DEV Community: Ertugrul

When Less is More: 5 Compelling Benefits of MVPs for Software Startups

Ertugrul — Tue, 19 Nov 2019 13:30:06 +0000

Most software developers incline to overbuild their first product release, mostly out of fear. They fear that their initial product offering isn't enough to compel the users. However, as overbuilding cannot guarantee success, it can even lead to failure due to over-spent resources. Starting small with an MVP, a minimum viable product, on the other hand, will actually increase the chances of success. One of the major MVP benefits is that, while reducing costs, they improve the overall product quality and efficiency as well as customer relations.

Here are 5 compelling MVP benefits for software startups:

#1: Quick Development

The great thing about MVPs is that they allow you to put your product on the market sooner rather than later. As the name suggests, you’re supposed to develop a minimum set of features and deliver less functionality to the end-user. By focusing mostly on the core features of the product, the development time for the software is naturally reduced. And releasing a product swiftly on the market comes with many benefits.

The idea behind MVP launches is that sooner you hit the shelves, sooner you get to be exposed to the harsh realities of the market you try to get into and learn from them. So, you prevent any costly mistakes from happening by testing the real market demand for the solutions you are offering. You’re not aiming for perfection with an MVP. You, instead, try to figure out what core functionalities to propose to the customer and how you can develop them in a very rapid fashion. So that you keep up with the actual needs of your customers.

#2: Lower Development Costs

Having focused on the most vital features addressing directly a market problem not only minimizes delay for launch but also substantially reduces the development costs. MVP approach helps you keep things simple. So, you don’t tangle up in over-complicated coding and projects. That may cause you to overspend your budget in the start-up phase.

Keeping your initial offering as simple and minimal as possible leads up to incremental enhancements that are responsive only to the real market feedback. That means you only progress with the feature ideas validated in the marketplace. So, you don’t needlessly put yourself to invalidated expenses.

Also, fewer features to develop in a product means less testing and debugging the code written for the product. That, most certainly, reduces as well the overall expenses you’re to bear along the software development process.

#3: More Room for Improvement

Early adopters won’t be purchasing your software for the extensive features you roll out. They do so because you solve a particular problem they're facing. So, It forces you to carefully determine your value proposition before releasing your MVP to the market. That helps you set a clear target for your product and determine the right metrics while assessing your product idea on the market.

Staying focused on the core functionalities in the beginning also provides you more room for improvement with customer feedback. You can assess better whether an additional feature idea fits in with your original proposition, which is neatly predetermined in the early development process. And, due to the gradual nature of growth that comes with the minimum approach, you can adapt better to the ever-changing needs of customers and newer technological trends. That helps you keep your product relevant within the competitive landscape.

#4: Testing in the Field

As mentioned, one of the major MVP benefits is that it allows you to progress further with a product idea that you know people want rather than you think they want. That is because of the critical feedback you get to obtain from real-life users in the field during an MVP launch.

Such valuable feedback will let you know whether you’re on the right track of providing your users the right functionalities best serving their interests. If not, you can always take a step back to determine what needs to be changed about your product and, simply, pivot. Here’s a list of some of the big startup brands that had massively successful pivots, mostly for the flexibility that the minimum approach has to offer.

MVPs vs. Presales

If you’re still in the early production validation stage, though, building an MVP may not come in handy for you. Even that's an MVP, you’re still going to need to write codes and develop your software to a certain point to make it ready for an early use. But, allocating resources to a project without any validation can constitute a huge risk.

Instead, you might want to seek validation with a minimum economical viable offer, a MEVO. That is basically what you "pre-sell" to the prospective customer. A MEVO puts enough information together to help your audience gain interest in what you plan to create during a pre-sale launch. So that you can validate your early product ideas without allocating resources on a large scale. Here’s our previous post on how to pre-sell a software product before you even build it.

#5: Grow with Your Customers

Considering the innovation adaptation cycle, you must exclusively focus on early adopters while developing features for your minimum viable product.

Trying to address the all varying needs of the early or late majority of customers at once is likely to make concentration difficult on core functionalities you’re offering. Targeting directly at early adopters, on the other hand, will provide you refined feedback on additional features. Such feedbacks not only help you validate your product offering sooner, but also provide you a better-grounded product roadmap for future feature plans.

