I met with the CEO of a startup last week to talk about her venture. She has a great idea and a lot of domain knowledge and industry contacts to back it up. She has very little experience with startups and is not technical. After she gave me an overview of the business, where it is at, and what the opportunities are, we discussed a number of things.
First, I introduced her to the 7 Revenue Streams and we looked at the opportunities in the business regarding revenue modeling. A number of very viable options are present, and as of that meeting she was unclear as to which revenue streams to take advantage of. I suggested a lot more research and customer development was in order. Along those lines, I also introduced her to the concept of a Minimum Viable Product; getting something into the customer's hands as quickly as possible, meeting just the absolute requirements of the customer.
After a quick email to check-in, she sent back the following message and I responded. I thought the exchange likely had value to others, so I anonymized the messages and posted them below.
Her email:
We made some tactical progress this week, and are planning to "interview" a couple of app development companies next week.
I'm considering taking on a "project manager" role and want to break up the "product" in to silos;
- Database
- Application
- User Interface (UI) / User Experience (UX)
Or, is there a " playbook" for this kind of thing that exists (for software startups/ SaaS)?
My response:
As far as the COO type of role and all of that.... my advice is to keep it simple. If it helps you manage your business and keep things humming along by categorizing things, then do it. But at this stage, you might keep that to yourself. Now is not the time to silo the team members... everyone needs to contribute as much as possible, even if that means doing things that are outside of their comfort zone. This includes you, too. ;-)
Unfortunately there isn't a playbook since all companies are different and have different resources available (money, talent, etc.). You have to know what the market needs, and then what you have available to meet those goals. Then, you need to figure out what you need to bring in in the form of outside resources after that. Product development in a startup is 180 degrees different than the way things are done in large companies... at this point, your product IS your business so make sure you treat it that way.
I think I understand where you are going with the "silos" approach, but remember that at some level its all related and should all be developed in a tightly-coupled effort to reach your business goals; not just technical specifications. Be careful putting the cart before the horse with too much software development before business development. Yes, this is what we do at Sixteen Ventures so this might come off as me trying to sell you, but believe me, I'm not.
Use us, use someone else, read books, Google the answers, or whatever... but please know that more companies fail, or fail to launch, because of "business" issues than technology problems. In other words, make sure you have your MVP fully scoped out (which means you should be interviewing more clients now than developers) before you engage with technical resources.
Remember that MVP isn't just Minimum (Technically) Viable Product, but Minimum (Commercially) Viable Product... how can you build something if you don't even know which of the many and varied revenue models you'll choose? In SaaS or web-based solutions, support for the revenue models must be built into the product so that is one big issue that you have not solved yet.
In the end, you'll save time and money ensuring that you are building *just* what the market wants and nothing more. It also allows you to "fail faster" by only spending time and money on a minimal feature set and getting that in front of paying customers. If you missed the mark, you aren't out too much in both time and money and you can quickly iterate to get what the customer really wants back in front of them.
Just my $0.04 (I think there was more than two cents worth of info there)... Sorry I didn't have a better answer for you. I wish there was a machine where I could feed some specs and out would pop a viable growth company... still working on that!
Take care,
Lincoln
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