Let’s say you’ve decided to start a startup in 2021
Building an MVP is just not enough… | Publish your startup
Welcome to hell, future founder!*
*Of course not, that’s even worse…
If you have just decided to begin your first startup journey — then you probably know nothing about startups. But no worries, the good thing about startups is that you will learn a lot. 82% of early-stage founders say they have to operate in areas they had almost no experience in before. For example, if you are a [former] Software Engineer (which is very common for early Tech startups), you are going to be involved in the design, marketing, management, sales, and even finance processes.
Nothing can guarantee you that your co-founder or employee will have some issues the next day, and you would need to help him or do his work. And that’s when you have a team, just imagine what awaits you when you’re starting alone…
But the point of this article is not to scare you. Let’s take a look at what can you do with it.
Quick market overview
Every year startups become even more complex than before. Some people say “look, that thing is so simple…” and they show you Telegram / Uber or another mobile app. But trust me, they don’t even know 1% of what’s being done under the hood. Would you show a simple chat app as your MVP today? Probably not. Because Telegram is not a simple chat. It has a clear and simple design, but it is a technical monster that serves 300 million people worldwide every day.
Then stop thinking that you can easily create a new Telegram app that will easily attract a lot of users the next day because it is another big problem for startups. Believe me or not, but having good technology in the current world means nothing (until it is not a “golden technology” the world was waiting for…) We usually think about startups as B2B and B2C ones if it is a B2C startup — you have to spend a lot of money/efforts to reach out to your first users, and even then there is a big matter of luck (honestly) that someone will make your product viral.
Ideas are easy. Implementation is hard.
— Guy Kawasaki, AllTop Co-founder
If it is a B2B product that you are going to sell to a manager of another company — instead of just having good technology, you also should have a good product. And yes product != technology. A product means that technology should be wrapped in an intuitive interface and provide a good user experience, and it should, of course, look cool! Moreover, you should deliver a great service —solid business support, process feedback cycle, constantly improve it together with an R&D team.
What mistakes do founders usually do?
It’s not a question that everyone makes mistakes. Founders do even more often. If you’re just starting your startup, it could be that you may recognize the problems you’ve had after reading this.
Let’s first look at how the general early-stage startup looks like
- Idea
- Team
- Product
Even from first sight, this seems pretty obvious. Here’s what could go wrong when you’re starting your startup.
Idea. Every idea is not perfect, in real life your idea changes with your product and vice versa. At first, you have to validate it — common sense is to create a “landing page”, promote it, and calculate how many people will click “sign up” or “buy”.
Team. You probably consider inviting your friends to your first startup. Usually, in case you had not to work together before, it ends up with a broken friendship. However, you may succeed if you’re really good at work/life balance and don’t push your friends to do smth. Also, you need to prepare and realize how frequently your team will change. In early-stage startups people are more likely to leave after 3 months, not everyone understands how thorny and unobvious is the path of a startup.
Product. I’d say the biggest 3 problems here are: UX, bugs & user expectations. UX — building a product is not
What should founders learn?
It is a great question, however, the answer can be different for everyone, while it might remain correct.
TL;DR: It mostly depends on the project want to build & launch
When you build the next tool that you want to monetize, or even create a new company with its mission and goals, there is a general feeling that you should know everything — that would be great, however, we can discuss which things you should focus on… Here are my top 3 things.
Marketing. In today's world market competition got to an insane state where you literally have to do impossible things to get attention. It is also great to understand how you can build a go-to-market strategy. It’s important because you will probably not advertise the same way when you have an MVP and when you have a solid product with 1000 paying clients. Your strategy is flexible and should always adapt to what you have and what you can. That can be done in a lot of different ways — SMM, Email marketing, Growth hacking, SEO, and so on…
Product design. While mentioning this, I mostly speak about tech startups that so many of us heard about. A good product could save you a lot of marketing efforts and let your customers become more satisfied and pay you more. Understanding how the product should look is key in today's world. You can hire designers and software engineers, but without the founder’s product vision they will make a tool that will look good, work somehow, but won’t satisfy any user or customer.
Networking. Another skill that founders should have, and yep, you can learn it. You will move much faster if you know where & how to find the right people. And this is not only about B2B startups. In any startup, you can make new partnerships, find investors and first customers. You just have to know the right way to reach out — and that’s what you will improve with every new experience.
Of course, there are other skills that could help founders, such as knowing how to create a working business model, finance, know how to manage other people, how to structure team and organize reporting, how to track KPIs and the list can be endless…
Tools that help
So now we know what you should focus on. Here’s a small collection of tools/websites that could help you to easier achieve your startup goals and would help you with networking, feedback, hiring, and finding your first customers.
- Projectium (link)
Have you ever tried to grow a community of your project? If you did, then you know that it is a very long and hard process.
Why would your project need community?
- 📣 It is constant feedback & support
- 💡 A lot of new ideas, new people
- 🧑💻Meet potential first users
- 👥 Find contributors, teammates, and investors
Projectium makes it much easier to build that community by providing you a networking ecosystem where you can interactively showcase a project, deliver news and show how you grow — to let people engage with you & follow the project.
It is welcoming projects at any stage — Idea, Alpha/Beta version, MVP, or a successful product.
🍏 Download iOS app: https://apps.apple.com/ua/app/projectium/id1543252843
🚀 Submit your project: https://projectium.network/
2. ProductHunt (link)
Another good website where you can publish your product to get more audience. However, make sure your product is complete & ready — as you only get one chance. ProductHunt acts like a newsletter that showcases submitted projects on a certain date. You will get a lot of traffic in the first week, but it works only once per single product.
Advice: Use it for launch of your product. When it works good already
What is also worth mentioning is that you can do a pre-launch campaign on PH as well.
3. Reddit
Reddit is a nice play for watching funny memes, but you can also use it to engage with a community of founders and early adopters, or to learn something…
Subreddits that can help you:
- https://www.reddit.com/r/SideProject/ — Showcase what you work one
- https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/ — Validate ideas, share experience
- https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/ — Ask for help, discuss startup ideas
Let me know any other tools that you use for validating and testing your startup in the comments 👇
