But how do you decide which ones to prioritize? How do you know if a feature is worth adding to your MVP?

In this article, we are going to share three ways to prioritize features in your MVP. These are based on real-world examples.

Benefits of Prioritizing Features in Your MVP

First, let’s remind ourselves of the business benefits of prioritizing.

• You can focus more time and energy on matters most for your business.
• It helps you build better products faster by focusing on only those things that matter.
• By doing this, you will not waste time and resources on unnecessary features.

Now, let’s look at some reasons why you should not prioritize certain features:

• If they don’t add value to users’ lives.
• They are too expensive to implement.
• The market doesn’t need them yet.
• There aren’t enough people using them right now.
• Users won’t pay money for them.

There are plenty of methods that help you determine what features to include in your MVP. But before we get into it, here are two questions to ask yourself:

1) What problem does my current solution solve?

2) Is there any way to make it even easier for someone else to solve this same problem?

MoSCoW Matrix Prioritization Technique

Dai Clegg developed the MoSCoW matrix technique in the rapid application development project he was a part of. The aim is to arrive at features that offer the most significant and most immediate benefits.

MoSCoW is an abbreviation for Must have, Should have, Could have and Won’t have features.

Here all the desired features are listed out along with their relative importance. Then each one gets tagged as either (M, S, C or W) according to its importance. This gives us our first step towards prioritizing features.

When time is not sufficient to complete all the features, the team will aim to finish the Must have and Should have features and leave out the Could have, and of course, the Won’t have parts. Even if this small set wasn’t completed on time, the team would focus only on the Must-have features.

Pros of MoSCoW prioritization

– It allows you to quickly identify what must be done before moving onto other priorities.

– You get to see clearly where your efforts lie.

Cons of MoSCoW prioritizations

If you’re working alone, then you may spend hours trying to figure out what can be left out without compromising the product’s functionality.

– This method also assumes that every single feature has equal weight. But often, some features are much harder than others to develop.

When to use MoSCoW prioritization

If you want to start with something simple but still effective, then go ahead and try MoSCoW. The MoSCoW technique is excellent for small and simple products that don’t have many features. However, if you plan to launch a complex app with lots of features, you may want to consider another approach like the following.

The Kano Model Prioritization Technique

The Kano Model is based on three types of features: foundational features that are a must-have (for example, clean rooms in a hotel); performance features, which are aimed at enhancing the experience (for example, a desk with a chair); and exciting features, which make the customer delighted that they want to talk about it (the same room overlooking the ocean).

Pros of the Kano Model

– You map the product features based on their utility to the customer. This makes marketing easier.

– You involve the customer in product development right from the beginning.

– Can be applied to any stage of the product lifecycle.

– Makes it easy to achieve product-market fit early in the project.

– Helps in setting a rock-solid roadmap.

Cons of the Kano Model

– Potential features need to be known well ahead of time.

– The analysis can be time-consuming, expensive and exhausting.

– Since it’s a user-centred approach, it’s easy to overlook essential features that the user did not consider.

When to use the Kano Model Prioritization Technique

This model works best for startups looking to build a new product rather than improving upon existing ones. Also, since most companies already know how their customers behave, this technique will help them better understand what features should be included in their product.

Effort and Impact Prioritization Technique

The effort and impact matrix is a 2D visual that helps teams understand how hard different features will be to implement and whether those features are worth implementing.

It works best when there are two dimensions – Efforts and Impacts. Each cell represents an individual feature. To fill up the cells, you should assign values to both Efforts and Impacts.

Here you evaluate each feature, whether it’s easy/hard to implement and offers low/high impact. You then map it on a 2D graph like the above. You can either do this manually or automate it using tools such as Trello.

Pros of Effort & Impact Matrix

– Allows you to prioritize features easily.

– Easy to visualize and share across stakeholders.

– An excellent way to communicate with customers.

– Easily understood by non-technical people.

Cons of Effort & Impact Matrices

– Requires more resources to create one.

– Not suitable for large projects.

When to use the Effort & Impact Prioritization Technique

This is an excellent method to identify low-hanging fruits in your feature set. Use this method when your team has limited resources and needs to choose between multiple features. It also works very well for smaller projects where you’re trying to decide between several ideas.

Summary

Feature prioritization is essential for every startup because you won’t have a chance to succeed without knowing what users want. There are many ways to do so, but these three methods are the easiest and fastest ways to get started. If you’re still struggling with deciding which features to include in your MVP, please reach out to us.

The post Three Ways to Prioritize Features in Your MVP first appeared on Merkat Intellekt.

Their main drawback was that they were based on intuition rather than data. Intuition often leads us astray when making decisions about what products should exist and which ones shouldn’t. We need more evidence-based decision making if we want to make sure we’re building something useful and valuable.

Luckily, we have a better way to approach this today: Design thinking. This methodology was first developed by IDEO in the late 1970s and has been used successfully across industries such as consumer electronics, healthcare, automotive, fashion, food & beverage, retail, education, and more. The goal of design thinking is to develop something valuable and understand why users want what they do. By doing so, you can build products that meet customer expectations while simultaneously improving your company’s bottom line.

Design thinking is a powerful tool for startups and small businesses because it allows them to develop new ideas and test their hypotheses quickly. In this article, I will explain how design thinking can lead to better MVPs.

