Chapter 10: Venture Forth
We’ve talked a lot so far in this text about how, exactly, to best plan your ideas and minimize the risk when it comes to starting your own business. There’s a great deal of value in the words you’ve already read if you’ve made it this far. Unfortunately, the toughest decision is the one in which you choose to actually act on your ideas, bite the bullet, and put your money where your mouth is.
At Coder, we’ve come to think of this as ‘venturing forth.’ We arrived at that phrase with no small amount of good reason; starting a business is effectively the first step towards your goal, but it’s a great deal more than that. The process you’re embarking on is a journey. We could sit here and spit cliches all day (‘the road to success is never a straight line, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step,’) etc, but there’s not much of a point. If you’ve made it this far, you’re likely more interested in how we can help you.
With that said, the purpose of our final chapter here is, in short, multifaceted. We’re going to discuss some of the finishing touches when it comes to rounding out the idea that will become your company and, more importantly, what Coder can do for you. We’ll discuss our process of launching businesses, as well as draw upon examples of some of the companies that we’ve helped make a reality.
Our hope, here, is that you’ll use the ideas expressed in this final chapter in the way that’s most beneficial to both you and your company. We’re not here to sell used cars, and we can’t imagine anyone entrepreneurial enough to be in this space is interested in a pitch. Nonetheless, we’d encourage you to reach out if the processes and services we’re discussing interest you. We’d love nothing more than to take this journey with you, in some shape or form, and we’re always open to connecting with fellow startups.
Lastly, before we jump into the true meat of this chapter, we’d like to extend our thanks to you, the reader, for taking the time to review this text. Whether you’ve flipped through the book casually or read it cover to cover, we appreciate the time you’ve all put into this, and we’d love to hear your thoughts. Feel free to reach out to us at team@builtbycoder.com.
Thanks,
Brian & Alex
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I) The Coder MVP Process
One of the reasons we’ve had the success we’ve had at Coder is because we’ve been willing to take a somewhat regimented approach to launching companies. One of the downfalls of entrepreneurs — ourselves included — is that it’s often difficult for people in this space to work under deadlines or lock down hard and fast due dates. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and it’s almost certainly at least somewhat attributable to the entrepreneurial space being creative by nature.
Unfortunately, we learned quickly that the best projects can become greatly devalued when time isn’t treated as a factor. That’s why we’ve built out what we call the Coder MVP Process — a program we’ve designed that allows you to get to your minimum viable product within 100 days or less.
Effectively, the Coder MVP Process is broken down into three primary parts: The First 100 Days, The 12 Step Program, and the ‘Get Your Shit Together Plan.’ While all of these sound a bit ridiculous on their own, we’ve found that the three intertwined together actually offer a very viable and reliable process to take your company all the way from ideation to launch in less time than many other forums might suggest.
The First 100 Days
We like to think of The First 100 Days as the first figure that any entrepreneur should be playing with in their head when they come to talk to us. If the company can’t be launched, at least to the tune of a minimum viable product, within 100 days, it’s likely because the idea needs a little bit more narrowing down before it’s ready to leave the page be externalized.
The First 100 Days are a critical time for the entrepreneurs who work with us, not only because they provide a strong litmus test for the sustainability of the company, but also because this time period serves to identify needs that you may not have known you had. There’s really no better way to begin understanding where you’re strong and where you’re falling short than just jumping into the process, and that’s why we set a firm cap for our initial process at 100 days.
The first 100 Days consists of 12 week-long periods, each dedicated to a different stage of developing your business, as well as two weeks for a testing sprint. With the two days remaining, we tend to designate one as a day of rest and one for a launch party. Why not, right?
Barring the two weeks that we use for the testing sprint and the two days described in the prior paragraph, most of the the First 100 Days can be described in, what we call, The 12 Step Plan.
It’s not like what you’re imagining, but it does require faith and commitment. That joke may be in poor taste, but you’ve got to have a little room for humor in all of this. The 12 Step Plan is comprised of 12 individual segments, each a week in length, that focus on different parts of launching your business.
