Product Strategy of your Startup
A successful product must connect with the personal values of targeted customers. A product experience includes the expression of the product and the interaction with the product. The three main ingredient of any product are,
- Usefulness of the product that enhance or ease some activity or process
- The product is easy to use and remains consistent in use throughout its expected life
- Desirability of the product.
The more complex the product and larger the business, the harder it gets to deliver on all of the above. Developing a useful, easy-to-use, and desirable product that creates a meaningful connection between the brand identity of a Startup and the needs of a customer is hard enough. Creating that relationship and making a profit is the major challenge. Finding the optimum position between mass production with low margin and smaller-run niche markets at higher profit margin is a challenge startups must contend with. Like how low Harley-Davidson can go with the cost of their motorbikes before they negatively affect their brand of exclusivity?
The product, the customer, and the product experience must be the core throughout your entire Startup. You and your entire team must,
- Focus on a shared understanding of the targeted customers
- Respect one another and recognise how each area of the Startup contributes to the product experience for each and every stakeholder
- Recognise that their approach, attitude and end product all form the basis for the product and Startup brand image
- Recognise that the value-base and affiliated qualities the customer seeks must drive the product development process
In many cases, a product becomes the basis of a Startup, while in other situations; new products are developed within an existing Startup. There is a variety of alternative strategies that startups can consider when developing a brand identity for a new product, like,
- How a Startup can develop a new and broader identity?
- How a new product can become the basis for a new Startup?
- How a new product in an existing Startup can bring about a whole new line of products?
- How a Startup can use a flexible identity connecting a core across all products while still maintaining the USP of each of the products?
Remember that an effective product development process will bring together your Startup mission and brand image to the product and targeted customers. Your Startup team must understand the needs of the user, desired user experience and how that understanding translates to product criteria.
Focus on creating value opportunities though your products. All the very best for your product development process!
5 Key Bootstrapping Strategies
I have been a bootstrapper from day one since I got bitten by the entrepreneurial bug. I learnt important key lessons from my first Startup that I applied in the next to optimise the chances of its success. Based on my learning, am sharing the following strategies for bootstrapped startups,
1. Network hard and get connected, but work the ways on your own. Look for business mentors, hire experts, and the rest ‘Do It Yourself’. Remember that all other kinds of help and support costs money that you don’t have. It’s fine that you are a rocket scientist, a specialist, but you can train yourself to do marketing, sales pitch, finance, websites, and other work that will help your Startup grow.
2. Rent for office space is one of the biggest expenses for any Startup. Till you start making money from your business, try to work from a home office. Rent that garage the Bill Gates way. Work virtually. Spend the rock bottom minimum money to keep your Startup running. Look for innovative ways through which you can cut down your costs, be it setting up fees or the operational costs.
3. You don’t need to start taking huge CXO salaries the moment your Startup starts making money. Take out survival money and re-invest the rest of profits back in your Startup. Before you get into the bootstrapping mode, plan your survival finances for 12 months, instead of the mythical 6 months break even period. Believe me, in most of the cases you are not going to see any real money coming to your Startup in its first year.
4. You will have to constantly find ways to market your Startup creatively. Use social media to its fullest. Don’t go for the glittering marketing expenses, which are huge and will eat up your initial money that may not bring results to keep you and your confidence afloat for a long time. Either find interns from graduate schools around who can do marketing for you through twitter, Facebook, e-mail, LinkedIn etc or just do it yourself.
5. They key to any bootstrapped Startup is perseverance. If you don’t have patience and want to strike the jackpot from the word go then either you have to be the luckiest person around or you are living in a utopian world. For the real people, steady persistence with focussed course of action leads to desirable results and success.
So keep a tight lid on your costs, trust your gut feeling, and march forward with all the passion in your dream. The growth may be slower with bootstrapping, but it’s all yours. All the very best in your endeavors!