Benefits of Design Thinking Approach in Developing MVP

1) Faster Time to Market

When developing an idea into a working prototype, there are two ways to go about it:

1) Start from scratch

2) Use an existing framework/toolkit.

If you choose option 2, then you’ll likely end up spending weeks trying to figure out how to integrate all the pieces. Design thinking eliminates the need to integrate anything at all! You simply create a set of user personas, conduct interviews, observe customers using your product, and iterate until you find something that works well. Once you’ve found something that works, you can move onto the next step to further refine your solution.

2) More Valuable Products

Listening to your target audience is the key to discovering who they are, what problems they face, and their preferred solutions. When designing a product, you must first ask yourself, “what does my ideal customer look like?” Then, once you know that, you can begin to answer questions like “how could I help him solve his challenge?“ It may seem evident at first glance, but most companies fail to realize the importance of listening to a potential customer.

3) Less Waste

One thing that makes design thinking unique compared to other methods is its focus on understanding human behaviour instead of just solving technical issues. It is not uncommon for designers to spend a lot of time figuring out how to implement new features without considering whether those features matter to anyone. For example, let’s say you were tasked with creating a feature that allowed people to share photos online. How can we best provide this information? How might someone use this feature? Would sharing photos online improve or hinder their experience? It’s hard to answer these types of questions without talking to real people. But since interviewing people isn’t always feasible, design thinking provides another alternative – observing actual usage patterns.

4) Increased Customer Loyalty & Retention

As mentioned above, design thinking focuses heavily on learning more about your target market by talking directly to them or by observing them. By doing so, you gain valuable insights that allow you to understand better why certain products succeed. From these findings, you can make decisions regarding future iterations based on feedback received from previous versions. This means that when you release new versions of your app, you won’t need to worry as much about losing current customers because they already had a chance to try out your latest iteration.

How Design thinking Leads to Better MVPs

A minimum viable product (MVP) is essentially a minimum product version that solves a specific problem. Since it doesn’t include everything needed to launch a full-fledged product, it forces developers to prioritize which parts of the application should receive priority attention. This allows them to build only the functionality required for users to achieve their goals while still providing enough value to justify continued development. In short, if you’re looking to develop a high-quality product in less than six months, design thinking will save you tons of time and money.

Identifying the target audience is the first step in any design thinking project. You need to know who you’re trying to reach before you start designing anything. Once you’ve identified the problem or opportunity, you’ll then move onto defining the solution. Next comes ideating — brainstorming all possible ways to address the issue at hand. Finally, there’s prototyping — creating low-cost prototypes that allow you to validate whether your idea solves the problem.

Your goal here is to get user feedback on your initial concept. If you don’t receive positive responses, you may need to change your prototype until you find one that works well enough to continue moving forward.

When developing your MVP, you should keep these three points in mind:

1) Understand the Problem – Before starting any design work, you must define the problem you wish to solve. What is the pain point that you are attempting to address? How would someone use your product if it didn’t exist yet? Why did they choose to buy your competitor’s version instead? These questions will help you get a deeper understanding of your customer and guide you through every stage of your design thinking journey.

2) Define Potential Solutions – After identifying the problem, you now need to determine which core features you’d like to include in your MVP. Do you plan to add social media sharing capabilities? Maybe an analytics dashboard? Or perhaps even some sort of gamification mechanics? Whatever feature you decide on, ensure that each element serves its purpose within the context of solving the original problem.

3) Prototype It! – Prototyping is where most designers spend 80%+ of their time. Don’t let yourself fall into this trap. Instead, focus on building out just 1–2 screens worth of functionality. Use wireframes, mockups, paper prototypes, etc., whatever method best suits your needs. Just remember to test early and often throughout development. The critical thing to note about this step is that you shouldn’t be afraid to fail. As long as you learn from your mistakes, you won’t end up wasting too much time and resources.

Once you have a working MVP, you can begin testing with real customers.

In summary, design thinking helps us understand our problems better by asking ourselves what we want to accomplish and why. We then go ahead and create solutions based on those answers. Design thinking also gives us the freedom to iterate over multiple ideas without worrying about spending thousands of dollars upfront. Lastly, design thinking provides us with a framework to evaluate potential products to avoid making costly mistakes along the way. If you follow the steps discussed in this article, you’ll end up with a much stronger MVP than you started with. And once you launch, you’ll see how quickly your user base grows because of it.

The post How Design Thinking Leads to Better MVPs first appeared on Merkat Intellekt.

What is MVP, Briefly

The Minimum Viable Product is a term coined by Eric Ries in his book The Lean Startup. A MVP is a strategy that enables startups to quickly develop new ideas into marketable products without spending too much money upfront. Many companies have used this approach, including Amazon, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, Spotify, Uber, Airbnb, Dropbox, and Kickstarter.

The Goals of Your MVP

The most common way to measure success is by looking at how many people in your target market have tried out the MVP. You need to see whether there’s enough interest to justify further investment beyond the MVP. If there isn’t, then you’ve got to rework on your idea and refine it further. But even when there is sufficient demand, you still don’t necessarily get a return on your efforts unless you can prove that the MVP works. That means gathering some kind of evidence that shows users find the MVP helpful.

