| So far a few: 1) Don't spend money and time on things you don't need or will need earliest in a few months from now. 2) Regardless if you have a brand-new idea for a product or try to improve an existing product/process, you need to validate first that you follow the right path. I think a light-weight solution like the idea behing the Design Sprint (http://www.gv.com/sprint/) is a good option. Don't go off and try to build an MVP. You will waste time and money (again). Even for a simple and functional MVP you will need spend lots of time to build a frame around it. 3) If you intend to improve something existing in an industry, come up with something unique about your product first (compared to your competitors). This will help you to get initial traction. Again, you need to validate this particular unique feature before you start building. My previous startup endeavours failed all because we/I did not follow those rules. One time we were mostly building away because we thought we know the industry (worked many years in the same space before) and had a lot of wrong assumptions. This combined with wrong spending behavior made everything fail very quickly in the end. From the outside we just copied our competitors and even our product was superior and looked better and gave part of our business customers a much better experience, we did not attract enough customers (as in users), because there was no obvious reason for them to use us vs our competition. In another attempt I just got too deep into the tech and totally lost focus on what I was actually trying to solve. Lots of wasted time (except for experience). |