For start-up branding often takes a backseat to all of the other considerations — such as fund raising and product development. This is unfortunate, for a company’s brand can be vital to its success. Getting your product/service noticed is one of the most essential steps in building a successful Startup. Promoting your startup isn’t the mysterious and magical process some consultants will have you think. Customers experience your brand in numerous ways: products, packaging, price, marketing, sales personnel, etc. It all starts with your unique logo that defines what you do.
Your brand strategy is how, what, where, when and to whom you plan on communicating and delivering on your brand messages. How you advertise your Startup & products also is a part of your branding strategy. To start with, you must try defining your brand strategy in terms of your Startup mission, USP of your products/services, qualities that you want your target customers to associate with your Startup, among others.
The Essential Steps
- Have a brilliant logo for your startup and place it strategically everywhere.
- Be precise and tactical in your brand messaging.
- Get a tagline for your Startup/product, which should be meaningful capturing the e essence of your brand.
- Design business templates for marketing material and be consistent with the basics like color scheme and logo placement.
- Deliver what your brand promises. This is key to building the brand loyalty and converting single users into loyal customers of your product/service.
Brand goes beyond your marketing efforts. Your brand is only as good as the people behind it and the people in front of your customer. Evaluate your consistency in delivering your brand across all aspects of your business. In doing so, you will strengthen your brand equity and position your Startup for greater success.
One of the most important social structures that entrepreneurs need to deal with is the Justice framework ! It is pretty much the human over-ride or backup for the social concept of fairness and trust. Every day we hear of stories about how trust built up great companies, while the same trust is broken for little, corrupt gain in other spheres of life. So here is a take on how entrepreneurs should make use of this framework call justice
- The first thing to do for any entrepreneur is to get a CA and Lawyer as his friend ! They are a valuable asset at all times possible be it filing taxes, creating a company, ESOPs and so on … The friend aspect is to make sure that you build a longer term relationship which should benefit both the parties.
- Always get a company or LLP registered, most people seem to neglect this aspect. In this age when you can start an LLP online, I see no harm in spending small money to get a real legal entity in place. Companies come and go, but its most important to show that you are a legal entity here to stay [plus, it makes getting a bank account really easy]
- Try signing an NDA with most parties, it is a show of good faith and creates a positive atmosphere for interaction. To be honest, non-competes and NDAs are weak in India .. rarely does any company enforce them as well. Though, longer term its a great habit when you want to become a global company !
- Always sign contracts, no matter how small the contract value it is important to have some proof that you had started to do some work ! It is agreed that most startups are built up on trust, but you should not cut corners on legalities.
These are some easy tips to keep in mind, business should come first and not emotional trust. In such situations, instinct can actually become regret ! So all the entrepreneurs out there, keep working and signing those contract ….
So you are planning a business and plan to get started soon ! This article is all about how can you get started with technology to help your business grow …
Lets look at some of the things, that most startup should think about doing early on
- Getting some cheap computers ! Today, you do not need to by IBMs and HPs to get quality hardware, it is easy to get cheap laptops and assembled servers. My own machine is a eMachine laptop bought for INR 22,000 ! Now that is a steal. – http://www.tvpdirect.com.au/Acer-eMachine-E727-Laptop-P26137.aspx
- Get paid version control [SVN or git] online, this saves you a lot of future hassle if you are an internet company. You can use github or unfuddle ! [IT companies only] – https://github.com/
- Get project management online ! This would be key, most companies do not realise the benefits of using a collabboration tool. Good example to use is Basecamp. http://basecamphq.com/
- Get your site done in wordpress or drupal ! Use a CMS for your site, its easier to manage longer term. Just putting up static pages limits your imagination and you lose out on SEO a lot of times [CMSes have a lot of good built in SEO features]
- Use google apps to setup you emails ! If you really want to use quality email interfaces, you must configure your company [however small] emails with google apps. It will make you life very easy and zero maintainability on top. – http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/group/index.html
These were some quick tips to getting your shop in shape real quick, you do not need to spend a lot ! The idea is to spend it correctly. My current laptop technically paid for itself real quick, so like any business you should be able to fully utilize the hardware that is being procured.
