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Prioritizing for Success: Business or Product for Tech Startups?

Jun 27, 2022

Maulik

Innovify

Too much going on! As a Tech Startup founder, Should I focus on the business or the product?

New ventures are the child of labour, and love. Not only do entrepreneurs become emotionally attached to them, they find it difficult to choose their area of focus. After all, their minds are pulled in a hundred different directions all at once.

THIS, OF COURSE, IS PARTICULARLY TRUE OF THE OF TECH STARTUPS FOUNDERS. TYPICALLY, THEIR QUESTION IS, WHAT COMES FIRST? THE BUSINESS OR THE PRODUCT?

While the business is where the finances come from, the product is the heart of the business, and usually the area of expertise of a tech founder. While there may be successful Founder-CEO’s to the tune of Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg, it’s fairly easy to forget that they are an extremely rare breed.

Getting a startup up and running is no mean task. You need to build the product, the team, grab the attention of the customers, and keep doing that every single day. Your to-do list is ever growing, and every turn brings a new challenge. Sorry to break this to you, but you need to focus on both.

Top 5 reasons you need to do both:

1. Heart and Mind: The product and the business work hand in hand. Without a great product, you have zero customers. However, without a great strategy, you have no market to sell it in.

2. Vision: As the founder, no one in the world will have the vision you do. Not only do you know exactly what the product should be like, you also know what you want to help the customer with and why. Only you will have both a product-centric and customer-centric approach.

3. Change: Technology is constantly evolving, and changing. For something that is in constant entropy, business appears to be the only thing that is stable. A good game plan may be to build up your MVP (minimum viable product), and keep an eye on the business side of things to provide a stable platform for it to sustain itself.

4. Go to market: As the tech head, you will need to keep making changes to the product, and as the business head, you will need to keep an eye on the industry and the customer. Doing both of these at once, with clarity, will ensure that your go-to-market strategy is absolutely spot on.

5. Promotion: If you don’t have a line of people waiting to try out your product, it doesn’t matter if you are the next Uber. This is why you need to keep promotion going side by side while building the product.

This sounds like a lot, and it truly is. Tech Startup Founders work mad hours and have the toughest job of them all, but we do love what we do, don’t we?

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Image source: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/224967

You can make your work easier by constructing the MVP. A Minimum Viable Product helps you strip your product down to its most basic features so you are able to test it in the market and get immediate feedback. The advantage with this approach is that you can quickly make iterations to your MVP, and keep the money flowing smoothly.

It’s common knowledge that you need a co-founder. However, the difference between a random co-founder, and a great co-founder is that a great co-founder shares your passion, your vision, and ultimately enables you to achieve what becomes your common business goals. It is also common knowledge that while Jobs had Wozniak, there was, and always will be only one Wozniak.

Not many entrepreneurs know this, but finding a great co-founder is one of the toughest parts of the entrepreneurial life. A truly great co-founder can make all the difference.

A great co-founder needs to have solid technical capabilities. Without a stellar understanding of your technical requirements, there will most definitely be a delay in the time you take to go-to-market, ultimately leaving the arena wide open for competitors to enter.

Thus, we at Innovify understand how difficult it may be to do both simultaneously. We believe in a great team that supports you throughout the journey, and we are here to do just that! With Innovify you get the exposure of experienced product managers & architects who have experience in enterprises and growth startups.

Not only that, we provide you with a stellar group of self-managed, cross-functional teams with wide technical skills to achieve your goals faster.

Partner with Innovify and let us work together. Let us be the co-founder you’ve been looking for. Contact us here and Innovify will run this marathon with you. Working with us lets you take care of both – heart and mind; product and business. At the same time.

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INNOVIFY IS A FAST GROWING DIGITAL INNOVATION & PRODUCT MANAGEMENT COMPANY.

Offering a wide range of expertise, Innovify helps clients to develop innovative products that enable them to focus on key business drivers using a collaborative work model that functions on an Agile & Lean philosophy. Innovify has become a trusted partner to its clients by going beyond the typical scope of application development through a range of digital products such as websites, apps, and software.

Innovify is the right partner for your digital ambitions.

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