Launching a Software Product

Do you have a burning desire to become a founder of a tech company? Or do you have an idea for a great software? Here are 3 things you should know before launching your software product.

https://youtu.be/qGUqWEd136A

1. Creating software is a Long Game

There is this understanding that is seen in many people when it comes to creating a software product is that, they assume they can become millionaires or billionaires within 5-6 months of launching a software product.I’m sure you might have heard outlier stories of companies which created to sell that turned around and sold for a 10x return. These are the exception and not the rule.

As a founder, you have to be patient and focused. Specially during the time of development because your product would take some time to bring to light. You’ll need to develop a “why,” and a passion outside of just making money. You need to have long-term thinking.

While your product gets developed, look around for other things you can do during this time, including getting on the phone with your prospective customers and learning about them. Not just if the software idea will work for them, but really learning about their pain, issues, and how you can solve them. Remember, no one wants more software. They just want better solutions to their problems.

2. Validate Early, Often, and Quickly

When you develop your idea into a software, you’re basically creating a hypothesis of what the market wants. Your first step would be to learn your customer and your marketplace. Who are they? When do they have the pain you are trying to solve?  Why are they having this pain? Are there alternative solutions to this? And what does it cost them in terms of time, money or resources?

Once you have validated that your product has a need and people are willing to pay for it, it’s time to start building your MVP, or the Minimal Viable Product. This is the very base level product or software you can create to bring your product to early adopters.

To know what’s your MVP, you can follow these simple steps:

• Write down features you would think your software needs to have.

• Try to focus on the basic hypothesis or solution you are creating.

• Start removing features until you left with the minimum level of features that you need to launch the product.

3. Once your MVP is out aim not for hyper-growth, but progress!

If you are a first-time founder, you need to focus on the progress of the product, market fit, and how smooth your company is running, rather than just profit. The reason you don’t want to focus on hyper-growth until you’ve made it through this process is that this is actually a crucial learning time.

As you grow, you’ll start to incur new costs such as the following.

• Server expansion

• New development

• Add on features

You’ll need customer support and marketing help as your product grows and you onboard new customers. Therefore, you need to use this time to identify problems of your product, patch them and advance your product so it has a longer-term impact on the marketplace.