Dimension 0: Establishing Real Estate For Your Product

Entrepreneurial people have great ideas all the time. It just so happens that most of these ideas tend to result in great failure. There can be a variety of reasons that explain why both funded and non-funded startups fail. However, research on Think Growth showed one of the two top main reasons why more than a hundred startups failed was simply because of non-viable, bad business models. This research was also corroborated by Strategyzer.

At Incipient, we help our clients avoid this all-too-common mishap by giving them a Technology versus Application head-start. In other words, we call this Dimension 0 where we establish the real estate of a product.

Technology versus Application

To understand our approach, think of it this way: technology is the root of your solution. It makes the core functionality that enables your platform to help people. On the other hand, application of the technology is how you apply it to a specific use case, business user or industry. Think of technology as the “what” part of your solution and the application as the “how.”

Still a little confused? Don’t worry. Imagine you had a peer to peer (P2P) platform for dog owners who can find folks willing to watch or walk their furry friend. In this case, the P2P element makes up the technology of your solution. It connects users to others and allows the former to reach a contract. The application of that technology (P2P here) is that it is applied to the dog walking and watching market (assuming that there’s a big opportunity for it, like in big cities).

The misalignment of technology and application happens when the dog-walk app owner fails to think outside of the box. Limited parameters and filters will confine the technology to one particular niche — keeping it constricted there. In other words, flexible technology is technology built right.

Application

Perhaps the reason why people tend to focus on application first and technology later is because we’re visual creatures. The majority of mankind, we’re talking a solid 93 percent, communicates visually. So, we visualize our ideas before we even seriously think them through.

Whether you’re technical, non-technical, design-driven, or just an everyday person with a great idea, most people immediately process the benefits and use cases when they think of creating a product. Then they begin to run down the road of building the product to said use case and that specific audience.

The thing is, this application-before-technology approach has worked out for some but for most, it has ended in failure simply because of their inability to pivot without costly consequences.

Technology

By reverse engineering your idea and seeking to understand what is the (technological) root of the solution, you may be able to identify your core. This is the technology aimed to drive your product.

You don’t have to remove the use case and ditch the concept altogether. Those ideas will benefit you to identify other verticals or opportunities that the core technology may be able to be used in.

Think of our P2P dog-walking app. That P2P technology could easily be applied to other verticals in which people are connected to provide a product or service. For example, a job recruiting platform, or an automotive sales platform, etc.

Conclusion

By identifying your root and having a strategic plan to design and develop the foundational technology first, you will be able to make a variation of the core for your specific use case. This is a great way to keep your product running in the event that the initial market is not receptive or successful.

With technology first and application later, you will have staying power and the opportunity to identify a new market to pivot to with little costs because you don’t need to rebuild the entire solution. Remember: code flexibility is critical to all startups and is a major factor of the MVP mindset.