start up product design Fundamentals

specifically for startup product design strategy , NON FUNDED, bootstrapped companies doing products. And if you are a techie , an engineer, all you will do is set out to incarnate your product idea into a master piece, becuase an enterperneur is so much obssesed with it. And above all you will have the technology EGO. And now you are in a perfect trap.

Just Dont do it,

look around your self, windows vista is crap, xp was all blue screens, motorola phones still hang and are super slow, and iphone is just hacked. Lets look at services my ISP broad band , servers are regularly down for some or the other reason, the bike dealer does not service my bike properly, and nor does my hardware agent fix my computer problems easily, he has to always replace something or the other.

what is the Observation , even best of the brands dont have perfect products and services. Name one product / service that perfect around you, very very rarely will you find one, so dont go on a leap jump when you start to build a product. what will happen is , you will surpass the deadline not in weeks but in months and this will only make the situation worse , because your sales cycle is now toooooo far. remember money has to come in quick and then you need to get going.

So design the product in versions, rather saleable versions and not based on features, version 1 out and sell sell, version 1 will annoy some customers , but thats ok ,"yes sir we are coming up with our next version and it will be just smooth", get the money in , set out saleable version 2 , sell sell sell sell sell sell, "Yes sir, we are just week's waiting for our next release and you would be really happy to see it."

This is the way one needs to go in a bootstrapped environment. we did this mistake on our first product design , trying to perfect it , every time we tested we found bugs and we solved them again tested , again solved them,over all added new features, this will dam continue, Look at microsoft selling windows. Look at them. they are just selling a bad product. And we are using it without complaining.

Cut down your sales cycle time, it will not matter if you have a few customers not happy and you embarrassed. its ok, keep going. perfect the product in stages while you sell.

cheers