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.