Essentially, you have to measure two things:

1. The attractiveness of your offering to a viable pool of people / early-evangelists
2. How valuable is your MVP in solving a problem for your target user

Acquisition Rate

One metric that can help answer both questions above is the acquisition rate. AR measures the number of potential buyers who come across your offer within a given period. For example, if you run a website where people can sign up for free software trials, you could calculate AR based on the number of visitors per day. Another related metric is bounce rate, which tells you how often someone leaves your site immediately after visiting it.

Customer Acquisition Cost

Another metric that helps determine whether your MVP was worthwhile is Customer Acquisition Cost. CAC refers to the total amount spent acquiring one customer over the lifetime of the business (LTV). So, if you spend $10k to acquire 10 customers, but only 1 of those customers becomes profitable, then your cost per customer would be $1000. However, if you spend $100k to acquire 100 customers, but 50 become profitable, your average cost per customer drops down to $50.

Conversion Rate

Another metric that helps determine whether your MVP is worthwhile is conversion rate. CR measures the percentage of visitors who convert into paying customers. For example, you might be offering a trial plan for your web app, product or service. It is easy to determine how effective your MVP is by looking at how many people become paying customers after the trial period.

Return on Investment (ROI)

Return On Investment is another metric that helps determine whether an MVP is thriving financially. It compares the value created by the MVP against its costs. A simple formula looks like this: Value Created – Costs Return On Investment.

So, let’s say you launch an MVP that generates $5K in revenue during the first month after launching. Let’s also assume that you spent $20K developing the MVP. Then ROI can be determined based on the value created. Now, we need to know what “value created” represents. Well, here are three ways to do so:

• Value Created 1: Revenue generated by the MVP
  • This is probably the easiest method because it doesn’t require any additional data collection. Simply look at the numbers reported by your payment gateway(s).
• Value Created 2: Number of new subscribers acquired through the MVP
  • Instead of focusing solely on revenue, you might consider the number of new subscribers acquired through your MVP.
  • Once again, you should report monthly subscriber counts for each market segment (countries, regions, etc.). You can find more information about using GA’s audience insights tool here.
• Value Created 3: Average order size
  • To calculate the average order size, divide the number of users by the number of active accounts. For example, if you had 1000 active accounts and 500 ordered something, the average order size would be $500. If you could track these values, they would give you a great idea of which market segments generate the most sales.

Referral Rate

The last metric we’d recommend tracking is the referral rate. Referrals refer to the number of unique referrals made by existing customers. As mentioned above, referring customers is a meaningful way to grow your user base. Tracking referral rates lets you see where your best-performing markets are.

Learning Metrics

In addition to the metrics mentioned above, other essential learning metrics help us understand our progress towards building a sustainable company beyond a successful MVP. These include things such as retention rates, churn rates, and user satisfaction scores.

Retention Rates

The retention rate indicates the proportion of existing users who continue to use your application/service. Retention rates help to understand the value created by our application/service. It requires a sound strategy in place to retain an existing user.

Churn Rates

During any given timeframe, churn is the number of users leaving your system. High churn rates indicate poor quality of experience. They could mean – too many bugs! Or, perhaps, not enough functionality to entice the user. Either way, it’s a big red flag and you must focus all your efforts on addressing the overall quality of your application/service before increasing your marketing budget.

User Satisfaction Scores

Finally, the User Satisfaction Score measures customer happiness. Customer Happiness is calculated based on ease of use, performance, reliability, security, and support. The higher the score, the happier the customer. A straightforward way to measure customer happiness is to get user feedback by asking your current customers what they think of your service.

Conclusion

As you can see, there are several different types of metrics available to evaluate your Minimum Viable Product and improve your learning about your target customers. Each has strengths and weaknesses. However, no matter which ones you choose, make sure that you keep them consistent across projects.

We’ve intentionally left out metrics like customer lifetime value (CLV), average revenue per user (ARPU) and revenue per account because they’re better suited for the post-MVP stage.

The post MVP Metrics: Measuring the Success of Your Minimum Viable Product first appeared on Merkat Intellekt.

The goal of an MVP is to find out if there is enough interest in your product to warrant building a full-fledged version of it.

You can use different methods for your customer acquisition process. Define your target audience well and reach out to your earlyvangelists. You could talk directly to your earlyvangelists or try reaching them via., market research and surveys. Or you might even try using social media platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter to get feedback from earlyvangelists, who are interested in what you have built so far and are ready to buy the product.

In this article, we’ll briefly understand what a minimum viable product is and a few ways to find your earlyvangelists/first few customers early on.

Start with a Lean, Minimum Viable Product

The best thing about starting with an MVP is that you don’t have to spend money or time developing something that doesn’t work yet. You only pay attention to what is essential to entice your earlyvangelists and ignore everything else. This makes it easier to test things without spending too much time on non-essential features.

It’s important to know whether you’re building a pain-killer solution or a vitamin-like solution. Both have different MVP requirements and approaches. According to Kirti Varun Avasarala, Chief Product Officer at Meesho, “A pain-killer problem requires a quick and lightweight MVP to solve while vitamin products need a vast improvement over existing solutions”.

To put it differently, a painkiller product solves an unmet user need(s) while a vitamin product improves an existing solution. Examples of painkiller products would be Dropbox, Uber, and Airbnb. Vitamin products include: Slack, Trello, and Stripe.

Considering the nature of your user problems, market dynamics and long-term vision will help you decide whether you’re building a painkiller or a vitamin.

