First build your product and find your market niche. Once you've got enough customers to pay the bills, then you can worry about your role in the organisation. Until then you're just daydreaming.
- Read up on customer development, then build your customer development plan. Getting your first customers is critical, so having the initial plan in hand is critical.
- Make a list of assumptions about your business: what has to be true for you to succeed. Then find ways to empirically test those assumptions. Then test them! You don't want to spend a lot of time going down dead end paths. Keep doing this until you have a repeatable business model.
- Identify your weaknesses (whether that is product development, marketing, sales, etc), and make sure you know how you are going to overcome those weaknesses (hiring, contracting, eliminating the need, etc). If you don't think you have any important weaknesses, you need to do more introspection.
- Have fun and take breaks. Your business can become all-consuming. Don't let it, or it will soon suck the fun out of it.
These are the suggested steps:
1) Have a stellar board of advisors and mentors.
2) Build partnerships with well-known organizations.
3) Get some kind of external third party recognition.
4) Take design seriously and make sure you have a strong web presence.
5) Write about your experiences online.
6) Get a major VC behind you.
7) Do your research.
8) Sell. Sales solve every problem.
9) Don’t worry about it.
These are solid points, its important to focus on building something people want. Once its validated and youre making sales, people will take your word seriously, whether youre young or old.
Since you got a lot of good advice already, I would like to add following.
Hire or make deals with, people who can speed things up, developers, designers, sales people. You can't do everything by yourself. Find people you can talk to, that is super important.
Often people trick themselves into building elaborate product first, but also there is a case where you genuinely have to make something before you can sell it.
Find the potential market of your idea - who are the people which will use it.
Find a good team (designers + programmers + marketers).
Execution is everything - don't wait around long; if you have a good idea, make a small working prototype asap.
I wouldn't tackle it generally. A lot of products are like building a house. You don't generally build a house. It's a very specific thing that encompasses many different fields of expertise. You can build a house and sell it by yourself, of course. But nobody here is going to be able to tell you how in a single forum comment.
Suffice to say you need to learn to become a developer, a project manager, a product owner, an architect, a systems engineer, a customer support specialist, a salesman, a marketer, a financial officer, and an executive officer. If you are good at learning on your feet, you will learn just enough of these things to get your product running and make some money, from a month to a year or more. It all depends.
Agreed. Talk to enough people to do the customer development and product development needed, otherwise, stay fairly mum about it. If/when you get traction, and you think the upside is greater than the downside, then start making a lot of noise.
Talk to prospects, validate the need, market the product, write marketing copy, write marketing content, grow a lead list or a waiting list, create a pitch deck, write documentation etc etc.
There is a lot that can and should be done before building the product.
Build a minimum viable product (MVP) as a side project and then actually talk (face to face or over the phone if you can't face to face) to some prospects to get their feedback.
The day you can actually get someone to pay for your product - jump in.
My approach is the following:
1. Learn to code
2. Build the prototype
3. Try to sell the prototype to verify the market
4. Bootstrap the business
5. Get the business going then people (co-founder, investor,etc...) will show up
2. Go sell it to someone and have them pay you to build it.
3. This will look mostly like a service at first, very custom.
4. Now go and sell part of the thing you just built, or the whole thing to someone else.
5. Build this second one using as much of the first thing as possible. Add whatever features the second company/person wants so long as you can sell it back to person/company #1 or a third company.
6. By this point you should have talked to a bunch of people... you should know generally what people actually want. Take the stuff you built, generalize it, refine it, test it, and then sell it to people in person.
7. for the last step you don't need my advice or anyone else's... you have a product and people are paying you for it. You now know what to do.
I've been wrestling with a similar question. My current take on it is this:
1. Get a real, working system to a demo-able point. This is not an MVP, but rather a system that lets people see the underlying potential.
2. Start talking to people. This includes both potential customers as well as potential investors. The goals is to find out whether I'm up in the night or if there is a real need here.
3. ???
4. Profit.
(#3 is said somewhat in jest, but it really means synthesizing the output of #2 and determining if there is a real path (whether bootstrapped or funded) that leads to #4.)
Do consultancy. Become excellent. Build a team. Bootstrap your entire development phase. Sell enough to demonstrate the market
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