PE Chapter 6 — Before Step 1 — Many steps were undertaken across 5 years before freezing step 1 mentioned on www.preseed.in.

I think, I type, I delegate’s unfathomable R&D.

In the event of the occurrence of a task in our minds for our co-workers, we should not only communicate it to them, but we should also delegate it to them. ‘@’ on Slack or Whatsapp sure is a good way to communicate in a team group, mistakingly presuming, communication is as good as delegation. What if I tell you there is a better way to delegate, such that the task becomes instantly clearly accountable and trackable, at the instance of its communication. What is a better way? Chattodo.

1. Ideation — Have a habit of not letting go of problems the solutions to which (the idea) can greatly improve one’s own life, at the least. See problems as opportunities, as gaps that need to get filled anyway. The fun part starts when after tirelessly thinking, interacting, and researching current visible solutions like apps/products/platforms, one gets a crisp superior idea. That idea takes one into a long journey of R&D as it took Nishchal into a 10-year+ journey.
2. Brainstorming — Over time, he discussed it with Preseed team of thinkers, hustlers, designers, hackers, an extended network of some well-achieved developers, entrepreneurs, politicians, media personnels, police, teachers, victims of false cases trapped in jails without any evidence, and years of mediation; for further validation. It kicked of the whole gamut of work as can be seen from our website www.preseed.in.
3. Product Vision Research — It’s at such a stage his idea goes into our Idea Sheet on which we manage multiple interrelated ideas we are either toying with or looking to toy with to conduct the following upon. The most important missing aspect of today’s entrepreneurship, just like it is missing in media rhetorics. At this stage, detailed research is done to ensure we are clearly differentiated from anything that already exists within the scope of our vision. This stage greatly influences our product’s feature list. Anyway, generally since the goal is to build the MVP first, we generally dabble with just one feature, that exact feature which solves the problem in question simply, no more, no less.
4. Communication of the product vision — We document the vision well enough to communicate with you, the hackers/hustlers/designer, to have you understand what we are looking for. This is what our website had been about — We listed our ideas, theories, research here and then we listed our website on various job boards. As a result, 10s of talented volunteer developers helped us achieve our MVPs.
5. Product Development — Researching and identifying elements of a complete product that already exist. Open APIs have induced a culture of pre-built solutions for most of what we would look for, for development. Thus, leaving most of the developer’s job today to research well in order to integrate all that exists and code only that, that doesn’t already exist. We try to ensure that it is through the hacks we build our products for the point we are trying to make is that MVPs should not take a lot of resources to build. (In fact, Todoed & Chattodo are built exactly like that, while teaching the same to many more entrepreneurs)
6. Collaborative Whiteboarding (Done on www.muraly.co) and some sheets of papers for defining the user experience. Here we together collaborate on anything that needs to be brought into our product plan perspective. The online collaborative nature of this stage ensures that our team can collaborate on design research from wherever they are located. Finally, packaging the concept so far on a mural to state the product vision, R&D data, UI/user experience perspective and product architecture broadly. (however, this step is optional at our end, for sometimes in words we define the product vision and leave to the hackers to do the mockups based on their understanding of the product vision).
7. MVP — This is where we needed the hacker. The first iteration of the product is generally to build in the core functionality we need. This is where we found Sai, Dhaval, Bhanu, Nirbhay, Sahil, Kapil.
8. User Feedback — Then we run a feedback loop among ourselves to translate the first iteration to an MVP. This MVP is actually about the first use case of the codes we are about to write. However, when that first use case is achieved to satisfaction with many early adopters using it, we may or may not move to tweaking the product to achieve other use cases too. It is at this stage we transitioned from Todoed to Chattodo.
9. Prelaunch Marketing — Before we even coded our products we went into many startup groups to invite them into our subscriber lists.
10. The product got named as Chattodo and got listed on Android.

The unfathomable part is not the above, but the underlying presence of god, the non-matter, in the making of Chattodo.