
- Visionary thinker
The biggest takeaway we remind teams in the Centrality Accelerator powered by Lightning Lab is, “you can’t just focus on the tech.” Developing and maintaining a deep understanding of the target customer’s needs and how the market currently supports those needs is essential”.
At its core, your dApp needs to focus on addressing an identified customer group need. And developing an innovative solution that is both sustainable and defensible against current and likely future competitors will be critical to achieve success.
For more information, check out our blog post on market validation, 5 questions to ask before building a successful dApp.
To stay up-to-date on the progress of Centrality’s ecosystem, follow us on Twitter and our Telegram Announcements channel, plus join our community on Centrality’s Official Telegram, Instagram, Reddit and Facebook.
