A Way To Avoid Losing Focus
Readme Driven Development For Your Startup
I stumbled across a great post on “Readme Driven Development” (RDD) by Tom Preston-Werner. However, from a holistic startup perspective, I’d like to put RDD in a broader context:
When you have a startup idea…
- write the readme first
- then build a simple landing page
- try to find customers
- iterate
- now start coding, not any earlier!
RDD is a wonderful tool to focus your idea. Don’t forget to clearly state the problem you’re solving (the “pain”) before you state the solution. Up to this point, you have found a pain that only exists for yourself and you have an idea about a solution. Next step is NOT to implement the solution! The next step should rather be trying to find out, whether anyone else out there has the same pain as you. After that, you need to find out, whether any of these people feel enough pain to make them actually pay hard earned money for a solution. Only now can you start to implement a solution and constantly validate it with your customers to see, if your solution alleviates their pain.
Why? Because Customer Development, Lean Startup and the like tell us so. But why? In our business of tech startups the biggest risk for our products is usually not a technical risk: we know how to build software according to requirements and rarely do anything technically revolutionary. Our risk is rather a market risk: will customers pay for our product? Think about it. So to mitigate the overall risk, we need to tackle the highest risk first: the market risk. This is why we need to develop our customers before we develop our product solution. If we can’t develop any customers, we can save a lot of time and money by just not implementing the solution! If we (hopefully) can develop any customers, we usually have learnt a lot towards implementing a successful solution for them and we can tackle the less risky, but more time and money consuming job of building the product.
Next time you have an idea, try to start coding as late as possible — do your RDBD and customer development first.
I am part of a team of customer developers, agile engineers and design thinkers at Dreimannzelt. Feel free to ask us for help on your idea or startup.
