Product

Creating new products that appeal to people at large is a difficult process that requires time, luck and a good budget.
I don’t want to use any structured product building methodologies here, but I just want to mention some necessary actions and unwritten rules that the startup team will have to take in order to increase the product’s potential for success.

1. Before starting any technical development of the product, it is necessary to initiate a discussion on social networks on the topic you want to cover and feel the pulse of the public. You can use various methods, questionnaires, surveys, discussion groups, personal conversations…
2. Divide specific functions with specific responsibilities between founders and team members.
3. When you have the approximate image of how your product should look, first imagine the overall image of the new product into the simplest wire frames, how you could visualize the flow of the product.
4. When defining the product flow through wire frames, try to divide the product into two phases. In the first phase, set everything that is necessary to perform the functions to solve the key problem, and in the second phase, set everything else that is good to have but is not a priority.
5. Build an internal consensus that it is normal for the first version of the product not to be perfect and that bug fixes and critical comments from users are a normal process.
6. After defining the MVP, or the first phase of building the product, your overall focus should be on customers and user provisioning, not on technical development.
7. In the first 4 months from the release of the first version of the product, your focus should be only on fixing bugs and not on promoting other functionalities. Release all new functionalities in the new version of the product.
8. Lead all product development communication through a product development platform, with clearly defined issues and clearly set priorities.
9. Most of the time, the maximum term for the development of the first version of the product must not be longer than 4 months for a team of maximum 4 developers, one of whom performs the role of PM.
10. Between the period from the release of the first version to the release of the second version, use as many ways as possible to attract as many users as possible and therefore use different marketing activities (discounts, free registration, giveaways),

If users don’t order from the front, or no register on the platform, then go back and re-identify the problems, and don’t spend funds on technical development of the product.

I want to mention here that there are products that require a large team and more time to get to the first version of the product, but with certainty this pattern can be predicted in 95% of solutions on the market.