Bringing Your Dream to Life: 5 Startup Development Phases

We are all entrepreneurial by nature. We have bright ideas and want to turn our dreams into reality, by implementing these ideas and creating bright new products and services that will make people’s’ lives easier. However, in order to be successful, a startup has to offer a solution for a problem that was not offered before (or superior to existing alternatives) — and avoid various mistakes during the startup lifecycle. We offer you a detailed guide on 5 startup development phases that will help you safely sail the dangerous waters and deliver a successful product.

Many startups (either located in Silicon Valley or not) were successful, yet many more failed. By the trail of tries and errors, the succeeding startups showed a working approach every tech startup can follow:

• Idea validation — is there truly a problem that needs solving and none of the existing solutions are good enough?
• Solution validation — what needs to be done to solve a problem (and do it better than the existing solutions?)
• Outlining the MVP features — clear understanding of technical requirements is required from startup founders in order to outline the core features of the future product and highlight the software features that cannot use available solutions and need to be developed from scratch
• Software development — either by an in-house team of developers or by a hired remote development team
• MVP release, the first step on the long way to IPO or exit.

Let’s take a closer look at each of these stages.

Idea validation

Your startup idea should solve a recurring problem your target audience experiences. It’s best not to target the whole possible customer audience. Concentrate on a rather specific group of potential customers, like school teachers, accountants or cab drivers. When you are oriented at a distinct group, it’s easier to create buyer personas and form a shortlist of features they would expect. This helps shape a prototype of your future software product and validate it through market research.

Solution validation

It’s highly unlikely you thought of a solution for a problem that has no existing alternatives. According to Statista, there are more than 5 million various products on the biggest software stores, which means there already are multiple solutions that address the problem your startup tries to solve. Use this goldmine of information to list the benefits and flaws of existing solutions (READ THE NEGATIVE CUSTOMER FEEDBACK, people are quick to say if something is wrong!) and understand what features should be included in your MVP to gain network effects and what can be left for further development.

Outlining the MVP features

Once you know what functionality and features of your future MVP are already available (as SaaS or an open source code) and what needs to be developed from scratch, you can make the most important decision: should you hire an in-house team of developers or enlist software development services from a contractor? There are some challenges to this, described in the article describing 3 steps to hiring a software development team. Angel investment or crowdfunding for your product via Kickstarter or other platforms can take place at this stage or earlier.

Software development

Software development requires a major part of the startup’s initial budget and is one of the key phases in the startup lifecycle, so we will cover it in more details.

This phase begins with the software design stage and shows the actual look and feel of the future product. Even if only depicted as a series of sketches, this helps give form to the previously discussed MVP features. What buttons and menu items are there on the main page, which button opens what page, what action takes place after doing this or that, etc. The product design stage helps better connect the features with the user’s interface and create a model of the future software’s structure.

Once the design is complete, the development team moves on to the wireframing stage, where they connect the needed features with the designed interface. This stage results in clickable mockups and wireframes that imitate the final product functionality. This also allows to add or drop some interface elements if need be.

The next stage involves the frontend and backend development to support the product features planned. The code that operates the features and exchanges the data with the backend, the login options and personalization — every MVP feature planned is developed on this stage, which ends with an interactive prototype ready for alpha testing.

Alpha testing of the software is done by an internal team (or may involve friends and family) and should only verify the key MVP features are present and functional, as bugs and data loss are expected and acceptable. It also gives an invaluable user feedback, allowing adjusting the functionality should the users so desire. The alpha testing can (and even must) take place after designing each feature to minimize the number of bugs present in the MVP before moving to beta testing.

Once all the main functionality is verified, the product enters the beta testing stage. This can be a closed beta testing done by a limited group of users (due to resource limitations or scalability issues, for example), or an open beta testing by everyone willing. The latter allows checking the product performance against high workloads and finding lots of bugs a smaller testing team was sure to miss. Intense bug fixing and developing additional features takes place until the MVP is finally considered feature complete and ready for release.

MVP release and further updates

This is an important stage of the startup lifecycle. If you made everything right (growing a community on Kickstarter, Steam Greenlight or other platforms, running ads campaigns, etc.), there should be an audience eagerly waiting for your product release, both on your website and in various software stores. Besides, the software that gets lots of downloads shortly after the release goes to the top positions of said software stores, which further increases the numbers of downloads and your income.

This helps attract more investors through the next investment rounds and continue the software development cycle, adding more features and scaling the product, while choosing the next course of actions. Many startups go for developing the product on their own, going for IPO and becoming a brand. Many others prefer simply exiting by selling the product to some corporation and beginning a new startup.

If the latter was the initial goal, going for dedicated software development services from the very beginning easily becomes the most beneficial choice, allowing spending the resources optimally and delivering the product within strict timeframes to gain a competitive edge. After all, in order to succeed you do not have to destroy all the competition, you simply have to be one day ahead of the rest of the market.

Conclusions

These are the 5 startup development phases and as you can see, the most important part of them is software development. Building a good internal development department on time vs hiring a trustworthy remote development team to do the job — this really is the choice that can make or break the project. Did we miss some important startup tips? Would you like to add or replace some points based on your experience? Please drop a line in the comments, we are always open for discussion!