Ideas to Get Your Initial Paying Customers

Build a Landing Page and Send Traffic to It

One of the most effective ways to let your earlyvangelists know about the solution you have built for them is to let their traffic to your website, by creating a landing page. Create the landing page in a way such that it clearly brings out the problem you are addressing for the earlyvangelists and how your MVP can address their pain point.

To make sure that visitors actually land on your landing page, send traffic from sources like Google Adwords, Facebook Ads, Twitter ads, or LinkedIn – a channel where your target customer hangs out. Once they arrive at your site, give them a clear call to action. For example, “Sign Up Now!” or “Download now!”

When someone clicks on one of these CTAs, he/she gets redirected to another URL that contains more information about your product. That means you’ve successfully converted a lead into a potential buyer.

This method is great because it allows you to quickly build a list of users who want to try out your product. As long as you keep sending traffic to your landing pages, you won’t lose any leads even after you stop promoting your product.

Create a Free Trial Version of Your App

Offering free trials is a good idea. The reason why we suggest giving away a trial version is so that you can gather customer feedback.

Free trials allow you to see how well the actual product performs under normal conditions. They also let you gauge interest among prospective customers. After all, people are willing to download apps when there aren’t many alternatives available in their area.

You should consider making this option optional though. In other words, offer a free trial but require signup before downloading. When people use your free trial, they become part of your email list as a subscriber and can be used for marketing purposes in the future.

Offer Discounted Pricing

Another way to attract early adopters is to provide discounts. This strategy works best with software products since they tend to cost less than physical goods. Timebound lifetime deals are also a great option. Here, you offer your product for a one-time cost for the first few hundred or thousand customers – rather than the regular monthly or annual pricing.

You offer this discounted pricing in exchange for market feedback, which makes for excellent product strategy.

Provided your product offers excellent value, platforms like Appsumo can help you accelerate user growth efforts by getting thousands of engaged and happy users in just a couple of weeks.

AppSumo launched Zapier with access to their then 157 services for a one-time fee of $39. Now with over 2,000 integrations locked and loaded into their arsenal, and over 3 million users Zapier has become the leader in the app integration market.

Consider another market leader, Intercom, which was also launched on Appsumo in 2012. The lifetime deal had a humble pricing of $49.

You don’t have to spend hours manually searching through social media profiles to find interested prospects. Instead, you can rely on automated platforms like Appsumo or GrabLTD to do the work for you.

Get Reviews from Influencers

Influencer reviews work really well for software products. These days, influencers are everywhere online. And thanks to social media sites such as Instagram, YouTube, and Pinterest, they’re easy to reach too.

All you need to do is ask your favorite bloggers or vloggers to review your product. Just be careful that you don’t overdo it. If you bombard them with requests, they might get annoyed and ignore you forever. Instead, focus on contacting influential individuals who have already expressed an interest in what you’re selling.

Once you’ve built relationships with these influencers, you can pitch them ideas related to your business. You may end up getting featured by them in exchange for providing exclusive access to your product.

If you get permission to mention their brand on your landing page, that’s another win–win situation.

Build Communities for Your Product

Social media has changed everything. Today’s consumers expect brands to be active across multiple channels including social networks. To stay relevant, businesses must engage with their audience through various platforms.

Right now, social media groups such as LinkedIn & Facebook Groups are the most popular place where companies interact with potential buyers. You could use your social media group to launch features, get feedback from your customer base, and gather ideas for in-demand features.

But if you want to build long term loyalty, you’ll eventually need to move beyond these social media groups. That means building your own communities outside of the likes of Facebook.

For example, you could create a Slack channel for your product. Or maybe you’d prefer to host in-person events at local coffee shops. Whatever method you choose, make sure that you keep things interesting. People will only stick around if they feel connected to your community and their feedback is valued.

Create a Lead Magnet

A lead magnet is any piece of content that provides value to potential buyers by showcasing your expertise and thought leadership. For software products this could be anything from lead-generating white papers to webinars. The goal here is to provide highly valuable information – even if it’s free – that helps prospects understand why they should buy your product instead of competitors’ products.

Start Content Marketing Early On

Content marketing is an essential part of any business strategy. It helps you build trust with your audience and establish yourself as an authority in your niche. Then, when it comes time to sell them on a software solution or service, they’ll be more likely to buy from you because they already know who you are and what you stand for. Therefore, if you want to get started building up that list of potential customers right away, here are some tips:

Start by creating great content. This means writing blog posts, articles, videos, etc., all related to your industry. The key thing to remember is that people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. So make sure you’re sharing useful information that will help others solve their problems.

Create social media profiles like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Quora, YouTube, etc. and share your content. Make sure these accounts have clear calls to action. For example, if you offer a process design app, then include links to download the app on each profile page.

Conclusion

We’ve discussed a handful of highly effective practices to win your first customers for your tech solution. Picking one or two tactics and implementing them is the fastest way to start generating leads today. But there’s no reason not to try out several different methods. If you find something works really well, continue using it! And if you can’t seem to generate enough leads with a particular tactic, consider trying another tactic.

The post Getting Your First Few Customers for Your Early-Stage Tech Product first appeared on Merkat Intellekt.

Freshworks, a billion-dollar unicorn, during their initial days came up with their iconic Freshdesk solution by reading the market carefully. The competition was missing out on a critical piece of the solution to the end customers and Freshworks leveraged on the missing pieces by building a solution that addresses these pain points. The rest is history.