Basically, we believe that there are two primary components to launching a startup within the tech realm: Venture and Development. Development, needless to say, focuses on the more technical aspects of your company, such as building a platform, running tests, gaining a user base and ensuring consistent, reliable functionality.
Venture, on the other hand, tackles the process of starting a company from a bit more of a business development perspective, helping you and your cofounders to develop the most functional strategy possible.
The basic timeline of the 12 Step Plan is shown in the image above, but let’s take a second to explore its individual components and the ways that the Venture and Development sides interact.
Weeks 1 & 2: At this point, the Venture phase has moved past ideation, in which we sit down with you and your cofounders and try to whittle down the idea for your platform into its most basic form, and begin moving from there. We begin innovation, where we try to draw as much as we can out of the basic we’ve arrived at, brainstorming features and options.
Meanwhile, the Development side has moved past it’s initial kickoff and into Discovery, where we begin to determine exactly what we can and cannot include in the platform. At this point, Development and Venture interact a great deal; our discussions on the Venture side of things inform what we try in Development, which we bring back to venture, successful or otherwise, for revision.
Weeks 3 & 4: On the Venture side of things, weeks three and four are completely dedicated to branding initiatives. As we all well know, even the best ideas can fail without the requisite tools to get their name out there, so we felt it only reasonable that this part of the process should require nearly 1/6th of the First 100 Days. We’ll discuss marketing initiatives, logos, slogans, web presences — determining at every step how we can project the right image for your company from the onset. I’ll admit — this is one of our favorite parts — seeing the creativity that comes out of our clients during this stage is a real benefit of our jobs.
At the same time, the Development side is focused on two primary concepts in weeks three and four: Scope and Design. At this point, our primary focus on the development side is determining not only exactly how your platform is going to function, but to what extent it’s intended to do so. This process involves a great deal of communication with the Venture side of the business, as we’re effectively determining which audience the application is being built for, and how large that demographic’s requirements are.
Weeks 5, 6, 7 & 8: At this point, the Development side of our process moves into, well, development. This is when the actual setup of your MVP begins, moving from wireframes and mockups into proper coding. This phase, on the development side, carries all the way through week 12, when we begin testing, as mentioned before. The entire time, the Development aspect of the business is in frequent contact with Venture initiatives to ensure that the necessary adaptations are being made as the market launch for the product comes into clearer site.
During this section of the 12 Step Plan, the Venture side of the business moves into evaluating financing options, as well as honing your company’s pitch to potential investors. This tends to be one of the more stressful areas of the First 100 Days, but with good reason. One of the most basic rules of finance is that good financing can’t save a bad business, but bad financing can ruin a good one. Whether you’ve worked through seed funding, bootstrapping or VC rounds before or are completely new to all of this, we’re here every step of the way to make sure your company gets what it needs to be successful.
Weeks 9, 10, 11 & 12: Don’t let the fact that these weeks are lumped together here fool you; this is one of the most ambitious moments in the First 100 Days for both the Venture and Development sides of our model.
The Development side, at this point, becomes primarily concerned with preparing for the two week test sprint that occurs after week 12. This means, of course, that the coding process steps up in a big way during these last four weeks, to ensure that your minimum viable product is delivered with enough time to work the kinks out before you go to market. During this period, it’s of the utmost importance that the Product Manager on the Development side stays in constant contact with the Venture side of the platform, so as to ensure alignment of the product vision.
On the venture end, these last four weeks take on a very unique challenge, building a meaningful marketing and advertising presence through three key areas. First, we focus on developing a content marketing platform that will allow you to advertise and promote your business during the initial post-launch weeks without having to worry too deeply about generating content in real time. We do this by developing a battery of whitepapers, blog posts, social media accounts and industry research pieces to be used in the future, along with a corresponding content calendar for the first few months following product launch. This way, you’re going to be able to stay relevant in the social lens, even as the post-launch concerns of starting a new company become more and more the center of your day to day.
From there, Venture moves into developing a raw marketing plan for your post-launch phase. Here, we move away from the content marketing model somewhat, and focus more on direct, guerilla marketing that not only boosts awareness, but hopefully also engagement.
