Between the great idea you had and a working product there are huge steps it is hard to be aware of at the beginning. The idea is crucial, as you don’t want to spend the next following years fighting for something useless. But is it certainly not everything and it will most probably change several times until you get to your final product.
In the meantime you will have to find partners, develop a prototype, raise money, recruit employees, convince beta testers and many other tasks you will discover on your way. Your are facing problems in fields you know nothing about and you must fix them quickly. That is your daily job. So how one should proceed? We tested several approaches and made many mistakes and we think it could be useful to share them with you.

We rank all the issues we face by priority and start with the first one (what could we do otherwise?). The major point here is to know when to stop and start dealing with the second issue. Let’s say your first priority is to build a prototype. You want your prototype to be impressive for your investors. It should not be too buggy either as your beta testers would get fed up with bugs quickly. Finally it should be well designed or your beta testers will focus on graphic details and won’t give you the deep feedback you are looking for (I should mention here that we don’t believe that you should test your service before it reaches this point or the feedback you will get will be polluted with detail noise). So all in all, your goal is almost to build your product entirely! And that sounds hard…

If you step back a second and think about your main goals with this prototype (convince investors and get feed back from users) you should be able to re-focus :

• Only implement the key feature you want to test : drop fancy community features (beta testers will ask for it but maybe they will suggest a better way than the one you imagined). But implement it carefully and don’t underestimate presentation wrapping.
• Leave scalability issues for now. Drop the great idea you had about hosting your service in the cloud. No matter where you host your service if nobody uses it!
• Do not optimize! Donald Knuth said it a long time ago but it is worth repeating it : « We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. ». We believe that this is true in computer sciences but for everything else also.

When I am saying « drop », I mean do not implement it. But you should of course keep it in the corner of your head (and design your service so it can be easily extendable and scalable).

If your only key feature has been well implemented and wrapped, beta testers will be happy to test your service and enthusiastic about your new coming features.
Investors will understand what you do (this is a first step!) and will take your only feature as a reference for your work : clear and efficient. They will also be thankful for sparing them the listing of all the « cool features » you implemented like color customization, home made drag & drop…

More generally, in almost all fields, learning and production work the same way. At the beginning your are really efficient : you learn a lot in a short amount of time but progressively it costs you more and more to progress a little bit (in other words, the learning/working curves often have a logarithmic shape). That is the point where you should stop. Stop when your primary goal has been reached and doing more feels not necessary or unpleasant. Of course it won’t feel unpleasant at the beginning and you will be really happy to implement this nice color picker but don’t! Step back and think, does this color picker is really mandatory to convince an investor? Or would he be more interested in a deep market analysis? (If you think the investor would be more interested in your color picker, find a business partner quickly!)

To sum it up, do as little as you can to reach your goal and only your goal. Be lazy or you die!

Tags: entrepreneurship, product development, project management