The Importance of Competitive Analysis

Competitors can be your most significant source of inspiration when you’re trying to build something. They may have already solved some problems that you haven’t thought about yet. Or they might offer an entirely different approach to solving those same problems. Either way, understanding who else is out there will help you focus your efforts to address the pain points that you have sought out to address.

How to Perform a Comprehensive Competitor Analysis

There’s more to a successful competitor analysis than simply identifying competitors. You need to dig deeper into how well these companies solve similar problems, whether they’ve been able to scale successfully, and if not, why not. This requires digging through public data sources like Crunchbase, AngelList, and Crunchboard. It also means talking with people inside the company, including founders, CTOs, engineers, marketers, salespeople, investors, customers, partners, and anyone else involved in the business.

Identify your competitors (online)

Use Google Trends to identify keywords related to your industry. Then use Buzzsumo to find blogs written by influencers in your space. Finally, look at which companies appear most frequently across all of these sites. These are likely your top competitors.

Analyse Your Competition

Research online review sites G2, Clutch and Capterra

Look at reviews from previous clients and try to figure out why they chose one vendor over another. If possible, talk directly to current users of each solution. Ask them questions like “What was missing?” and “Why did you choose us instead?” and “What’s the biggest pain with this (competitor) solution?”. Use this feedback to determine areas of difference and improvement.

Analyse Product Features & Pricing Models

Look for commonalities between products. Try to get a sense of the competitive landscape for each feature. How much does it cost? What percentage of customers pay extra for certain features? Is there any overlap in functionality between competing products? Are prices increasing rapidly? Do competitors seem to be losing customers because of price increases?

Compare Products Side-by-Side

If you want to compare two products side-by-side, consider creating a spreadsheet template that includes columns for:

Product Name, Price per Unit, Number of Units Sold, Market Share, Customer Acquisition Cost, Marketing Spend Per Customer Acquired, Sales Team Size, Average Revenue Per User, Revenue Growth Rate, Cost Structure, Pricing Model, Key Differentiators, Features, Inventory Management, Support, Customization Options, etc.

You’ll then fill in the numbers based on publicly available data points. For example, you can pull revenue figures from CrunchBase, marketing budgets from LinkedIn profiles, customer acquisition costs from websites such as Kissmetrics, and so forth. You can also try collecting all these details in one place using Enkiai, an AI-driven Sales Intelligence tool without having to run through multiple sources in order to collect information about your key prospect. The goal here isn’t just to make sure you’re comparing apples to apples; it’s to ensure that you’re looking at comparable metrics.

Understand Customers and Their Awareness

It is essential to make some educated guesses about the customers of your competitors. You don’t need to know everything about every single person who uses your competitor’s product, but you should have an idea of what kind of user base they serve. Who are they targeting? Where do they live? What industries do they work in? What problems do they solve? Why would someone switch away from your competition? Which channels work best for acquiring new customers? Which marketing channels don’t work well? The answers will help you understand how different types of customers behave when making purchasing decisions.

Analysing Your Competitors’ SEO and SEM Efforts

Companies often use search engine optimization and search engine marketing efforts to attract more traffic to their website. These techniques include things like keyword research, link building, content creation, social media management, paid advertising campaigns, and many others. It may not always be obvious which tactics were employed by your competitors, primarily if they use multiple vendors. However, you can still learn valuable information through these methods. Here are some questions to ask yourself:

What keywords did my biggest competitors target with their SEO/SEM strategies? Did they focus on specific verticals or broad categories? If they targeted both, was one approach better than another? Were they successful?

How did they build links? Which high domain authority sites point back to competitors’ websites?

Which are their high ranking pages?

What does their content strategy look like? Which topics are similar or related to yours?

Do they use social media influencers?

Review direct competitor’s ads and landing page copy. How effective are they? Do they offer any value? Are there any mistakes made? Is anything missing?

Keep an eye on your competitors’ social presence.

For the type of offering you have, first, decide which social networks make sense. Then, do a competitive analysis on those platforms. You will analyse your competitors’ social media engagement levels, including likes, shares, comments, retweets, followers, guest posts, and other indicators. You can also find their frequency of publication and the types of content published. This way, you understand where your company stands compared to its competitors and the kind of content your target market segments love.

Analyse Customer Acquisition Channels

You want to see which customer acquisition channels worked best for your competitors. For example, email marketing works great for B2B businesses because it allows them to communicate directly with potential buyers. Facebook Ads might be ideal for consumer-facing products that sell via word of mouth on the flip side. Accordingly, you should know what kind of business model is most appropriate for your product before deciding whether to invest time into each channel.

Conclusion

Going to the market without a deep understanding of the market is like driving blindfolded. You could end up in a ditch. So, take this checklist as a starting point to get started. As you go along, keep asking yourself, “why am I doing this?” and “what else would I need to know about this topic?” Once you’ve answered all of these questions, then you’ll be ready to start planning your next steps.

We hope this article helps you dissect your competitors in many ways and gain valuable insights into your market landscape. As a result, you’ll be able to make informed business decisions about your product positioning, marketing and sales strategies to help you stand apart in the marketplace.

The post Startup Competitive Analysis Made Easy first appeared on Merkat Intellekt.