MVP Benefits

An MVP benefits your software business in many ways while releasing your first products.

Building any software product is costly, not only in terms of money, but also time and energy to produce. MVPs can help you start small with the minimum amount of time and financial investments to kickstart your up-and-coming software projects. MVPs by nature are less costly, easier to develop, and prone to be more innovative.

5 Reasons Why Going Remote Will Benefit Your Software Business

Ertugrul — Tue, 12 Nov 2019 14:07:20 +0000

Who would know the best way to obtain efficiency with employees is to offer them as much flexibility as possible? Especially recently, working remotely has become the standard practice across industries. As the pioneers of this trend, technology companies are hiring more remote workers every day, realizing the remote work benefits. The reason for this is that remote work has many favorable effects on employee morale, and thus work efficiency, which tech businesses can benefit from.

“If you’ve got development centers all over the world, you’ve got a sales force out with the customers, the fact that tools like Skype (and) digital collaboration are letting people work better at a distance — that is a wonderful thing.” — @BillGates

Here are 5 reasons why remote work will benefit your software business as well:

#1: Increased Productivity & Job Satisfaction

Your business is worth as much as your employees. Once your employees become more productive, they will come up with better results and bring in more revenue to your software business. The research done by TINYpulse found that an overwhelming 91% of remote workers feel they’re more productive when they’re working remotely. The study also shows that remote working increases job satisfaction promoting employee retention.

One of the main reasons why remote work yields better results than office work is that constant distractions prevent “Deep Work”. Continuous interruptions in open workspaces hamper productivity and make it difficult for teamers to engage in deep work. At the same time, that's not only productivity but also the mental health of workers seems to be affected by interrupted work.

The evidence shows that the employees try to compensate for the interrupted work by trying to work heavier and faster, which leads to heavy mental workload, more stress, and time pressure. Thus, one of the biggest remote work benefits is that it enables people to fully focus on one’s work, work in a less stressful way, and thus produce great results.

#2: Enhanced Talent Pool

The number of talented and skilled workers has rapidly increased. And, it became harder to find and retain them. According to LinkedIn Talent Blog, the technology (software) industry is seeing the most talent turnover as the average tech employee’s tenure at a tech company is only 2.1 years. So, instead of toiling over hiring talented people in a competitive landscape, most tech companies today resort to remote work so that they can take advantage of skilled workers from all over the globe. So, geography no longer poses an obstacle for software companies, restricting them to hire only where their offices are.

Thanks to remote work, we have now the entire world to choose perfect team members from. The talent pool for remote workers is almost endless.

Also, remote work consolidates diversity within your team. You’re more likely to form a more heterogeneous group made up of different kinds of people with a variety of ideas and backgrounds as you have the means to hire remotely. Diverse teams perform better and come up with better ideas. It also improves work culture and helps you attract better talent.

#3: Lower Turnover

Once you set your ideal remote team, the teamers are more likely to stay around for years to come. The research shows that companies that embrace remote working have a 25% lower turnover than companies that do not. Also, the companies supporting remote work are perceived as taking heed of their employee’s needs and more likely to attract skilled workers who worked remotely before and have no interest in returning to traditional 9-to-5 office jobs.

Some of the unique features of remote working useful for retaining employees are as the following:

Flexible. Assuring that the teamers can work wherever and whenever they want.
Productive. Their productivity is assessed by the tasks they accomplish not by the hours they filled in.
Autonomous. Teamers are accountable mostly to themselves.
Transparent. All work towards a goal and know other team members do the same.

#4: Reduced Attrition

According to a Stanford study, remote work helps increase wellness in the workplace besides productivity and job satisfaction. During the 2-year experiment on a Chinese travel agency, it was found that employee attrition decreased by 50 percent among the remote workers, they had fewer sick days and took less time off. That should be mentioned that the company also saved $2k per employee on rent by reducing office space.

People who are working remotely from home enjoy a better work/life balance and lower stress levels. So, they’re less likely to take a day off for minor health issues. According to the study, 75% of remote workers stated that they’d continue to work in case of flu-like conditions, weather-related disasters, and terrorism compared to 28% of traditional office workers. Moreover, companies supporting remote work reported 63% fewer unscheduled absences.

