The programmer remembers his mistakes
Let's try to understand a number of popular misconceptions of people starting their business: fear of telling about their idea, compulsory patenting, knowledge of the market before entering it, and perfectionism when developing at the initial stage. I will be happy to tell you about the experience of dealing with such "fears", which, I will not hide, and I was overcome when our project was born .
I’ll say right away that the conclusions are controversial in many ways, but they have been repeatedly confirmed by personal experience. Therefore, I will be happy to discuss alternative points of view.
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In this case, it is not necessary to disclose and everywhere to trumpet about your knowhow, which the project should have. Investors will have to disclose it, but they are not your competitors, but are interested in a partnership, and the NDA has not been canceled. Showing the main advantages for clients is also required, but you should not do this publicly before the project will be stable on its feet, since competitors really are and analyze each other. One should know the measure in everything, so in the first article I described not the product, but the story of origin with a number of obvious moments, but did not say anything about monetization and other important issues.
Let me remind you once again that everything I write below concerns most IT projects. There are always exceptions, but they are extremely rare.
For all participants of the project, the service is initially interesting, they live for them, they breathe. When you lay out a product, be it a service or a game, you expect that the project will immediately have regular users. Many different people who have tried to launch their products have already written more than once that the work on the initial promotion often exceeds the complexity of the work on product development. That is why it is very important to bring the product to the market as soon as possible in order to confirm or, as a rule, refute the initial theories and look for ways to correct them. If there are no well-known analogs on the market, then you will encounter a double wall of misunderstanding regarding your product on the part of consumers. It is interesting that large companies face the same problem. If company A has millions of users in service B and it starts service C, then even if the service is useful, relevant and in demand, it will be necessary to make significant efforts so that it will gain proper popularity, but this may not happen. When starting from absolute zero, the task becomes more complex. Examples of such stories with different success rates: Google Wave, Google Plus, Microsoft Zune, Windows Phone, BB10, Qiwi eggs, Qiwi: movie tickets, Yandex: money collection.
Before the pilot launch, without significant experience in a particular field, you are very likely to know almost nothing. Moreover, you can perfectly see the problem and solve it, but you may not be ready to pay for it. There are many failed mass projects, when customers have and play / use the service, but do not pay, or the cost of attracting new users is more than the average revenue per user (ARPU). This situation is not as easy to reverse as it seems. With great probability, your monetization strategy will need to be adjusted after the first sales. That is why investors are more willing to give money in full "clones" of some novice successful services, because the monetization model has already been confirmed and the business will pay off.
I know for myself that many IT people are perfectionists. It is necessary to choose the best tools, correctly design the architecture, cover all the tests - and there will be happiness. The startup operates in conditions of great uncertainty. The final product that will pay off may not be at all similar to the initial one. That is why it is very important to quickly enter the market, conduct frequent iterations of releases and, unfortunately, sometimes significantly change the strategy, discarding some of the implemented functionality. At the same time, this does not mean at all that “bydlokod” is our everything. If you do everything hastily, without paying attention to the architecture and code review, then at some point the project will become unsupported, and the changes will be very costly, both in time and in resources. Most likely the work will have to start anew. It is very important balance.
By the way, here lies the problem for large companies, which are often accused of slowness in terms of product updates and the withdrawal of popular new ones. There is a development pipeline, which includes product analysts, who set business tasks, system analysts, who create tasks for project teams and coordinate interaction. Development teams in large companies, as a rule, are engaged in the support and development of existing products, acting progressively, in accordance with the chosen architecture, gradually changing it and testing thoroughly to make sure that everything does not fall after the release. Often there is a QA where the project gets ready for release and comrades who are directly involved in hosting on servers.
When launching a new product in the face of uncertainty, a project manager is required who will formulate business hypotheses, in accordance with the experience of the current product, convert them into tasks for development, coordinating development at a certain level in order to solve problems quickly and take responsibility for all. Programmers also do not have to be just performers, but project participants. Often, IT professionals see the most effective solutions to problems associated with the implementation of a task, because they are the ones who constantly work with the project and thoroughly imagine its architecture. Developers can also make a number of very interesting effective proposals, but the project manager should coordinate, prioritize and be responsible for the decisions made, since he, in particular, should be responsible for the implementation of indicators (KPI) and focusing efforts. However, this requires different approaches and experience from the entire team, which is not obtained with the standard approach to development, which is used in large companies. Therefore, I occasionally see such articles . They appear, in my opinion, when the manager is divorced from the development and does not understand the processes, considering that everything will be done by itself, or you just need to press. At the same time, the development team is not dedicated to the business prerequisites of certain tasks, but is put before a fact, including deadlines. It is quite interesting when the approach to development and solving problems changes dramatically, for example, transferring a team from developing a stable product, when changes are introduced in stages, to developing a new, often changing, at least in terms of business requirements, pilot project.
Thank you for your attention to all who read it. In the next article, I’ll finally talk about what happened after the decision to allocate investment was made. I described the background here .
I will be glad to answer your questions, as well as to know the opinion about the personal experience expressed above.
I’ll say right away that the conclusions are controversial in many ways, but they have been repeatedly confirmed by personal experience. Therefore, I will be happy to discuss alternative points of view.
As soon as I describe the idea, it will be stolen from me, or competitors will implement it
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- The same idea comes at once to many people at the moment. This can be seen even on the example of almost simultaneous discoveries of the same laws of physics in different countries.
- An idea without implementation costs nothing. The previous and this thesis is confirmed by commentators in a previous article who say that there was a similar idea, but it was somehow not up to it.
- While you are cutting something yourself, someone will launch the project on the market, because he was focused and ventured. I also had a number of ideas that I perceived as too complex to launch independently, and after six months or a year I met a raw but working startup that successfully implemented it.