Fortunately, this is just a popular misconception; in reality, there are many ways for someone with no coding knowledge to develop technology products. Building a startup is not all about tech – it also requires managerial, marketing, leadership, sales, and financial abilities.

There are strong data points to back you up: not even half startup founders have a tech background. Startups like Airbnb, Tinder and Alibaba are not only industry leaders in their respective niches, but they also have one thing in common: they have non-technical founders.

Check out this blog post to find out how a non-tech founder can successfully develop a tech product. You will know:

• The success ingredients to build a tech product as a non-technical person
• How to develop your prototype and MVP if you are a non-technical founder
• Top mistakes you need to avoid
• Best practices to contribute value as a non-technical founder

The Success Ingredients to Build a Tech Product as a Non-technical Founder

You can bring your excellent management skills on board. If you are not a technical person, the best thing you could do is ensure product operations are on time. For example, market research, partnerships, marketing, recruiting, monetisation, distribution, and funding. Here are many skills that constitute the success formula to contribute & grow as a non-technical founder.

Research

The most crucial building block for a successful startup is research. Flawed research will backfire at any point in time. It is advisable to carry out market validation, along with market research, to avoid poor research. The core questions one needs to research on include:

• The pain you seek to decrease/reduce
• People who will use your product
• Monetisation model
• Existing solutions research

Nail Down Design

A founder needs to know how the app or product should look. It would be best if you had a mind map or sketches for mockups of the product. You can use Figma, Balsamiq, and any other prototyping tool to show your designers what the product needs to look like. Showing always trumps telling. Picking the right tools and displaying what you want doesn’t require a tech background.

Feedback matters

Feedback is important. Be open to receiving feedback about the idea, process, plan, marketing strategy, and more. Receive feedback as early as possible and build a system where people can share their feedback. Also, give feedback constructively to improve people, processes, and performance.

Find a tech partner

It is essential to find the right partner. You can do that by networking, finding similar-minded partners/vendors on LinkedIn, reaching out to colleagues or tech wizards you know. It would help bring someone on board as a partner who could share your values and resonate in line with your thoughts.

Be agile

It would be best if you are agile. You might face challenges in startup life. You need to rethink and evaluate options to see what works for you and the company in the best interest.

How to build your prototype and MVP if you are a non-technical founder

Turning an idea into a product requires grit and determination. One also needs to validate the idea to build a prototype and an MVP. A prototype is an early sample of your product made to show if the concept is feasible. You can show it as a simple landing page to introduce your idea. You can then create the working model (MVP) to know if the product is viable. MVP or minimum viable product is the first version of the software for your customers with features that will test its development and how it works. Having an excellent technical team or partner on board will help you build your MVP. So identifying the right technical team is the key if you are a non-technical founder.

• Document your value proposition and hire a dedicated engineering team or a freelancer
• Bring a technical partner with experience in working with startups on board to save you stress and time.

While this team takes care of the technical aspects, you can take care of the non-technical aspects.

Top Mistakes to Avoid

Hiring the Wrong People

Every startup is successful only if the team believes in the vision. You need to hire based on skills, beliefs, and those who will connect with your vision. It is the drive that will keep the team’s zeal high.

Communication

Your communication needs to be clear, on point and communicable. You cannot vaguely explain what you want to get built. Have some documentation ready, have good mockups built instead of vague sketches, other interfaces for ‘replication’ and more. These are all efficient ways to communicate with the team.

Learning tech to be ‘on par.’

To build your product, you don’t need to learn to code. You might be tempted to learn to code. However, it is a waste of time and energy as you can invest your time in other things that matter while offsetting the coding bit to others.

You can learn to code if you have the interest and aptitude for it. However, doing it only to build your product can prove to be a costly mistake.

Hiring a Single Developer

One great developer might sound fantastic. But, it’s not that nice. You might think it is cost-saving, has less effort and more. But, as a startup founder, you need to know that you must not put all your eggs in one basket. Build a team, have a vision and reduce the chance of burnout.

Best practices to contribute value as a non-technical founder

• Research, create, validate
• Form long-term bonds on mutual trust
• Take care of the core non-tech parts
• Empower technical team to a large extent
• Have original thought
• Network and seek out the best talent
• Assess how the work should be delivered
• Build the product visually to make it simpler for development teams
• Give critical feedback in a careful manner

Bottom Line

Anyone with a great idea and perseverance can build a product. So make the best of the talent out there, scout for the best talent/partner, look up on LinkedIn, and build your startup. Ensure the market fit is correct, the product fit is right, and an edge is offered over competitors. The success of companies like Pinterest, Airbnb and more is proof that your idea is your most considerable capital. Start small, reach out to experienced folks, build with them, test and validate your product, and scale higher.

The post Can a Non-Tech Founder Develop a Tech Product? first appeared on Merkat Intellekt.

1. Picking the Wrong Tech Stack

When you pick the wrong software stack, you may encounter poor performance of your application or website, difficulty with scaling up, and security risks. Depending on your type of business and your end goals, this can be a very costly mistake.

For example, if you are designing a website to quickly sell products through e-commerce, the best option would be to develop with open source platforms like Magento, WooCommerce…, instead of developing from scratch using the Angular / Java stack. (Or) If you are building a financial service app to make your customers’ lives easier, you need to ensure that security is never compromised and need to choose tech stack like Java which handles all security features well.