#5: Lower Costs

It’s surely beyond doubt that remote work will cut your expenses. It does so in many ways. First, since you no longer need office space, it will reduce your costs on lease and office equipment. Many tech companies today are replacing their office rental with a virtual office lease to utilize a commercial address along with access to meeting rooms and daily office spaces without a long-term commitment. In addition, one of the remote work benefits is that it reduces the IT expenses since remote workers can use their own devices, manage their projects on software-based productivity tools and intercommunicate via affordable high-tech video conference tools.

Going remote, however, is not only in favor of the employers, but also provides huge benefits for the employees.

It annually costs $10k to $20k to house an employee in a major city. The remote worker, on the other hand, can rent a place anywhere in any state (or even country) according to their budget. And, since employees no longer have to commute, they also save on transportation-related expenses.

According to Inc.;

Remote workers benefit from savings between $2k to $7k each year.
Businesses, on the other hand, saves almost $11k annually per employee.

Remote Work Benefits

It's almost like remote work has become the new normal. This is because of the self-evident remote work benefits, e.g. increased employee morale/wellness and productivity, better employee retention, and lower costs. As more and more software businesses are transitioning to remote work, it's definitely a trend to follow closely for other tech companies to take advantage of the remote work benefits as well.

How To Presell Your Software Products in 5 Steps

Ertugrul — Tue, 05 Nov 2019 13:13:45 +0000

90% of startups fail. They mostly fail because of the lack of market need. That's why it's crucial to validate your product ideas before allocating resources to a software project that is destined to fail. How do you know for certain if there's a market need for the software that you'd like to develop, though? Pre-sales constitute an answer. A software pre-sale helps you validate your product ideas without investing in them. You also get to fund your software development with the money you earn from pre-sales and develop a product that the market truly needs.

Here are 5 steps to a successful software pre-sale:

Step #1: Find Audience Paint-Points

The first step to a presell is surely to find out the audience paint-points to come up with the right software idea that the target market would be interested in. When you accurately define what the point-points of your audience are, you get to understand what exactly frustrates them. Also, you need to question how they impact their lives and what they look for in a product solution.

Knowing what your audience wants is very important. It determines the kind of software product you are to develop. You can find your audience pain-points in a few different ways:

Surveys

You can survey your audience simply by asking what their biggest pain-points are through surveys you create online with online survey tools. Here’s a detailed post on how to conduct market research surveys for surveying your audience on Survey Monkey.

Social media

You can oversee what your target audience talks about on a specific subject with regard to a potential pain-point on social media. You may either do so in a passive manner by simply observing the right social media channels such as by using twitter search bar through hashtags or joining related Facebook groups created on that subject. Or you can actively interact with your audience and urge them to speak on that particular pain-point you’d like to resolve. You can accomplish that by creating a closed Facebook page to ask questions, share information, and build more close relationships with the members of that group as your target audience.

One-on-one Interviews

if you’d like to have an in-depth understanding of the pain-points of your prospective customers, you need one-on-one interviews. It will help you find out exactly what products and services your audience may want to buy.

Here are 3 questions you should consider asking during your survey interview:

If you could have the best results about (the pain-point), what would it look like or feel like?
What impediments or frustrations prevent you from achieving that result?
If a software product was custom designed to your exact needs, what would it look like?

Step #2: Map Out A Basic Outline

After you have enough insights into what sort of a software product that your audience might be interested in, you need to put a basic outline together. What your customers can expect, how your software piece makes their lives easier and so on. You may come up with certain mock-ups or prototypes, or simply create a wireframe to have some material that people can envision what the finished product will look and feel like.

According to Dan Martell, you do not even need to create a Minimum Valuable Product (MVP) at this point, which has been all the rage in the last decade among entrepreneurs. Because an MVP still needs you to allocate resources for materializing your product offer since you need to write some codes and develop your software. But instead, you need a MEVO, a Minimum Economical Viable Offer, which is basically what you’re pre-selling to the prospective customer. A MEVO putts enough information together to help your audience gain interest in what you plan to create. Here’s Dan’s podcast going through MEVO in detail.

After you decide on the product idea that you’d like to progress further as well as the minimum viable offer, you need to map out a financial forecast for how many customers or what funding levels you need in order to develop your software product.

Step #3: Create a Sales Page

After you determine the paint-points of the market along with your value proposition of a software product resolving those issues, the next is step is to create a sales page. Here are a few elements to consider while creating a basic sales page.