In this case, it is not necessary to disclose and everywhere to trumpet about your knowhow, which the project should have. Investors will have to disclose it, but they are not your competitors, but are interested in a partnership, and the NDA has not been canceled. Showing the main advantages for clients is also required, but you should not do this publicly before the project will be stable on its feet, since competitors really are and analyze each other. One should know the measure in everything, so in the first article I described not the product, but the story of origin with a number of obvious moments, but did not say anything about monetization and other important issues.
First, everything must be patented, and only then ..!
Let me remind you once again that everything I write below concerns most IT projects. There are always exceptions, but they are extremely rare.
- Almost any patent costs. Apple patented slide to unlock. Android unlocked circle.
- A quality patent must be international. Russian patent is nice, but you have the whole market only in Russia?
- Proper registration of the patent is very expensive and takes a long time. It is necessary to conduct a primary analysis of the application, to write it so that the patent does not cost two clicks. Not to mention the other pitfalls.
- Everyone has heard of long patent courts. Do you really think that without proper resources, even if everything was arranged as it should and the violation is really present, you will succeed in achieving hypothetical success?
- Most of the “patents” for programs and databases are made for reporting. I participated in the filing of applications for such registration certificates more than once. Several questionnaires are filled in, a pair of sheets with arbitrary sources is attached, duty is paid and you are great. However, this evidence for a program or database “protects” not the idea, but the very “pair of sheets” of code. Obtaining a patent for a useful model that underlies the operation of a program or service algorithm is much more complicated and may take even longer than developing the program itself and bringing it to market. This has already been written on habrahabr .
As soon as I start the service, interested clients will immediately appear.
For all participants of the project, the service is initially interesting, they live for them, they breathe. When you lay out a product, be it a service or a game, you expect that the project will immediately have regular users. Many different people who have tried to launch their products have already written more than once that the work on the initial promotion often exceeds the complexity of the work on product development. That is why it is very important to bring the product to the market as soon as possible in order to confirm or, as a rule, refute the initial theories and look for ways to correct them. If there are no well-known analogs on the market, then you will encounter a double wall of misunderstanding regarding your product on the part of consumers. It is interesting that large companies face the same problem. If company A has millions of users in service B and it starts service C, then even if the service is useful, relevant and in demand, it will be necessary to make significant efforts so that it will gain proper popularity, but this may not happen. When starting from absolute zero, the task becomes more complex. Examples of such stories with different success rates: Google Wave, Google Plus, Microsoft Zune, Windows Phone, BB10, Qiwi eggs, Qiwi: movie tickets, Yandex: money collection.
Even before the first implementation, I know my clients, their problems and desires.
Before the pilot launch, without significant experience in a particular field, you are very likely to know almost nothing. Moreover, you can perfectly see the problem and solve it, but you may not be ready to pay for it. There are many failed mass projects, when customers have and play / use the service, but do not pay, or the cost of attracting new users is more than the average revenue per user (ARPU). This situation is not as easy to reverse as it seems. With great probability, your monetization strategy will need to be adjusted after the first sales. That is why investors are more willing to give money in full "clones" of some novice successful services, because the monetization model has already been confirmed and the business will pay off.
We will immediately make a cool service, having worked it thoroughly.
I know for myself that many IT people are perfectionists. It is necessary to choose the best tools, correctly design the architecture, cover all the tests - and there will be happiness. The startup operates in conditions of great uncertainty. The final product that will pay off may not be at all similar to the initial one. That is why it is very important to quickly enter the market, conduct frequent iterations of releases and, unfortunately, sometimes significantly change the strategy, discarding some of the implemented functionality. At the same time, this does not mean at all that “bydlokod” is our everything. If you do everything hastily, without paying attention to the architecture and code review, then at some point the project will become unsupported, and the changes will be very costly, both in time and in resources. Most likely the work will have to start anew. It is very important balance.
The experience of large companies
By the way, here lies the problem for large companies, which are often accused of slowness in terms of product updates and the withdrawal of popular new ones. There is a development pipeline, which includes product analysts, who set business tasks, system analysts, who create tasks for project teams and coordinate interaction. Development teams in large companies, as a rule, are engaged in the support and development of existing products, acting progressively, in accordance with the chosen architecture, gradually changing it and testing thoroughly to make sure that everything does not fall after the release. Often there is a QA where the project gets ready for release and comrades who are directly involved in hosting on servers.
When launching a new product in the face of uncertainty, a project manager is required who will formulate business hypotheses, in accordance with the experience of the current product, convert them into tasks for development, coordinating development at a certain level in order to solve problems quickly and take responsibility for all. Programmers also do not have to be just performers, but project participants. Often, IT professionals see the most effective solutions to problems associated with the implementation of a task, because they are the ones who constantly work with the project and thoroughly imagine its architecture. Developers can also make a number of very interesting effective proposals, but the project manager should coordinate, prioritize and be responsible for the decisions made, since he, in particular, should be responsible for the implementation of indicators (KPI) and focusing efforts. However, this requires different approaches and experience from the entire team, which is not obtained with the standard approach to development, which is used in large companies. Therefore, I occasionally see such articles . They appear, in my opinion, when the manager is divorced from the development and does not understand the processes, considering that everything will be done by itself, or you just need to press. At the same time, the development team is not dedicated to the business prerequisites of certain tasks, but is put before a fact, including deadlines. It is quite interesting when the approach to development and solving problems changes dramatically, for example, transferring a team from developing a stable product, when changes are introduced in stages, to developing a new, often changing, at least in terms of business requirements, pilot project.
Thank you for your attention to all who read it. In the next article, I’ll finally talk about what happened after the decision to allocate investment was made. I described the background here .
I will be glad to answer your questions, as well as to know the opinion about the personal experience expressed above.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/209066/
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