If you believe in your idea and are willing to pay for its implementation with time and money, it is time to move on to planning and analytics. It is important to have a good understanding of competitors, the market and users’ desires in order to solve the problems that are relevant for them. There is a lot of work to be done. Apparently, this is the reason why at this stage some enthusiasm comes to naught, and many failed businessmen return to their usual business or office. If you are ready to follow, you must do the following.
- Understand and formulate a common goal and objectives of the project. To form hypotheses. Remember: correct problem building – 50% of its success.
- Disassemble references and define main competitors. Find similar projects in other countries and explore their way.
- Describe the startup business model using a special methodology. This is a table that documents the main ideas for project development: the problems you are going to solve and proposals for their solution, a unique selling proposition, target clients and other aspects. It is believed that such a description scheme is most suitable for a startup, since the entire project is based on hypotheses that still need to be tested. This means that it is impossible to calculate everything in advance and prescribe a detailed business plan. When creating a new product, you will have to brainstorm many times.
- Another useful method to evaluate the profitability of future projects – unit economy. Here you calculate whether a profitable unit of goods or whether one customer will benefit. If the result is positive, the startup has a chance of success. Always consider unit economics. Otherwise, you risk investing all your energy in a project that will not make money.
- Make a Customer Journey Map. It shows the customer’s movement towards the product, identifies problem areas and helps to increase customer loyalty and sales. Customer Journey Map is created on behalf of the customer. It looks like a graph with points that reflect customer interaction with the product.
- Choose a project development methodology.
A detailed analysis is needed not only to understand how a startup will earn, but also to clarify and fix all requirements for the functionality of the future product. There are no secondary things here to plan iterative development, calculate terms and cost of work on the project. If you want to simplify your task, it makes sense to use services for startup.