Another example could be, a long-time startup founder once told us about his experience with a new JavaScript library that he was excited to use in order to build in-app animations for his e-commerce app. The library was very well written and it did exactly what he wanted. However, when he went to test this new library with his internal development team, they found that the library was not responsive at all; it didn’t work in mobile Safari and it didn’t play nice with the built-in browser controls in iOS Safari. He had to scrap this idea and replace it with a different library. A costly mistake indeed.

Picking the wrong tech stack can be a risky move as it often leaves startups with little choice in the long term and tends to limit their capabilities.

Consider other implications: When you use a new stack, you’ll need more time to adapt. Developers are forced to read a lot of documentation, as well as take time to understand how the stack works. Or you might need to invest in training your team in order for them to become experts. All of this will have an impact on your go-to-market strategy.

Get the help of your trusted technology partner to think through these issues skillfully and make the right technology choice.

2. Investing in Features that Don’t Solve Your User’s Problem

Startups often fall into this trap when they are developing their product or service. Without a ‘product mindset’, you can easily get carried away with the next bright idea or shiny new technology and forget to deliver something meaningful to your early-evangelists / initial paying customers.

There’s another pitfall. Building a feature only because the competition has it. In reality, your customers might not have the problem that this particular feature solves. You’d only be wasting time, money and effort. So, it’s always recommended to scale back and test your assumptions with a minimum viable product and testing with your user.

3. Not Keeping Up with New Technology

Certain features of some technologies have technically advanced to the point where they can solve your customer problems better than you can. But they might not be as widely used by developers or other third-party companies as you’d like.

For example, a startup looking at creating an LMS application for students from various backgrounds and streams should ideally look at the Ionic Framework, which can help them to build the app accessible on all platforms such as Web, Desktop and Hybrid Mobile app. School and college users can have this dedicated LMS platform in their library and common students can use the same LMS platform on the web and mobile app.

On another note, if a customer wants to have a native mobile app for iOS and Android with native mobile features accessing mobile hardware such as camera, scanner, fingerprint etc… most JavaScript frameworks will not be an ideal choice and we need to use the native framework such as Android and Swift.

This trap can result in a lack of confidence to adopt new technologies, or even the entire industry, not realizing how current that technology is. This is a huge mistake for startups because it could lead to failure.

It is important that you stay up to date on the technologies that are relevant to the business model and the project at hand.

4. Starting Without a Proper Architecture

Sometimes, startups make the mistake of not starting with a proper fail-proof base architecture resulting in problems that were not anticipated during execution including technology incompatibility, missing out on a problem-solving technology or library, delaying the plans & affecting scalability in the future. This often results in technical debt wherein the cost of development overruns / exceeds the budget.

After proper architecture, tech scaling can be tricky, especially if you’re trying to do everything all at once & hit the market. And this is where a technology partner can help. When you partner with a like-minded expert & share your vision & plan, they can take on the burden of using appropriate technology as per the architectural design, even if it involves learning and applying new technology to ensure that the application is always able to scale.

When you make fail-proof architecture a key requirement from early on, you will be able to prevent growing pains related to tech later on.

5. Mismanaging Costs

One of the key success factors in a technology startup is how well you manage and foresee technology costs. You can miss out on many opportunities to save money simply because you don’t have a clear idea of the costs involved before your tech team takes on their first task. A good technology partner will help you understand these complex issues.

For example, when building a new web application, the cost of hosting can be expensive than originally anticipated. Also, ramping up people is usually expensive immediately after starting your company.

Non-obvious mistake startups make is: buying a lot of software, hardware and software licenses before they even start their tech company. Instead, you should focus on finding the best talent that can help you build your tech product better & faster.

In other words, startups can begin building their startups at a cheaper price and when they realize their needs increase, they should scale up with this new setup.

Conclusion

There are a lot of reasons why early-stage startups make the technology mistakes that we described in this article. The first step to avoiding them is to understand that you can be more effective with the capabilities of technology and growth. When you need help, there’s always an experienced and skillful technology partner that you can tap into. The easiest way to build a successful business is to avoid mistakes and offer a few uniquely valuable things for your market that no one is doing.

The post Tech Mistakes Your Startup Must Avoid to Succeed first appeared on Merkat Intellekt.

Good news is that there are many correct answers to choose the appropriate tech stack. The quality of the software has very low correlation to the technology stack used. I’ve personally seen great software craftsmanship, user-friendly interface with excellent performance and scalability, written in both NodeJS as well in old-school Java. I’ve seen a lot of bad code in many languages including the trending ones.

So before zeroing in on the technology stack, here are some of the prerequisites to be considered while choosing the right one for your business:

1. Cost: As a start up, you may likely have a shoe-string budget that is split between development and marketing. It is no secret that new technologies cost heavy spending, so being a start-up, you wouldn’t want to waste money. Thus, the most profitable thing for you to do would be to embrace open-source solutions. The best thing about open source is that the original source code will be available and open to the public, meaning you can use such technologies for free.

2. Community: Make sure that the technology you are going to use for a start-up has a vibrant and active community.  The community also indicates how rich is the technology for learning resources which would be beneficial for any start-up environment. Moreover, the community offers support for solving technical issues that a start-up might face.

3. Time to market: Speed has a significant advantage for ANY kind of a start-up. Why? Well, there are two reasons for this: First, somebody might be just addressing the same problem you are trying to solve. And you know, the first one to launch and address the issue will be the one to hit the jackpot; Second, a start-up budget isn’t endless, so the longer you are stuck in the developing phase, the more money you’re going to spend.

