Starting Up

Process

First I wanted to share a presentation I did back in 2019 regarding the process and tools for building a new product from scratch. I presented this when I got hired by Creditas to help build new businesses and products that would be leveraged by the financial solutions the company already had. Those gave birth to a few initiatives being two of them Creditas Home and Creditas Auto.

General Guides

Guides
Ycombinator YC’s Essential Startup Advice
Basecamp Shape Up, Getting Real, Rework

Business Canvas

Start exercising the business model from the beginning, and iterate. Everything you fill in your business model is considered a hypothesis until they are validated.

Miro Template
Miro has a template for this:
Business Model Canvas Template

Miro Template
Miro has a template for this:
Lean Canvas Template

Canvas
Business Model Canvas (BMC)


Introduced in 2008 by Alexander Osterwalder in the Book “Business Model Generation”
Download Template (from Alexander Osterwalder’s site)
Buy the Book
Business Model Canvas
Lean Canvas


Introduced in 2010 by Ash Maurya in the Book “Running Lean”
Download Template (from Ash Murray’s site)
Buy the Book
Lean Canvas

Testing your Ideas

Use NoCode Tools

Purpose Tools
Landing Page Builder Unbounce, Instapage
Forms for Data Input Typeform, Jotform, Google Forms
Integrator Zapier, Make
Backoffice Retool, Bubble
Database Google Sheets
Sales Pipeline Pipedrive
Custom Workflows Pipefy
Product Analytics Google Tag Manager - Enables adding other tools without coding
  Google Analytics - Traffic, Engagement
  Heap - User Behavior, Funnels, Feature Usage
  Hotjar - Session Recording, Heatmap, Form Drop and Time Spent Analysis
A/B Testing Google Optimize

Also have a careful look into Bubble because it has the potential of being not only a tool for testing but for initial MVP, but it has a real potential for becoming a complete application builder.

Find Early Adopters

An Early Adopter is a person who starts using a product or technology as soon as it becomes available.

It is very hard to find early adopters for the initial testing of your product (and depending on the niche might be even harder), but you can always trust Product Launch sites to help you find the first ones to help you on this first step of your Journey.

But don’t expect to have a bunch of signups because that won’t happen. I tried them all and the best you are going to get is a couple of free signups to start testing and just a few will engage and give up valuable feedback.

Product Launch Sites

Other interesting communities to find Early Adopters

Other alternatives

  • Alternatives to

Prelaunch strategy

Launching through Product Launch sites is not the right way to launch a product, because it causes a large spike of interest on launch day but that does not sustain in the following days, leaving founders disappointed.

Product Launch - How it should be

You need to put in place a prelaunch strategy to build momentum and interest. And even create on top of it a referral strategy.

You can start a prelaunch campaign even before you have your first line of code, even before you have validated every detail or even experimented with Early Adopters. But keep in mind that you will have to keep nurturing your waitlist so that they don’t lose interest. So an email nurturing campaign needs to be created.

These are some tools focused on Prelaunch Waitlists and Refer-a-Friend Campaigns

Valuable History and Books

Here is a little bit of history around how this movement around startups started and all the Books that launched important concepts that we use today.

Design Thinking (1950s) “Drawing on psychological studies of creativity from the 1940s, such as Max Wertheimer’s “Productive Thinking” (1945), new creativity techniques in the 1950s and design methods in the 1960s led to the idea of design thinking as a particular approach to creatively solving problems. Among the first authors to write about design thinking were John E. Arnold in “Creative Engineering” (1959) and L. Bruce Archer in “Systematic Method for Designers” (1965).” (Wikipedia)
Agile Manifesto (2001) “On February 11-13, 2001, at The Lodge at Snowbird ski resort in the Wasatch mountains of Utah, seventeen people met to talk, ski, relax, and try to find common ground—and of course, to eat. What emerged was the Agile ‘Software Development’ Manifesto. Representatives from Extreme Programming, SCRUM, DSDM, Adaptive Software Development, Crystal, Feature-Driven Development, Pragmatic Programming, and others sympathetic to the need for an alternative to documentation-driven, heavyweight software development processes convened.”
[1959] Creative Engineering - by John E. Arnold
Promoting Innovation by Thinking Differently
Original Version Launch Year: 1959
[2005] The Four Steps to the Epiphany - by Steve Blank
Successful Strategies for Products that Win
Original Version Launch Year: 2005
Key takeaways
  • Customer Feedback is a framework for incorporating customers’ inputs into your product development cycle.
  • Customer Development Methodology consist of 4 steps
  • (1) Customer Discovery (Problem/Solution Fit): tests hypotheses about the nature of the problem, interest in the product or service solution, and business viability.
  • (2) Customer Validation (Product/MarketFit): tests the business viability through customer purchases and in the process creates a 'sales road map', a proven and repeatable sales process. Customer discovery and customer validation corroborate the business model.
  • (3) Customer Creation (Scale Execution): executes the business plan by scaling through customer acquisition, creating user demand and directing it toward the company's sales channels.
  • (4) Customer Building (Scale Organization / Scale Operations): formalizes and standardizes company departments and operations.
  • Customer Discovery Steps
    		•
    		[2008] Business Model Generation - by Alexander Osterwalder
    A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers
    Original Version Launch Year: 2008
    Key takeaways
  • Business Model Canvas - business model design template, that helps describe its business model.
    		•
    		[2008] The Lean Startup - by Eric Ries
    How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses
    Original Version Launch Year: 2008
    Key takeaways
  • Is about maximizing learning and minimizing waste in the innovation process; it combines Customer Development, Agile software development methods, and Toyota’s Lean practices (Lean Manufacturing).
  • Leann Startup is a methodology for developing businesses and products, which aims to shorten product development cycles and rapidly discover if a proposed business model is viable; this is achieved by adopting a combination of business-hypothesis-driven experimentation, terative product releases, and validated learning.
  • MVP (Minimum Viable Product)
  • Continuous Deployment
  • Split Testing (A/B Testing)
  • Actionable Metrics
  • Pivot
  • Build-Measure-Learn (The Loop)
    		•
    		[2010] Running Lean - by Ash Maurya
    Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works
    Original Version Launch Year: 2010
    Key takeaways
  • A systematic process for quickly vetting product ideas and raising our odds of success.
  • 3 Principles: Document Plan A (your initial plan), Identify the Riskiest Aspects of your Plan, Systematically Test your Plan
  • 4 Steps to Systematically Test your Plan: Understand the Problem, Define the Solution, Validate Qualitatively, Verify Quantitatively
  • 3 Stages of Startup Growth: PROBLEM/SOLUTION FIT, PRODUCT/MARKET FIT, SCALE
  • Lean Canvas: focuses on addressing broad customer problems and solutions and delivering them to customer segments through a unique value proposition.
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