Be explicit in saying that this is just a Pre Sale. Let your customers know that your software product hasn’t been developed yet.

Make the discount apparent. Your customers would only pre-buy a presell offer if there’s a considerable pre-sale price. Highlight it. Also, mention that the price is going to increase so that you create some sense of urgency.

List 3 to 5 Benefits. Let people know what’s in it for them to preorder your software. This section is for re-articulating the pain-points your customers have.

Add in a Few Testimonials. Testimonials are great for constituting the social proof convincing your prospective users to preorder your software. Let a few customers use your product for free, if needed, to get their honest feedback for displaying them on your sales page.

Add a countdown timer. Urgencies are powerful. Reminding your audience that the pre-sale offer is only for a limited amount of time would surely incentivize them to preorder.

Call to Action. After you laid out enough information for the visitor to place the order, direct them with caution within your funnel through proper CTAs. It seems obvious now but you’d be shocked how often neglected this is.

Step #4: Launching Your Pre-Sale Offer

After your sales page is up and running, it is time to announce your software pre-sale. Having an email list of people who are already familiar with your work makes the launch stage easier. First, you need to determine what percentage of conversion you’d consider as success.

If the attention you’re getting after a series of emails is less than you originally expected, then you might want to reconsider what is wrong with your software idea or marketing plan. But if it’s just as you expected, or even higher, then you know you're on the right track.

Launching a pre-sale offer is the same as launching an actual product. You need to generate a buzz. Here’s an emailing series of 4 to 5 emails to be sent within the week of your product launch.

Start with a Pre-Launch Email to generate curiosity. Keep it casual and let people know that you launch a pre-sale offer of a great product in days.

Send a Launch Email the day you’re launching your offer with the exclusive details on your software pre-sale. Include the details on what your product is, how they can benefit from your product and your pre-sale offer, and so on.

Following your launch, send a “Are You a Good Fit?” email for getting the right customers on board. Mention who could really be a great fit for your product as a reminder of your launch offer. It’d also help you reemphasize how you’re easing their pain-points with your pre-sale product offering.

And the day you’re finally closing off your deal, send a Last Chance Email to generate urgency and scarcity to leverage it on the last day of your pre-sale launch.

But what If you don’t have an email list?

Then you need to resort to mostly content marketing to drive organic traffic to your launch page, which might, however, take some time to build the momentum you need at the beginning of your pre-sale launch.

You can write a series of blog posts about the pain-point you’d like to resolve with your software offering. Guest blogging might be a better choice for leveraging the existing reader-base of the blog page you’re contributing to.

And/or you can create a video series on the same subject, going over the problems you’re resolving and introducing your software product.

Or you can simply share your software pre-sale on related Facebook groups as an exclusive offer for the members of that group.

Step #5: Close Your Offer

Like every other successful product launch, pre-sale launches also need to have a defined beginning and an end. That’s important for ensuring the sense of scarcity and motivating your audience to take action. That is why sending out Last Chance Email in the last days of your launch works pretty well. (Remember to exclude the ones who’ve already opened your email in the first place simply not to spam them.)

Following the closure of your offer thank anyone who’s participated and let them know when to expect to hear from you for collecting feedback. If you luckily achieved enough purchase orders to progress further with your software idea, share your timetable with buyers for delivery dates of the preordered software.

Successful Software Pre-sale

A successful software pre-sale comes in useful in many ways. First and foremost, it provides you feedback from real-life users helping you understand better the problems they have for coming up with better product ideas. It also provides you funds to actualize your software project on safer ground. And, the fuzz you generate during the pre-sale launch will surely help you with the momentum you will need when you're finally rolling out your product.

Simply launch a pre-sale offer before going all out on a software project to minimize potential losses and maximize the value you're providing your audience with your well-suited software idea.

If you have any experience with software pre-sale or questions about it, share them in the comments below.

And, if you would like more information on software monetization, we have written these articles to help:

7 Tips for Building a Successful Software Business
5 Steps to a Successful Software Launch
7 Most Profitable Digital Products To Sell Online in 2020
How to Successfully Sell Software Online
7 Key Marketing Strategies for Small Software Businesses
How to Price Your Software Products (Definitive Guide)