Lastly, we put a strong point of emphasis on ensuring that your platform is equipped with a variety of options when it comes to measuring market analytics. The moment of launch can be a bit overstimulating, and we’ve found that it’s best to keep a pulse on reality from minute one, in real time, through frequently observing marketing analytics and honing strategy accordingly.
Now that we’ve given a somewhat detailed outlay of what, exactly, we mean when we talk about The 12 Step Plan here at Coder, it’s important that we take the time to draw, exactly, how this feeds back into our general beliefs about starting a business.
With that in mind, we know that there’s no one, proper, universal way to launch a company. Indeed, the very nature of entrepreneurialism is far too complex to allow for so rigid a solution. If it weren’t, someone else would have already perfected the concept of innovation and my partner and I wouldn’t have jobs.
Rather, we believe that what’s most important when it comes to launching your business is recognizing that there are many, many paths to development and launch of a company, and that all of them can be successful. More directly, though, we believe the key to achieving the most success is learning to link these various paths together in a parallel pursuit of your end goal.
In the graphic we shared earlier in this chapter, the legend on the left shows multiple roles, all color coded for their various interactions within The 12 Step Plan. At Coder, we’ve come to believe that, while it’s critically important to have expertise in one area, launching a business is better done by many skilled individuals willing to work multiple roles.
In order to understand this, consider, or imagine, that you were attempting to launch a business to business product within the software as a service space. You know several things from the outset:
- Your idea is great
- Your space is crowded
- You have limited funds and resources
At this point, going out and hiring a different project manager for each given functionality that you want your MVP to have, even if you could afford it, wouldn’t really stand to benefit you very much. Rather, you’d do better to simply find two to five dedicated individuals willing to work multiple roles, and then foster as direct and effective communication between them as possible. That’s what we’ve been doing at Coder, and it’s working.
The ‘Get Your Shit Together Plan’
As we said before, we don’t want to give the impression that we believe there’s only one way to launch your company, and to do so successfully. If you come and work with us, we aren’t going to force you into our 12 Step Plan. If you come to us in Week 8 and tell us that you want to tweak something we were working on back in branding, we’d be thrilled. The challenge and the fun of this business lay in the constant need to think on our feet.
With that said, we’ve developed this system as, for lack of a more eloquent term, a ‘Get Your Shit Together Plan,’ and we think there’s good reason for that. As we stated at the beginning of this chapter, one of the biggest challenges in launching new ventures is also one of the greatest benefits — entrepreneurial people are never satisfied, and, therefore, aren’t very deadline-driven people a lot of the time.
While we recognize that finished is the opposite of perfect, we’ve found that having a basic outline of how both parties want to spend their time together during launch can be helpful simply for staying on track.
If you’re reading this and thinking you’d be better off going with your own process, we’d love to hear from you. Get in touch, and let us show you how we can cater our plans to your company’s needs.
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II) Services & Resources
As you likely know at this point, joining Coder for a full-scale ideation to MVP build isn’t the only way that you can gain our help in getting your idea off the ground. We also offer a host of venture services that can add value to companies at any stage of their development, pictured below:
We could write a whole chapter on each of the 12 services offered above, but we’d rather offer you a brief description of each:
Business Plan Development: This is, admittedly, somewhat self explanatory. Even the best ideas need a functional plan to get going, or else they’re simply ideas. At Coder, we’re seasoned in the art of bringing an idea to market, and touching all the bases in between.
If you’re an early stage company with questions about profitability, financing, marketing, coding and development or general strategy, we’d love nothing more than to help you develop an effective business plan.
Graphic Design: It’s been our experience that most young companies have a great deal of need for strong graphic design services, but don’t always have the resources necessary to acquire them. Our team of product managers, marketers and coders all have experience dealing with graphic design needs, and would be thrilled to help you create the perfect imagery for your company. From wireframes to marketing materials, you can’t go wrong.
Pitch Deck Creation: One of the greatest struggles for the average entrepreneur is determining how to best convey the worth of your idea to outside parties. Whether these be investors, potential employees or even clients, you need to have the ability to speak on demand about the place your product holds in the market.
