You want to create a startup project, but are afraid that you will not be able to realize the idea in the best way? Let’s clean: nothing will ruin your venture faster than delaying the process of turning a business idea into a product. In this article, we present some information concerning startups with tips on how to move from an idea to implementation and “get real”. The Getting Real approach was invented by the employees of Basecamp (formerly 37signals). The main idea of such an approach is to create a startup from scratch as quickly as possible while using minimal resources.
With Getting Real, you focus on building effective customer relationships. Customers who know that you create a great product and your company is a reliable one, will recommend you to friends and help to make the startup popular. We’ve selected a few tips based on the Getting Real approach that will help you to open your business:
Reduce product vision to one sentence – Digital Agency London
Where to start a startup? Firstly, you need to understand what you are doing. If the vision of your startup cannot be put into one sentence, then it will be very difficult for you to convince users that you are doing something worthwhile. Besides, without a clearly defined vision, you are deprived of a guideline that helps you make the right strategic and tactical decisions. Examples of startups with a clear vision:
Stick to lean startup
How to organize a startup that will use resources at a minimum? The lean approach will help here. Lean startup means that you need to attract as few people as possible (the first version of the product can be created by a team of three people or you can outsource the creation of MVP) and use cheaper solutions or open source.
Set deadlines and an accurate project budget
Creating a business involves determining the amount of work, time and budget. How to balance between them? A start-up is worth starting with MVP, including only critical functions, the number of which can change at the development stage and set the deadlines and budget fixed. Such restrictions will serve as an incentive for your team and will motivate you to search for innovative solutions.
Offer fewer services
You are solving the problem, right? Then discard the beauties that have nothing to do with your decision! Modern users are more likely to choose products with limited functionality (such as Snapchat), and services like Facebook are considered boring.
Develop a habit of refusing any offer of a new feature. The same applies to feature requests that users leave: consider adding only after it becomes clear that more and more people require this functionality. For example, Twitter only started using previews for links in 2015, nine years after launch.
Remove unnecessary settings
You don’t want users to get stuck for half an hour on the settings screen, and then just close your application or startup site? Then you need to help them with the choice. After all, it’s not so important, the main one displays 5 or 7 posts. If any aspect is important for users, they will tell you about it, and you can change such minor details.
Give your product a personality
Guided by the vision and knowledge of your audience, create a product that has character and its principles. They may not like to someone, but those who you focus on will be delighted that is what you need for a startup! For example, the Slack corporate messenger has won the hearts of many developers, but there are plenty of opponents to its use.
Create an intuitive product
Users look at the instructions and FAQ only when something stops working. Make life easier for them: a brief onboarding should be enough to explain how everything works.
Do not try to solve problems that are not yet
One such problem is scaling. Startups are worried that they will not be able to quickly scale the service in case of the rapid success of MVP. But it is impossible to prepare for this. It is much more important to promptly make changes to the product and identify the startup business model that will work for you. And, of course, to please their users. Arouse interest before even launching a startup.
Here is how to promote a startup in the best traditions of Hollywood:
- A couple of months before the launch, you need to create a “teaser”, start a blog, show your logo, hint at what you are working on and start recruiting subscribers and first followers on social networks.
- Two weeks before starting a startup, switch to preview mode. Start talking about features, show a couple of screenshots or a video, tell the customers about use cases. Distribute a dozen invites to raise interest in a startup.
- Launch your IT startup along with an updated landing page and complete product information.