   As a Bootstrapped entity, our recommendation would be to choose technologies that are easy to implement, flexible and have a lot of beneficial third-party integrations for speeding up the development process.

4. Scalability: You are planning on growing your start-up and engaging with more users, right? Well, then choosing a programming language that is easily scalable is a must-have. What exactly does a scalable product mean? Well, a scalable application, whether mobile or web, should be able to process quickly multiple requests to your server. Say for instance, you have a hundred requests per day, your product may accommodate this traffic and function perfectly. But will it continue to operate the same as you begin to gain traction and get more requests? What if it crashes in the peak time? In order not to face such nightmare, use scalable programming languages and frameworks.

5. Project size: The right goal for a start-up should be not creating a Unicorn all at once right from the start, but to focus more on the problem that needs to be addressed step by step and look for gradual business growth. Obviously, at first, you are going to focus on creating an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) that will help collect the necessary feedback from your target earlyvangelists and build the features that are missing. However, your tech stack should have a promising future in creating not only a basic MVP but rather the grown-up start-up that your heart desires. At Merkat intellekt, we believe that every start-up and every business should do a grand experiment that tests product ideas against consumer demand. That’s why we advocate targeting a problem and then developing a minimum viable product to begin the process of learning.

6. Web vs Mobile: You will be able to decide only if you researched well on your target audience. Therefore, it is advisable to analyse your target audience especially your earlyvangelists and go ahead with a suitable type of product that meets the requirement.

In a nutshell

A technology stack should function as a tool to help getting your start-up up on its own feet. But the essential thing is not to forget about the quality in chase of time and economy otherwise, the result might be another dropped product that didn’t see the light of day. As a company, Merkat Intellekt has been helping start-ups succeed with our pool of expertise & I2IP Engagement model. We believe that in order to choose the best technology stack designed for your needs, you should consider using our services especially I2IP Engagement model for MVP that shortens GTM with minimal investment. Besides, it also can help you to exhibit your product to investors for raising funds.

The post Factors to consider while choosing your start-up technology stack first appeared on Merkat Intellekt.

1. Who is the consumer of your MVP? 
2. How do you pick the right set of features for your MVP? 
3. Given that your MVP will have only a few features, how do you 
   ensure that your customers stay invested and interested in 
   your offering?

Let’s deal with them one by one. 

Who is the consumer of your MVP? 

MVP by its very definition will lack the polish and the completeness of a mainstream product. Eric Ries points out in his book Lean Startup that an MVP is a learning vehicle to gather insights from your customers with least effort. Plus, your initial user is also willing to pay for access to your MVP.

Who in the world is willing to pay for a half-baked product, you ask.

Meet your “earlyevangelist”!

Steve Blank coined the term ‘earlyevangelist’ to describe the class of people who will help you to build an MVP. They have these five characteristics: they have a problem, they are aware of the problem, they have been actively looking for a solution to this problem, they have a workaround or a hack to deal with the problem currently, and they have already set a budget to solve this problem or can acquire it quickly.

If you are able to identify your earlyevangelists, your job is half done in this stage. Mind you, the size of this user need not be very high.

It’s your earlyevangelists that you should be building your MVP for and ignore everybody else at this stage. Because they already have a budget to solve the problem you’re attempting to, they’re ready to pay. This will give at least a little bit of extra runway as you expand and perfect your product.

Now that you’ve identified your early customer…

How do you pick the right set of features for your MVP?

Three things to keep in mind while answering this question.

1. We said earlier that the goal with your MVP is to learn. So, that translates as pick features, processes, or efforts that help you achieve that goal and ignore those that don’t help with the learning you seek.

2. You’ll pick only a handful of features at this stage. Some use the 80/20 rule that says pick the 20% features that have 80% impact on the outcomes. Twenty is just a representative number; depending on your situation, it could as well be 5, 30 or something else. Remember that you’ll get the chance to build your favourite features, it may not be in the MVP stage.

3. Talk to your earlyevangelist. This is the most crucial step in picking the features for your MVP. Since the earlyevangelist has dealt with your problem for quite a while and has even built a workaround to tackle it, it’s a smart move to tap into their knowledge and expertise. Mind you, pick the smallest or least complicated problem that the customer will pay you to solve.

By following these guidelines you automatically ensure that your MVP is on the right path and no IT efforts are wasted.

How do you ensure that your customers stay invested and interested in your offering?

The most common reasons for startup failure include: (1) Not the right technical team (2) Mis timed Product – insufficient planning, (3) lack of customer validation, (4) failure to execute, and (5) lack of cash flow.  Of these, the third reason is the one we think founders and executives miss most often. That’s because founders and executives tend to believe that if they build it, people will come.

But it doesn’t work that way. Customers don’t come to you. We go to them with intermediate prototypes that they can give feedback on. By involving even a handful of customers in product development right from the beginning, we can produce a product that’s perfect for an entire market.

Summary

By identifying your earlyevangelists and collaborating with them throughout the development of your MVP, you can amplify the chances of hitting the perfect minimum feature set not only solves a problem for these customers but also creates a natural monopoly for your startup.

The post 3 Questions to Ask While Scoping Out Your Minimum Viable Product (MVP) first appeared on Merkat Intellekt.