We can help you construct a pitch deck outlining not only the benefits that your company poses to investors or clients, but also offering a clear description of your vision moving forward from your initial idea.
Performance Analytics: Yes, we know that everyone knows how to use Google Analytics. It’s a valuable tool, and we have nothing negative to say about it. But, why limit yourself?
From Chartbeat to KissMetrics, our staff is trained in every performance analytics platform that you can think of. More than just a measurement of your current engagement, we pair performance analytics with strategy to determine potential new for new markets and expansion.
Ideation and Innovation: A classic part of our 12 Step Plan, ideation and innovation serve as one of the core principles of our business.
We understand that your idea is your own, and that you have the final word on what happens with it. With that said, collaboration is at the root of creativity, and we’d love the chance to show you what we can contribute. Whether you’re looking for a sounding board, a partner, or an audience, Coder can help.
User Testing: Nothing turns a successful launch bad quicker than not having performed the requisite amount of user testing on the MVP prior to launch. When you work with us, that’s never going to be a problem.
This isn’t your traditional black-box QA. Through a mixture of automated scripts and active user testing, we ensure that your product is working as functionally as possible prior to putting it in the hands of consumers.
Go-to-Market Strategy: The downfall of far too many entrepreneurs is that they develop a phenomenal product, but don’t put enough time during development into considering how they’ll actually introduce the product to the market once it’s completed.
Luckily, this problem is easily enough solved. We have experience bringing applications at the startup, B2B and enterprise levels to market, and recognize the valuable differences in the strategies at all three levels.
Branding & Marketing: Whether it’s developing a reserve of content marketing materials to be distributed throughout your first few months post-launch or working on developing a branded Snapchat geofilter for your product launch, we’ve got your back.
We’ll work with you both in the development and post-launch phases to not only build a marketing strategy, but also constantly hone and revise it through marketing analytics.
Financial Modeling: If you’re predominantly concerned with the creative strategy of your product, then you may not even have a hands-on founder when it comes to financial strategy.
We’ve worked to pair the best of financial analysis with our product development team, so that you’ll always have a clear sense of your fundraising and capital structure needs and, thusly, what’s a reasonable bottom line expectation.
Surveying & Data Collection: Unfortunately, just because you think an idea is phenomenal (and we’re sure it is, in it’s own right) doesn’t mean that the rest of the world does. In fact, it could be quite the opposite.
Normal people can’t afford to run their own Gallup polls, so we’re proud to offer strong survey methodology as part of the Coder suite of services.
Content Strategy: There are two primary problems with content strategy. First and foremost, taking care of it on your own time takes a lot of, well, your own time. Secondly, outsourcing content strategy to a content marketing firm means it ends up on the desk of an overworked 22 year old with an Art History degree
Leave content strategy to the people actually handling the development of your MVP.
Social Media Management: As an addition to content strategy, we’re more than happy to help develop a strategy for the platforms on which that content is actually distributed.
Admittedly, social media strategy can see like the kind of thing anyone can do, but the seamlessness that comes from having this strategy managed by your development team is impressive, to say the least.
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III) Afterword
Well, it’s certainly been a ride. We’d like to thank you, on behalf of both of us as individuals, and Coder as an enterprise, for taking the time to listen to what we’ve had to say.
Throughout this text, we’ve spoken on everything from ideation of your company to the actual launch of your MVP, including all the finance, hiring, marketing and more in between.
Our hope, in short, is three-fold. We hope that you’ve learned something and that this has proved fruitful. In the secondary, we hope that you feel more inspired than ever to go out and be a part of the community, growing in most major cities in America and across the world, of entrepreneurial folks who are trying to make their dreams a reality by starting their own businesses.
Finally, it’s our hope that you’ll join us in continuing this conversation. Check us out on Medium @Coderinc, follow us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and AngelList by searching #BuiltByCoder, #BuildSomething, #CoderInsights or #CoderNews.
We encourage you, more than anything, to start small, dream big, and venture forth.
We’ll leave you with what we’ve come to call ‘The Tao of Brian:’
Know your weaknesses.
Focus on your strengths.
Learn something new everyday.
Never give up.
