You have a startup Idea?
Here are a couple of ways you can get your tech idea into the market fast
Get a Cofounder
This is easier said than done. Especially because there needs to be trust and conviction that the idea is valuable enough to make efforts and take risks. It’s important to choose people who can complement you rather than just people who you know. If you don’t know or cannot learn to code get someone who can do it. It doesn’t matter even if the person is working full time in some other organization. Because initially, it is more to get feedback from potential customers and let them try your product. Once the product gets enough traction then you can think about onboarding him/her fulltime. This reduces unnecessary pressure on personal survival.
Outsource to an agency
This is the best option if you have a good amount of wealth, to begin with. It can take away a lot of headaches and let you focus on what you are good at. Look for the company’s past reputation and the projects they have completed. Though it can be cheaper to get companies from developing countries such as India, make sure that the agency has a clear understanding of your target market. People’s preferences and engagement to try out something new varies by culture and region. What works in India might not work in the USA.
Hire an employee or better outsource to a freelancer
This option also requires you to invest some money upfront. Hiring can be especially difficult if even don’t know where to start and what are the milestones completed for developing the product iteratively. Not to mention the testing, interviewing, selecting, and then handling the formalities of payroll management. However, based on the employee attitude you can get multiple things done like managing even some accounting or customer followup with emails.
It is better to try out people from freelancing websites like Upwork, Freelancer, or even Fiverr. Though comparatively, it can be costlier and focused on one task. Keep in mind the same advice given above for outsourcing to a company.
Make a Clickable Prototype
Making a clickable prototype today is very easy and it costs you mostly nothing but time. There are plenty of tools out there to get this done fast. One of the best tools I found was Figma. It can make your prototype look and work very similar to the actual app. However, does not come with actual forms or databases.
What’s great is that it is free and has a plugin ecosystem that can extend the functionality of your prototype further. Design updates are pushed in realtime to anyone who is viewing the prototype. It even works great even on mobile browsers.
However, before you dive into Figma it’s always better to make a few sketches with traditional pen and paper or whiteboard. This will bring more focus on what needs to be done rather than feeling overwhelmed by the wealth of options out there.
Learn a code enough to build a small MVP
If you feel adventures enough and would not bother to spend some time learning to code this is the best option. It gives you a very good hands-on approach to your company’s core function. There are plenty of online courses to get started with and will cost you a maximum 10$ say on Udemy. If you have some trouble deciding what to learn, you can check out Django. This is a web framework made in python. Python has an easy to understand syntax and it flows like English sentences rather than having weird curly braces. It has battle-tested for several years by both large and small companies alike. You can also hire developers easily once your customer grows. Since it is based on python you can easily add data analytics or machine learning into the application. All applications are getting smarter these days and python being a defacto leader today in Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence you will not regret this choice. Also once you learn to code you can easily pivot/try out other different ideas if your primary one did not seem to work.
Summary
Here is the order which I think would work best
- Put your idea in pen/paper → Build prototype in Figma → Build an MVP in Django (if you can spend time to learn and code)
- Find a co-founder who can do step 1.
- Based on how much money you can afford you can hire a freelancer or outsource to an agency.
- Hire an employee
