Prioritized Development

This article is written by Mohammad Eslim, a Contributor Author at Startup Istanbul.

Erik Anderson is an entrepreneur originally from Los Angeles but taking an extended “Jobbatical” in Europe: first in London with Techstars and since early 2014 with SWG. After headhunting top founders to join SWG in Tallinn, Erik is responsible for the sales curriculum and driving traction in English speaking markets. He was present at Startup Istanbul 2016 where he gave a speech.

For things to work out in your startup you have to focus specifically on what you do, who you are building a product for and doing it as efficiently as possible. And talking about that bring to the prioritization of the development in your startup. In this stage of startup, you will define your current offering as in where you are currently at in your prioritization or in your product, think about the features of what is coming out in the future and what is the most important to your customers, moments like when you are going to deliver the most impact and interactions with customers to get another feedback on your development.

Communication is a key point to understand your customers as you can go and have a talk with them in the malls, bars and on street. It will become like a one-sentence pitch where you propose for the customers a solution for a problem. There are many points you have to focus on to do it right like how to get your point across, and where does your communication focus on when you are talking to potential customer or investor or even someone higher. It is essential to practice it no matter who your audience is.

Being innovative is not about your idea being unique it’s about how your idea solves a serious problem in specific conditions, and no matter how the solution seems repeated we need to realize how big the market is. So when you build a product you should advance carefully through many stages and your product will go in so many phases until it reach its starting point in the market.

Final thoughts on how to build your product, you have to be bold and have your fun doing going through your startup. You have to be yourself and focus on your fundamentals and what you are good at and build your product with that because it is your perspective is what shapes you. And you have to listen to what people say and you might get inspired on how to meet their needs with your services or your products. 

Focus on emotions as you deal with the customers, pay attention to the terminology and most importantly the users of the app or your customers if you have product-based business and never ever forget or ignore the importance of keeping in contact with the customers.

Once you are already on one-to-one base communication with them, you shall be friendly and specific about the data you want to collect as a feedback, be observant enough to know what interest them more and what they care about the most. These notes will help you in your future market as you will be able to understand the customers’ tendencies and directly be able to satisfy them with your products or services.

Bear in mind that for your startup to come to life and grow into business, you have to be patient and invest all your time and effort to work in prioritized order. Development is not an easy process so imagine if you don’t give a stage its own priority or its needed time to be done efficiently! Give everything its much deserved effort because you never waste time when it comes to the development in the business world.

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