Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

What do you say?

One for the low fuel LED!

You are never too busy to refuel your car. Fortunately there is a low fuel indicator in your car. However in a start-up, there are no such clear indicators. You may end up facing an unexpected halt in your journey if you fail to observe any of the following key indicators. You may be too busy to look at these blinking LEDs, but keep an eye on these indicators before they halt or delay your journey unexpectedly.

Hiring delays

Imagine a situation when your start-up has bagged new customer orders. Your initial product has got good response in the market. There is some budget to get couple of guys on board, but you and your team members are fully overloaded with work. You should utilize this opportunity at the earliest. Plan to get some good guys on board. Most of the rock-star performers (including you) are solo contributors and get scared with the idea of assigning a crucial piece of task to someone new. They don't trust anyone to do the critical job. Some of them are just too busy to lead the lengthy hiring process. Yes, the hiring process is a tedious one and often leaves one frustrated. But there is no substitute to this method. To grow, you will need to increase the team size. Delegate your work to someone, prepare your back-up and most importantly trust other people. Get out of this hiring fear before you loose the opportunity. 

The hiring process should be kicked-off immediately. You should always be in the hiring mode and keep looking for good candidates. Unless you prepare to grow, the chances are bleak that your dream of growth will ever succeed.

Too busy for team meeting

Imagine another situation, you have got a team of talented people to complete the project in the limited time and resource. Every one is super motivated enough to work sincerely. There is no need of micro-managing your team. Moreover, you are too busy running from one customer/investor meeting to another to develop strategy or meet new customers. In all this frenzy, it is easy to assume that the work keeps going on even without a sync-up. Obviously, everyone understands the need of the hour and is capable of handling it.

It is a fatal assumption that can derail your growth prospects. A regular, may be weekly or monthly, sync-up is needed within as well as across the teams. In the fast changing dynamics of a start-up, things change frequently, priorities are revised and expectations are redefined. Develop and maintain a mechanism to have regular sync-ups at all levels to ensure an aligned growth. Without clear direction all your efforts may go waste.

Overlooking quality & documentation

Finding critical bugs in a product requires testing hundreds of test conditions. Every bug fixing triggers another round of testing. In most of the cases, up to 40% of the product development time goes into quality control. Apart from allocating time in your product launch plan, you need to allocate some budget for test set-ups, bug tracking tool and dedicated testing team. In a cash starved start-up, this budget is very hard to justify. However, you can not afford to have unhappy customers. Setting up a separate quality process, bug tracking tool and testing team go long way in securing satisfied customers. To start with, define a minimum quality guidelines and adhere to these guidelines.

Apart from bug tracking and quality guidelines, documentation is another way to improve quality of your process and products. In a rush of creating MVP, documentation is generally overlooked. As the product evolves, some pieces of code/features just stick with the design because no body remembers the logic behind it. The small piece of code written for a quick PoC soon becomes a messy architecture with several loop holes. Testing such product becomes a mammoth task. The testing and development iterations keep delaying the product launch and ultimately you end up having frustration across all the teams. It is very important to maintain proper documentation at all the stages.

Postponing unproductive chores

Having sufficient support staff is a luxury that generally no start-up can afford, at least in the initial days. While you are assigned to develop a critical product, you also need to worry about several other unproductive chores. Setting up networking, fixing wiring/networking issues, paying bills, collecting payments, clearing bills, buying office stationary/furniture/grocery, maintaining lab, buying tools, book keeping, scheduling interviews, appraisal etc. The list is quite long. Your to-do list of unproductive chores have the tendency to getting filled very fast. You are over qualified to do most of these tasks. However, there is no way to keep pushing them under the carpet.

The best way to handle these unproductive tasks are to clear them regularly. Keep you desk uncluttered. Never let those unnecessary bills piled up on your desk. Find a slot in your schedule to complete these tasks on frequent days. Delegating these tasks to your team is another way to share burden as well as responsibility.

Ultimately it doesn't matter what car you drive or where do you want to reach, you can't keep ignoring that blinking low fuel LED...

*Image courtesy of supakitmod at FreeDigitalPhotos.net 

One for the Bumpy Ride!

The only certainty about running or working in a start-up is that one finds an uncertain situation round the corner very often.  When people say that ideas are worth only 1% and remaining 99% of the success relies heavily on the execution, unfortunately they are true. So if you think that you have a very good idea that can make the next Google, Flipkart, Amazon or Facebook, consider that it's just the beginning of a bumpy ride. What else one should have, apart from having a good idea, to create a good product? Lets explore.

In the quest for survival, a start-up faces several types of issues. The most of them are not directly related to the basic skill sets of the employees of the company. It requires one to think out of box or apply some quick fix. In my past 5 years of experience at a start-up, I have observed that the problems of one type or another keep popping up.  For example, initially we struggled to create an attractive GUI. Our product was good and feature sets were attracting all the right customer base, but we were failing at a good GUI. Once the GUI part was controlled by outsourcing the design part, other challenges popped up. These challenges were mainly related to product aesthetics, stability, customer support, finding bigger office, selecting manufacturing unit, cash-flow, vendor management and so on. Every time, we zeroed in on one key issue to fix, we got a new one. We always remained (and still is :) ) in the fire-fighting mode. Unfortunately, there is no generic solution that can be applied to all the problems. The frustrating rule of 3 is applicable on all types of start-ups. Everything is either three times more or three times longer - either one needs three times more capital than one planned for it, or it will take three times longer to reach the milestones, or it will take three times more sweat & tears that one is prepared for.

However one strong pattern has emerged. A start-up can survive - not just on good technology, huge cash pile, good product or strong customer base, but only by the never-say-never attitude of its employees & founders. Being one of the first employees of the company, I have the opportunity to work with many employees, and everyone has contributed in a unique fashion. People pushing the limits, solving a tough looking problem in a simple way, trying very hard and failing, doing everything to make it work. Most of them are still part of the company, and some have left, but the culture remains intact. We deal every problem with the same passion. Team work wins over hard times.

A start-up is defined by its founders & employees. Apart from the obvious focus on developing your product or service, you should also pay attention to your work culture. Always be cautious on hiring a new person and don't hesitate to let one go, if he/she doesn't fit into. Keep looking for diverse skill sets and fresh ideas to welcome on board. As you grow, make sure that your employees also grow and the culture of solving a difficult problem remains intact, because as one has rightly said success is a journey and not a destination. And the journey to convert your good idea into a good product is not possible without passionate team members.

Reference:

• 'The frustrating rule of 3' - Ganesh Krishnan, founder of Tutorvista.com
• Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net