The Startup Playbook: The Product is Just Part of What You’re Selling

Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from The Startup Playbook: Founder-to-Founder Advice From Two Startup Veterans available on Amazon here.

In the first part of our book, The Startup Playbook: Founder-to-Founder Advice from Two Startup Veterans, we broke down what it takes to be a founder so that you can do a gut check on whether it’s the right path for you. In the second part, we showed you how to develop a concept for a product and how to lay the right foundation to build a successful, fundable company. In the third section, we outlined how to get funding for your new company. Here, in the fourth and final section, we’ll discuss how you bring your concept to life and get your product into the hands of the people who want it the most.

If you’ve gotten this far, you’re likely looking past your first round of funding and are ready to deliver a great product to your customers.

We’ll kick things off in this chapter by discussing how to create your product. This involves expanding the business model you’ve developed in two dimensions. The first is to take your original product implementation – the one you developed a prototype for earlier in the business modeling process – and grow it into a full product, also known as your “offering.” This includes turning your prototype into a solid, final, and stable product that people will pay for, but it also consists of creating everything else required to make it a complete offering, including how you’ll provide support, deliver documentation, and handle customer feedback.

The second dimension for expanding your original business model includes projecting how your product will evolve in the coming months and years. This is your roadmap. It serves as an overview for how and approximately when you’ll add features. While you’d like to deliver everything you can at once, that’s impractical. You’ll almost assuredly be constrained by limited resources, and you’ll need to get the most important differentiating product features to market and into your customer’s hands as quickly as possible. To do this, you’ll need to incorporate feedback from your customers and consider what you can deliver now and what will have to wait for a later date. The timing may be determined by the urgency to deliver specific product functionality in order to collect revenue or by the need for customers to have a certain set of features before others you are planning.

Every product type will have varying development methodologies and specific processes that work best for your particular product and market. Rest assured, we won’t try to cover all of them. Instead, we’ll describe an overall approach to product development that is relatively universal.

The core of this approach is a continuation of what you did to create your initial business model and your first prototype product – using iteration and customer feedback. By listening to what your prospective customers have to say and quickly addressing those comments, suggestions, and feedback, you can converge on a solid and complete enough version of the offering that your customers will be interested in paying for. The difference now is that you’re iterating and evolving your business model with all the components of your offering, including your product, of course, but also the other components necessary to support the product and customer.

It’s important to note that at this stage, your goal is less about selling a product and more about satisfying a customer. While you’ll want to start maximizing revenue right away, this shouldn’t be done at the expense of broad customer satisfaction. Early in the life of your company, you need your customers for much more than the revenue they deliver. They are actually an integral part of your offering’s creation. Their engagement and feedback are vital to you having a successful initial product launch. They’ll help you fine-tune your offering so more customers will adopt it, and they may even become part of your marketing efforts as you expand your customer base. Your customers’ success with your products and their happiness with how they’ve been treated is a vital part of having a successful offering that gets broadly adopted.

Think about Amazon. While their revenues have grown over time, from the beginning, they’ve run the company with almost no profit. Part of their strategy has always been to be the market leader in price. As such, they’ve done everything possible to keep prices low, even at the expense of profit. Growing their customer base has always been their highest priority, and it’s one of the reasons they’ve been successful.

To get more information on outlining the creation of your offering, rolling out future features, expanding on what you deliver initially and much more, read the full book here, available to OpenView readers for $0.99 on Kindle now.