Presenting your start-up product to potential investors and partners is a great moment all start-up entrepreneurs work hard to prepare. You know that everything must fit perfectly. You work on your business idea, licenses, reports, images, prototypes, and, most importantly, know strategic numbers by heart.
However, sometimes many brilliant minds end up missing these opportunities for a few reasons. One of them is because the angel investors feel reluctant about investing in products they consider “non-validated”.
What happens is that many technology creators focus on product engineering, but they are not business experts. They put a huge amount of energy, time and dedication to building and testing their products. Nevertheless, in the end, they still miss the market approach that is essential to scale their business.
What are the important steps to validate a start-up business and product?
First of all, what is the so-called validation? We can say that validation is the process that proves your business and product viable, scalable and profitable. As there are numerous conditions to achieve this standard, this process includes several stages.
The final conclusion if your validation meets que minimum requirements or not might also vary, according to the investors’ perception. The more data you gather about your product, the more your chances increase to conquer positive assessments from investors:
1) Market and Niche Research:
Planning and conducting the product acceptance.
2) Product Increments:
Design, user experience and prototyping project management.
3) Prototype Testing:
Checking how the product works, troubleshooting.
4) Tests With Users:
First sales, volunteers, crowdsourcing, user priorities studies.
5) Sales Channels Testing:
Improving the main strategic sales channel, and a few secondary ones.
6) Unique Selling Proposition:
Check if the product is unique and hard to be imitated, and if its purpose is valuable.
7) Suppliers Solutions:
Proving you have alternatives of suppliers.
8) Price Studies and Financial Projections:
demonstrating you are competitive and profitable.
9) Investment and Scalability Plan:
Presenting your growth project and schedule to use investments strategically and scale operations.
But how to plan and manage such a complex marathon, even before receiving support from the investors? Well, GitScrum project management can help a lot. It’s important to organize all this initial journey for your business. With the right tool, you can accomplish all it takes, obtain help from partners and still keep focusing on your core activity – developing innovation.
Start-ups are using smart project management tools like GitScrum to validate their product ideas.
How can the Agile methodology help start-ups in the validation process?
Agile is an iterative methodology that helps teams deliver value to customers faster and constantly. So, it is focused on prioritizing work that is relevant to users, collaboration, and constant improvements.
The GitScrum Agile Manifesto – Apply Agile Principles to help your validation process
One: Satisfy clients through continuous delivery of valuable products.
This principle relates with the target buyer personas your company is willing to deliver products to. You must check if you can continue to deliver value after the initial sale, with additional services. Thus, your idea has more chances to succeed.
Investors see a possibility of recurring income on products that offer this potential. Besides showing your product is this good, you can demonstrate how you plan to do so, using the Agile methodology on the Scrum framework with GitScrum’s project management features.
Two: Motivate people, grant autonomy and they will do the job.
Lean on GitScrum Board to establish a collaborative routine, make sure the team members are aware about their assignments and committed to the validation goals.
Three: Changing requirements are a competitive advantage.
Imagine you work for 2 to 3 years on product testing, production, and customers request new increments later! Considering this probability, showing you are open-minded and prepared to implement changes might open doors and attract a couple of extra millions on investment, so going agile now is a wise option.
Four: Deliver working improvements often, small or large.
Establish an open channel to reach your potential customers’ needs and requests – start writing GitScrum User Stories to work user-oriented, and deliver relevant product increments frequently. User stories are short reports that sum up an end-user request, something he/she would like or needs from your product. You are supposed to organize these stories’ priorities and use them to define increments requests to product developers.
To organize your daily and weekly deliveries according to your goals, use Gitscrum Sprints.
Five: Businesses and Developers must work together. Daily.
The product development must be market-oriented and user-oriented. Developers are not supposed to work isolated, but to interact constantly and exchange ideas with the team. GitScrum Wiki is the resource for creative and collaborative teams who like to create, demonstrate and test ideas together. You can even create public projects and pages and do some crowdsourcing, gathering ideas for your product.
Six: The most efficient communication method is face-to-face.
Build a close relationship with potential clients and investors. Besides visiting them as possible and participating in events, invite them as counselors or volunteer contributors to your project, and many of them will be glad to help.
Remember that positioning your brand since the beginning might also open many opportunities and change the way your image and idea impacts your potential partners. GitScrum White Label offers you the unique opportunity to present your whole project, in all its stages, with your custom brand showing everywhere. That means you will replace our logo and your brand will be the only one shining. It will look like you built a specific project management tool for your product development, how awesome is that?
Still, add a favicon, set your SMTP to direct the tool messages to your email, use your own domain and the subdomains you create for your products!
Do you know what that means? Miles ahead from competitors, since investors will know they will invest in a company and a team who can manage their product branding.
Seven: A working product is the primary measure of progress.
Testing is a basic stage of product delivery for a start-up. But managing multiple tests, different groups of testers and versions of the product can elevate the complexity of this task, as well as the quality of the results. With GitScrum Sprints, you can plan split big tasks into smaller stages, creating time-boxed sessions to meet your planned deadlines and reach your testing goals.
Eight: Attention to detail and technical mastery make the job easier.
Show your partners your company is no place for amateurs. Besides your original technical product expertise, demonstrate you can hold everything accountable, do task estimates and measure efforts to base correct budgeting, with GitScrum Task Effort and GitScrum Time Tracking.
Nine: The best products emerge from cross-functional teams.
The most competitive solutions emerge from teams who collaborate daily on a smart platform like GitScrum and join multiple expertise to develop innovation.
Ten: Regular short meetings reinforce positive behaviors.
The start-up team can work remotely. However, keeping communication alive is vital to achieve validation goals. Besides the regular meetings during the week, use GitScrum interaction features to help enhance the increment procedures and consolidate test results. Hold discussions, recall specialists’ attention to tasks, integrate real-time notifications to obtain test results.
In conclusion, using the GitScrum project management tool and the Agile methodology will help you feel confident to go through all this validation journey, accomplish your goals within your schedule and have the structure to interact with all the important players in the market. This experience will be so positive, that you will want to continue to lean on this approach on your next step – scaling your operations.