How to Transform Your Ideas into Software Products: A step-by-step guide for validating your ideas and bringing them to life! by Vijayashanker Poornima

Author:Vijayashanker, Poornima [Vijayashanker, Poornima]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Femgineer
Published: 2015-01-21T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

What to Put in a Prototype

Here’s one of the most common stories I hear from people who reach out to me: "I'm really stuck, I'm tired, and I'm about to burn out. I've rebuilt this product 6 times and we've had 10K people download it (or 10M people sign up), but we just cannot monetize. I don't know what to do or what to build to get people to pay for our product. "

So then I ask them 2 very basic questions: "What is your value proposition? And, what problem are you trying to solve? "

Their response is a head scratch, followed by, "What do you mean, we built this thing. " And they point to the product.

I dig in a little deeper: "Well, what problem does it solve? "

They're just not sure. It's composed of a lot of features.

So then I move on and ask them, "Who are your customers? "

And they respond with something generic like, "Ugh, women... "

That's when I have to tell them, "Stop building! Don't build anything more. "

Of course, they are baffled. "You're an engineer, why are you telling us not to build anything?"

"Your problem is not that you don't know how to build a product or that you don't know how to get people to try it out. The problem is that you don't know how to convey the value of your product to people. So you don't have an engineering problem, which is why I don't want you to build anything more. I want you to think about your value proposition. "

You might in a similar situation if you’ve already built your product: you don’t know how to monetize your customers. Or, you might just be stuck trying to attract them.

Let’s take a step back and identify the true value you can provide to your customers. This will help you decide what to put in a prototype and help you run experiments to learn whether your product idea meets customer needs

Section 1

What’s your value proposition?

Before building anything, it's important to understand who the early adopter of your product is and what your product’s value proposition is. A value proposition is a certain experience or benefit that a customer can expect to receive from your product or service in exchange for money.

Let’s t Notice that this definition does not include, "My product has XYZ feature. "

Let’s t Here are a couple examples of value propositions from BizeeBee:

Stop losing money on expired memberships! (Revenue is the value proposition here.)

Use a simple solution to avoid losing money on expired memberships. (Revenue and simplicity are the value propositions.)

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.