How to materialize it in roadmap and keep only what is important?
Idea is good, but the devil usually hides in the details and you want to uncover it ASAP.
MVP should help you assess demand and validate your product hypothesis.
In order to convert your idea to a list of action items – it is necessary to sum up what we are about to build – functional and non-functional requirements as well as known constraints. We should reflect there not only what we want to create, but also a list of things that we do not want to have in the initial version.
My methodology to build MVP is old as world – rooted in Aristotele’s 7 questions principles
to collect functional/non-functional requirements we firstly outline answers to several questions:
- Who – our users – roles/persona
- Why – unique value proposition = problem to solve (better than anything else at the market)
- What – solution to pressing problem. How to check if it is pressing? especially if there is no product yet? There are a number of ways – but my favorite one is Concierge MVP – you manually do all the things yourself to catch all nuances and how you will automate it with tech later and assess demand.
- When/Where – to document our market hypothesis and prepare for GTM
Then we explore existing constraints – usually resource based – time, budget, people, …
At the next stage we should zoom in into our solution and prepare a list of use cases per user role. No need to worry about complexity or implementation yet – just offload everything to have a clear picture how all things should work in an ideal world.
Functional wireframes – document every step of user’s journey for every scenario – it is not about design – paper’s memo with text or Miro’s stickers more than enough.
Then it is handy to better understand value vs complexity. What functions will be part of the initial version? We can grade every use case with two values – business impact and technical complexity. That is a right time to start thinking about a solution to uncover the volume of work required for specific tasks within a future product.
Note, that feature driven development might be too costly – hence better to stick with core functionality – when users come – you should have much more resources to extend your product.
It helps us to sketch several courses of actions – Hows – with various trade offs and still do one thing better than all other solutions.
Q: What if someone steals my idea?
A: Don’t be afraid to share it. Execution – is all that really matters.
“Stealth” startups are missing a crucial point – feedback from real users. The faster you start absorbing it and learn from real life scenarios – the more you have chances to succeed.
Patents take time and a lot of it! in addition to money.
NDA or non-compete might be more than enough to get things started rolling.
Building a successful company is about much much more than the idea
(С) YCombinator
Q: Should you hire a sub-contractors to build your dream?
A: Most likely not:
We don’t recommend hiring a devshop or contractor to build a v1
you do need a co-founder who can and will write code
(C) YCombinator
And at the same time an independent point of view can save you tons of time (hence money).
I’ve seen people spend months(!) fighting with no-code tools instead of weeks worth of development efforts or choosing not appropriate tech stack choosing short-term gains in exchange of unavoidable burden of maintenance during ideation phase.