We have a business idea, and that's super cool! Now let's think about how to turn it into a product. Here are some steps that may give us some guidance.
Steps
- Inception
- What kind of product do we want to sell?
- What feature does the product offer?
- Does the product generate revenue via subscription or one-time sale?
- Market survey
- Does the product have a unique feature that is different from the current major players in the market?
- Is the market growing with new customers coming in?
- Minimum-Viable-Product (MVP)
- Prioritize the features based on impact to engineer hour cost ratio and get a list of functional/non-functional requirements, achieving high Return-On-investment (ROI).
- Synchronize with customers on the tradeoff between time and feature quality/quantity, and delivery deadlines.
- Design and implement a Proof-Of-Concept (POC) system.
- Iteration
- Collect feedback about the MVP from customers to quickly iterate and improve.
- Give customers 7-day free trial, plus monthly and yearly plan.
- Ask for the reason of unsubscribing to learn which direction to move forward and improve retention rate.
- Conduct gradual deprecation by marking a feature as deprecated in earlier versions before its actual removal.
Mindset
- Use theory to drive implementation, and use implementation to refine theory.
- Make creative destruction.