We must learn what customers really want, not what they say they want or what we think they should wan
One important thing you must do after conceiving the ideas is to figure out your champion feature and take to customers asap.
MVP (Minimum Viable Product) was introduced by Eric Ries in his book The Lean Startup. MVP aims to take your champion functionality into your customer's hands asap to validate your product or service. In my first startup, I made a mistake of perfecting a product and delaying launch. But the truth is, you won't learn about your idea works or not unless you launch. Reid Hoffman has said, 'If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late.' This reflects the importance of launching and validating the idea fast so that we can change the product according to the feedback.
Your idea is your baby, and you can't think of anything other than just raise it well. Everything else will be taken care of with the time. You don't have to figure out the logo, website design, company's hoodies, or other nice to have things in the beginning. Initially, your and your team's job is to adjust based on your customers' feedback — also known as the Build-Measure-Learn Feedback loop, conceptualized by Eric Ries. It demonstrates to reiterate the process to measure our idea based on feedback and improve it accordingly.
Validate Your Idea
When we have an Idea, we assume a few things based on our knowledge, but when we go out in the market, it scatters. Not only this dent founder's confidence but also put the company's future in a haze. To avoid this, we must validate our idea superfast. I did assume many things about my first startup, but it didn't go that way, which taught me that never work based on assumptions, but data. Data is the king. Therefore, your duty is to research available data on your assumptions, and if you can't find the data, test it by yourself. Let the dog decide the dog food.
The founders have this tendency to show their ideas first in their friends and family to validate them. And, often their response is, 'Wow! This is a great product.' They love you, so they may not be 100% honest to validate your idea. What's more, important is they are not your ideal customer. Not only your friends and family, but many times, your ideal customer will show interest in your product, but when it comes to paying for it, they hesitate. People say differently and act differently. Therefore, you must find out whether they are ready to pay for your solution or not.
Back in 2018, after leaving the job, I hired a friend to develop the application. It took him six months to complete the app because we had many features, like a food ordering system, health articles, and nutritional values. If I had known the concept of MVC, then I could have launched within a week. In hindsight, it makes sense that my champion feature was healthy food itself. If I had started with delivering healthy food only, I had not only saved money and time but could have learned more about their preferences while continue developing other supportive features. I failed to recognize my champion feature. Therefore, I suggest you look closely at your startup and ask yourself: How can you launch within a week?
As I had my realization that I could have started with selling healthy food physically while developing an application. Despite being a cloud kitchen, I should have sold my product to its right customer, so I could adjust if needed. Not only that, but I'd also have an early flow of revenue generation. You must consider that while building the platform, can you still be serving with any physical version of that product to your prospects? Suppose you want to develop a web solution for Tax management. What you can do is to offer your service physically by helping them with Tax management. While doing so, you can tell them that you are building a secure and easy web solution, would you be interested? If yes, ask for suggestions and feedback to improve your product. If they seem more interested in web solutions, then launch with your champion feature asap.
Do you know Reliance has launched the Jio, and it's all other applications? They were all full of errors with unattractive design. But with time, they have improved their design, their logo, and solved the errors. Within the few days of the announcement, they launched it without perfecting it. Google had done the same when it launched its Google pay application. All of these companies have learned the importance of taking your product to customers as soon as possible. You must do the same.