Tips for Successfully Managing a Software Startup

1/16/2023

Founding a startup and efficiently managing personal capacities can be challenging, especially if you are new to the startup industry. The following tips may be useful in this endeavor.

Don’t Start Off Developing Too Early

Even when you’re 100% sure your next project is a groundbreaking innovation, validation of that idea is crucial. Unless the project is small and quickly implemented, you shouldn’t start developing before your idea is fully validated. Your time is a valuable resource, and you don’t want to waste it on a project that can’t be realized due to unforeseen technical, legal or other boundaries. Always validate that the product you think of can actually be implemented with the available development and operative resources.

Additionally think of a working monetization including the validation that people are really interested and willing to pay for your product. You can use surveys and smoke tests to find that out. However, do not solely rely on surveys, as people tend to chose „I would pay [x]/mo for that“ much more often then they actually would.

What is a Smoke Test?

A smoke test is a type of limited user acceptance testing used to identify problems and validating user interest early in the development process. It involves testing a portion of the system and making sure it is working and accepted by the audience as expected.

A simple smoke test for a SaaS business would be a „fake“ sign up flow on your website. Although your product isn’t even developed yet, you can let users sign up or start a free trial for your product. At the point where the user would get into your web app/product, he is being redirected to e.g. a wait list page instead.

This way you can validate the interest in your product the most. Using surveys, obvious waiting lists on your website, etc. you never know if the users would actually use or sign up for your final product. Therefore, a smoke test is the best approach for a meaningful validation.

You can even take this one step further - if you want to validate the willingness to pay for your product, you can use a dummy payment flow, and just when the user would need to enter his payment details you’ll jump to a wait list or info page again. At that point you can validate that the user would have actually paid for your product - which is one of the most important validations of your business model.

Focus on the Most Important Features of Your Product

When it comes to building the app or web app for your startup, focus on the most important features. There may be many features that you think would be really beneficial to your product, but that doesn't mean that it would be as valuable for your target audience. And additionally it might not be mission-critical for your product and hence might be left out for first versions of your product and especially the MVP (Minimum Viable Product).

Better have a small working product that covers the few but most important features for your business model, than a half-baked version of the product you planned on having in 3 years. According to the lean management approach it is very important to develop demand-based and not controlled by your own feelings or assumptions.

Hence, start off developing an MVP and then find out what the users want the most, and only develop that. Feel free to either do interviews with your early adopters, use a feature voting system or a simple survey to find out what your users want.

Don’t Be Too Detailed in the Technical Implementation

As a software developer and designer, you may have high standards and expectations regarding the design, responsiveness and quality of the software, but try not to be overambitious.

It doesn’t necessarily get you anywhere when you have a beautifully crafted, native and animated application with a 100% unit test coverage, when you spent twice the time you would’ve actually needed, or don't even finish in time at all. There might be exceptional cases, for example if the USP of your product is that it’s just built better than all the competitors, or if your startup is VC backed before the actual implementation, and you have a lot of developer resources already. But otherwise, focus on the most important things and don’t be too shy to implement things quick and dirty.

Unless your product is located in a security critical business, you should also leave out complex unit or acceptance tests for the first versions of your product. After all, you first need to really validate and grow a user base before you have to focus too much on stability. If your MVP with 10 active daily users has some bugs or maybe even downtimes, nobody really cares, and you also won't lose too many customers.

Use the Right Tech Stack

Before building your product you’ll have to make decisions on what platforms to support and which languages and frameworks to use. Don’t just pick the ones you like the most, but carefully assess which ones are working best for your individual product.

One of the biggest decisions is whether to focus on a web-based application for desktop devices or a mobile app. In your validation phase, get to know your audience and find out what devices they use or would primarily use your product on. Nowadays people do a lot of stuff on their mobile devices. And even though you might think that your product makes much more sense to be used on a desktop computer, carefully validate this before making assumptions.

Also consider the suitable marketing approaches for your product. If it works best with Instagram influencers, it is important to either have a mobile app or a responsive website as most people will be using mobile devices when they see your ad/product placement.

Next, you’ll also have to decide on the tech stack. Don't simply pick the ones you favor; instead, assess which ones are best for your product. Of course if you’re working alone and are an excellent iOS Swift developer and have no clue about JavaScript, hybrid and Android development, it’s a safe call to work with that if somewhat suitable for your product. However, being future safe you should avoid using frameworks, languages or other technologies that are outdated or so sparse that you wouldn’t find suitable developers for.

It’s a difficult decision to make, but you have to find a balance between personal skill, target audience fit, developer availability and maybe industry related boundaries. When building technical niche products you should also consider the availability of libraries in your chosen language for your specific use case.