5 Essential Startup Tips After Building 100 Products

At Zartek, we love building products. Right from conceptualizing a solution for a problem statement to releasing it into the market, developing products give us great insight into the market and people behaviour.

The covid pandemic has accelerated technology adoption and we see a growing demand for technology products in the market. We have built around 100 products from a simple e-commerce website to face recognition SDK for entrepreneurs and SMEs. Working along with great founders has also made Zartek a better company.

Not all the products that we have built have succeeded. The success of a startup is based on multiple factors including the founding team, product-market fit, timing, persistence and many other factors. From our experience, here are 5 of our biggest learning and advice for people looking to create great products:

1. Document In-Depth

Documentation is an underrated skill. We have seen products failing because of a lack of clarity in the project scope. Lack of clarity in the features might lead to developers assuming features and building based on intuition.

Creating an in-depth document on the project scope of work helps to bring clarity into the project. Clear documentation of each deliverable at each milestone or sprint brings visibility to the product development status and pace. The team can create test cases for how each button should behave and its dependency on other feature. It will also help founders to understand the User Experience (UX)of the product.

2. Hire A Product Manager

The founder’s bandwidth could get consumed by fundraising, hiring, legal and other non-development departments in an organisation. A product manager is the mini CEO of the startup who would own the product development right from wireframing to taking customer feedback once launched.

Having a good product manager can help create the product roadmap. They work closely with development, sales, marketing, and support to ensure business case and customer satisfaction goals are met.

3. Understand Your Market

The most common reason for the failure of a startup is the wrong product-market fit. Founders need to understand the value proposition offered by the product and how they can reach out to their target audience.

A vernacular social commerce app has a better chance of success than an e-learning platform competing with Byjus. Identifying their target audience has helped our client Nursing Guru for a successful launch of a learning application targeting nursing students in India. Understanding the target audience also helps to focus on the right sales and marketing channels.

4. Build Fewer Features

Once the founder has zeroed in on the core feature of the product and target audience, build a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). Many founders build products with many features which may not add any value to their customers. But this can only lead to higher product development time, higher costs, more non-core features and increased product complexity.

5. Be Customer Obsessed

Once the product is launched in the market, be obsessed about how your customers are using the product. Many tools give insight into customer behaviour including the time spent, exit point and customer acquisition channels.

Last year our client SYC Inc. launched their audio and video streaming application called ShivYog Play. We witnessed how they would review each customer feedback in detail. These were aggregated and helped us prepare the product roadmap for future phases.

Summary

We are witnessing a big shift in how people use technology for life and work due to the pandemic. People rely on applications from ordering essential items to staying in touch with their loved ones on video calls. We are working with founders to help them build products and add value to their customers. If you are looking to build a technology product, please reach out to Zartek here.