Fund My Startup

“All men dream: but not equally.  Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.” -Thomas Edward Lawrence

An important question that frequently arises for any product company is, “How long will it take to build?”  Internally you will debate this (our lead developer can insert his silent chuckle here).  Externally you’ll hear it constantly from your customers, partners, investors, family, and really just about everyone you meet.  If you’re honest with yourself, the realistic answer is usually simple: we don’t know, but we’ll estimate anyways.

This rule applies to every build: your alpha, your beta, & every iteration within.  This is the nature of building a new product.

Product timelines are tough to pinpoint because of the large number of unknowns on Day 1. These unknowns result in consistently evolving product requirements.  For example:

1. Innovative systems many times require innovative solutions.  Using new solutions to solve new problems is an experimental process, not an exact science.
2. Your customers may not like exactly what your’re building.  You’ll need to alter your approach to build less of what they don’t like and more of what they do like.
3. Your market itself will likely evolve while you’re developing; sometimes drastically, sometimes slightly.
4. Bugs will take 10 times longer to fix than you anticipate.

….and I could go on and on.

Don’t be discouraged, these obstacles are normal.  What’s now comforting for me is that over time we’ve continually become more accurate with our estimates.  Better accuracy occurs because we’ve become more educated about our customers and their requirements, we begin to more keenly anticipate market moves, our system has taken on a more precise form, and the economic market forces focus, etc.

So as a parting note, here are three lessons I’ve learned to stay sane during the grueling process of building a product from the ground-up:

1. Avoid constant comparison to other teams’ development efforts; especially those within a different market than you. Your product requirements are different.  Your customer needs are different.  Your technology is probably different.  Just because the HotorNot.com guys built their initial technology in a weekend, doesn’t mean that your alpha product will also only take a weekend to build.
2. Perform frequent releases.  Get feedback.  Then build more of what users like and less of what they don’t (mentioned above, but this is an important point to reiterate). This provides your team the opportunity for consistent feedback so that you aren’t just building for the sake of building.  Building for a reason (i.e. real customer requests) is so much more motivating than anything else!
3. If you can still taste the market and you have the talent, then use your team’s vision as motivation to survive the long haul. If your market requires a tough solution then many of your competitors will either lack the skill set to get ‘there’ or will simply become too discouraged at some point and quit.  Keep going.  Persistence mixed with talent, agility, and keen market awareness will result in something special.