We have a great business idea, but how to turn it into a software product? Here are some steps that may give us some guidance.
Steps
- Inception
- What kind of product do we want to sell? What features does it offer?
- Do we want to build a product that generates revenue via subscription and maintenance, or the one for one-time sale?
- Market survey
- Does our product have unique features that are different from the current major players in the market?
- Is the market growing with new customers coming in?
- Minimum-Viable-Product (MVP)
- Turn customers’ feature requests into MVP tech spec.
- Evaluate each feature's impact to engineering hour cost ratio to prioritize high Return-On-investment (ROI) features.
- Synchronize with customers on the tradeoff between time and feature quality/quantity, and delivery deadlines.
- Design and implement a Proof-Of-Concept (POC) system.
- Set up an operational dashboard for logs, metrics, and alerts.
- Work with the design team to polish the user interface.
- Write documentation.
- 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.