Art of the Start Week 4/24

Building your first prototype or Alpha

As teams move into week 4 of the SV.CO #StartInCollege programme, most students have selected ideas and have started work on finalizing the features for the Alpha Prototype.

The Alpha Prototype is the first major milestone in creating a product and , most first time founders are naturallyconfused as the don’t know how much features to build into the first version of the product.

A good analogy to think about is flying gliders v/s flying MIG’s. Our aim is to finally be capable to fly a MIG but westart learning to fly on a glider.

You sit in the cockpit, feel the air as you lift off, feel the rumble of the engine and then you learn to safely land the glider back on ground.

The basic principles of flying are the same for a Mig and a glider. Once you learn how to fly a glider and have enough hours of practice, then you can fly the MIG which is a bigger, faster and more powerful aircraft.

A real company (like a MIG) is just a bigger version of a startup (like a glider).

When you are building your Alpha prototype, its like building your own glider that you are going to fly. It is not important to go into the many features of what a MIG would have but its important to build the bare basic features that would make the plane fly.

This wonderful experience of learning how to build something which other people in the world can use is a great joy in itself and even if you fail, you get a lot of skills.

Students primarily pick up Product, Engineering and Design skills while they build a product startup and these skills can be only learned as a team.

With more practice and feedback, the skills a student have grows faster. The skills that you develop will be directly propotion to the time and effort a student puts in.

Eventually, once you learn to build 3–4 products, that when you become a real expert at building products.

At that time, you can now decide whether to use your engineering, design and product skills to build your own startup or trade those skills to another company and then get a good job which can pay anywhere from 6lacs to 16 lacs depending on the skills you have.

If you have startup skills, you thus have a choice of working for yourself or working for someone else. If you have no skills, you have no choice.

Building a startup early on in life is a great way to pick up skills and the Alpha prototype is the first major milestone in the life of a fledgling startup.

Thankyou Kireeti Verma for reading the draft of this.