Hey everyone, I'm a software developer and have been leading the development of an application which revolves around child behavioral tracking and pattern detection. Aside from picking a name for our new application and securing the domain we've been focused solely on prototyping the first version of the application. It involves quite a bit of data visualization challenges so we were eager to roll our sleeves up and start coding. The initial progress has been great, our technology stack is defined and our initial prototype is extremely elegant under the hood but we are currently at somewhat of a standstill. Having worked at agencies for the majority of my career I've been somewhat spoiled in that by the time I'm writing code everything from the branding to the personas, use cases, and wire-framing has been completed. We skipped all of that due to sheer idiocy on my part or extreme excitement for what we want to achieve, not sure which, probably both :o) My question is having jumped way ahead into the software development lifecycle, should we continue to sprint along until we get a MVP that we know we wont be happy with fairly soon or reign it in and enlist the help of both a UX and UI design resource and not worry so much about when the app can launch? Thanks in advance for any advice! -Mike Ellan
Hi Mike, there are lots of good answers here already, so I'll be succinct: One of my favorite marketers, Gary Halbert, liked to say that the only competitive advantage he wanted was a hungry crowd. You can have the worst recipes and stale ingredients in an inconvenient location with rude waitstaff and still build a profitable business if you've got a hungry crowd. So I'd recommend (re)reading The Lean Startup by Eric Ries, and giving yourself the goal of doing 100 customer interviews in 30 days. Focus on two simple questions: 1) "If I created this [your software], would you pay for it?" and 2) "What would it be worth to you?" Over the course of those 100 interviews, you may either validate your hungry crowd or it may disappear. Regardless, don't keep building unless you're 100% certain that people will PAY for your specific solution.
Answered 9 years ago
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