Five Considerations When Starting Your Tech Product

Thinking about building a mobile app? Think you can solve the world's problems with blockchain? Are you sure your market will use your product? Will they pay money for it? How do you know? Are you ready for the costs of building, maintaining, and evolving tech?

As you start thinking about building out a new tech product, there are a number of considerations you'll want to make. Here are five quick ones we often talk with clients about when we first meet with them.

1. Keep it simple. Technology is expensive. One way to reduce costs is by building less. Most of the time (all of the time), you don't actually need what you want to build, or it changes over time because your market or their problem changes.
2. Just start. Stop talking about it. Stop researching it. And start. If you can't find a developer to help you at the beginning, do it yourself. Start with a website before building an entire app. Start with a landing page to collect emails before building an entire website. Squarespace is a great option here. Do the work you want to automate with tech manually at first. For one or ten customers, you can do that. It might be work, but building a business and a product is just that. Hard work.
3. Do it yourself. Start with low or no technology. Being able to show your solution, even in it's most minimal form, you'll have better success at attracting top talent for when you are ready to build the technology. You'll have better success when talking with potential partners and investors when they see you've done the pre-work and have people using it or committed to using it. It shows that you're already learning before even building.
4. Think now about how your product will make money. Even if it's "for good," even if that makes you uncomfortable, your product and business need to be sustainable to continue to serve your customers. Also, tech, building it, maintaining it, supporting it, and evolving it is not cheap.
5. Sell it before you build it. By starting with low or no tech, doing it manually, you can test your basic idea and your market first. Before spending a boatload of cash. It will help you narrow in on what the problem actually is, a solution, and who your market is. Did you know that DropBox was started with a video posted to HackerNews? Overnight they added 70,000 people to their beta list.

Maybe you don't even need a mobile app. Maybe you need a simple website. By considering these, you'll be setting yourself up to be more successful when you do actually need technology.