OPINION: I’ve been running a digital marketing agency called ApeForest for a few years now and in late 2012, my co-founder and I were accepted for Startup Chile.
The program gave us resources and focused our attention on building ContentForest – a ‘productised’ version of what we did for clients in our agency.
We finished the program in May and along the way learned so much about running a business from the ground up, especially about building and selling a tech product. I thought I’d share some valuable lessons with the other tech entrepreneurs out there.
1. Launch ASAP
Before we left for Chile, we did not even have a developer to help code the product. But a month into the program, we launched the first version of our product to the public.
It was full of bugs and our homepage did not have well written copy. The design was something out of the 1990s.
Despite that, this primitive website was profitable from day one. Our early clients are actually our most loyal because they were part of the process of building the system.
With things like Twitter Bootstrap, which makes the design and user interface easy to build, and Ruby on Rails, a framework which allows for the fast build of applications, you have no excuse for not shipping the first version of the product in a short time.
The tech community refers to this first version as the minimum viable product or MVP, but you don’t have to be in tech to get the financial and logistical benefits of launching draft versions of your product. Build now, learn from the experience and make it better over time.
2. Take Control of the Tech
We had a major issue with the developer we were working with. He was from Venezuela and, because of political instability, he lost his internet access for a month.
Because everything was going smoothly before this incident, I fell into…(READ MORE)
Article By: Pravin Daryani
Published at: Stuff.co.nz
