5. Product Project
Your own idea Work for someone
Your own name/brand Someone else’s
Your own customers Someone else’s
You Control and Decide Someone else does
High Risk Low Risk
High Returns Low Returns
Long Cycle Times Low Cycle Times
Needs large Capital Needs Smaller capital
Products Are all Around you: Facebook, iPhone, Honda Cars etc
It’s What makes the world go around
Product vs Project
Doing Projects is not bad, it’s what you can afford to do
A good product is because of a good team
A “good team” is simplifying it
A good team will simplify architecture, deliver, make smart compromises. Makes 100 of great decisions which aggregate into a great company/direction
First: have a great team
Great culture is how you treat people
How you work
How you treat failures
How you work on problems
Convo things:
1. Almost everyone codes (19 years of programming experience)
2. Culture of nice. We actively root out jerks
3. We keep formalities to a minimum. We’re 50 in islamabad; only 1 support staff.
Product teams generally work on tougher problems and have higher flexibility than project companies
Convo example:
Custom XMPP Extensions
AngularJS Custom Framework Extensions
That’s something which projects don’t do because they want to move to the next project s fast as possible. Where product
companies work on something for 2-3 years
These hard problems allow to hire the best and brightest
Not Hypothetical
Do you know someone who would pay you to solve this problem?
Why is the failure rate of products so high?
in order for you to sell something you have to create it
That takes time and energy. What happens when you spend 6 months creating something that people don’t want?
You’d fail because you didn’t have a good product market fit
(no market, not a large market, not a high paying market)
You can iterate but every iteration costs you. Every iteration is an opportunity cost
So much of what you have to do is to get that crucial feedback early on into your product
Don’t spend two years and appear with the wrong product?
Lean Startup: MVP
How can you cut down time or effort?
Thats what Lean startup and MVP is about
MVP: what is the minimal possible for me to create that could get people to buy
Convo is the poster child for minimum for getting feedback. We created a demo. No code, people just loved it. We had a pretty successful launch with pings from VCs all across.
But now it’s really easy to create a whole prototype without having to create just a demo
If you of a great product, money will find you. Money is very good at finding opportunity
If you of a great product, money will find you. Money is very good at finding opportunity
Your goal is to reach that state with the minimum amount of money
Another advice: be global. It’s a huge multi-trillion dollar market, online payments make the hassle of collection a breeze an everything just becomes easier and better
No one cares if you’re a dog on the internet
Fund Raising
Draw an axis
Just idea - do you have a track record?
Presentation
Prototype
Users who are engaged
Paying users
This is all product maturity
Advice: go in an area where you have to use less capital. Consumer Internet space takes a lot of capital as to two sided markets. These models expect you to create two models. Focus on consumer monetisation