The Startup Lifecycle by Gregory Shepard

Author:Gregory Shepard
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781637744338
Publisher: BenBella Books
Published: 2024-06-28T00:00:00+00:00

The Significance of a Prototype

As Mark Twain once said, “Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection”! I must say, in all my years, I have never seen any mistake more often than founders not getting the product in front of customers before it’s done.

Imagine you’re selling oatmeal cookies. Sure, you could bake five thousand cookies and pile them up in your store, but if it turns out nobody likes your recipe, you’ll be left with thousands of unsold and unsellable cookies. Further, you’ll have no ingredients left with which to try chocolate chips or macaroons. It’s far better to start off baking only a dozen or two batches, watching the customer ask questions and taste them, so you can see whether customers actually like them.

You might find your recipe is a winner—or you might find that your customers really want chocolate chip cookies, not oatmeal, which you may end up feeding to the trash can. As you will learn along your journey, you can turn that kind of initial misalignment into a learning experience rather than a startup-killing catastrophe. Instead, you will have an opportunity to improve your product, serve your customers better, and build a better and more durable startup.

I’ll tell you a story that occurred while I was in the process of writing this book. I have been building my Visionaries platform to help founders get through the minefield of obstacles, some of which my team and I have worked through over the past twenty years. I recall telling my team at one of our startups that I wanted to start demos on Monday. The response was almost the same from all those involved: “OMG, we are not ready!”

I went to the product and engineering team and said, “It’s happening.”

We started doing demos that Monday and found that the market feedback was already better than anything they had seen, and we were much closer to a prototype and even MVP than we thought! I cannot stress this enough. Get the product in front of prospects as soon as you can. Please, in the name of all that is holy, get the product in front of your user advisory board and prospects before you even think it’s ready. You will thank me for it!

In Phase One (Vision) of the Startup Science Lifecycle, you will put your vision through a validation process, as well as establish there’s already a potential market for your product in conjunction with the objectives in creating your North Star. In effect, you’ve asked the right people (starting with your user advisor board) whether they’d buy a product that delivered a particular kind of value, and they’ve told you they would.

In Phase Two (Product), the next step is to build out a prototype solution, and a minimum viable product, to show you can deliver the value you’ve promised. Basically, you’ve sold people on the idea of your product; now you need to check that your customers still love it when they’re actually experiencing the minimum viable product.

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