External scorecard and customer satisfaction score calculation have become common, especially amongst SaaS vendors, whereas, there are very few techniques of arriving at an internal scorecard of a product.
The full post at https://medium.com/@1ndus/internal-scorecard-of-a-product-6382e1ae0597
Scratch that. Delete that title.
Start with “Mine is a <insert product here like, finance, healthcare, etc> startup.” The only time you are a SaaS startup when you are solving a fundamental SaaS need like billing, metering, security, auditing, etc. It has become a fashion to use the latest technology to pitch your business and has been successful like, “We are <Java/Web2.0/SaaS/cloud/blah startup”.
Don’t move with fads. India does not need fads. India needs products.
The average consumer does not understand the technology stack. They need a solution. Whether the product uses cloud, SaaS, Java, Visual Basic — the consumer hardly cares. If it solves a need and must be on the internet then it does not matter whether it’s SaaS or BaaP or cloud.
User Interface is the visual part of your product; this is where all your back-end gets exposed. This is where your users interact with your application tier, middle-tier, database-tier, third-party & whatever-tier. The user interface could be visual, wherein for web products you have HTML pages interacting, for desktop-based products it’s your screen (or window) where the user interacts by clicking links, submitting forms, scrolling windows, or even closing the application.
The user interface design consists of four parts and is normally done in this order of development process:
Who does what? What are the roles & responsibilities?
1. Product Manager Overall responsibility. Creates the Information architecture. May take help of software/system architects for existing components and their behaviors. May engage web designer for existing sitemap & functionality. For startups, the Product Manager role may be assumed by the CEO, CTO or an architect on board.
2. Visual Designer Does final mockups based on wireframes and IA. May also do the final HTML/CSS.
3. Web Developer Converts the HTML/CSS using Javascript to product a working user-interaction.
The user-interface once connected to the back-end becomes complete & is revisited for usability testing, customer feedback, focus groups, scenarios etc. More about them in a future post.
(The bird is a Green Honeycreeper found in Mexico & Brazil. Pic courtesy Dario Sanches)
One of the biggest dilemmas faced by an entrepreneur who is starting up is to figure out when to stop building and when to start selling. Although, easy it may sound there are no hard boundaries between one or the other. Once, you have 5-10 people in the team then the question is different — you can have half of the team building the product and the other half selling it. What do you do when you have have 2-3 members in the team?
The idea is simple — build an initial set of features and then instead of only building, you, build, sell, build, sell. Repeat. Put a constraint that for every 5 new features, you acquire double the number of leads (or users if you are a consumer internet product) than the last time. That would be a perfect balance.
Here is a chart depicting a hypothetical idea where for every 5 new features you add to the system, you double the number of leads you acquire (or acquire users for consumer internet products). ‘R1’ in the figure below represents a baseline set of features for acquiring first set.
Lead (definition): A prospective customer, or someone who you have talked to but is not ready to use your product unless few more things are added. Or he is a free/trial user but not ready to pay the money, yet (Keeping it broad so that theory could be modified in specific situations)
Requires great discipline. As a coder-entrepreneur you may wanna go into the “comfort” zone of continuously building or if you are a non-techie entrepreneur you may just sell without a product in hand. Both are extremes and equally detrimental. Especially, in Indian conext where capital is meager and having the revenues in the books is golden, you strike a balance until your next inflection point where you are cash-flow positive.
So, how do you attain that perfect balance between sales vs. development OR feature build vs. lead acquistion? Here’s the recipe:
(The above example; for consumer products however, you may add few zeroes to the y-axis legends to get the point).
Thanks to Ankit, Sameer & Nandini for vetting the thoughts & clearing bugs in the draft