The long hours of a startup engineer are drastically different from the long hours of a founder. At least for myself, I spend the entire day context switching instead of coding. In any given day I meet to pitch to investors, do usability testing, then its onto prototyping and coding, and ending the day thinking about business strategy.
So how does one handle all of this? Preparation.
Prepping
I spent the first two months brainstorming ideas, reading, and networking. I spoke to anyone and everyone who would meet with me: investors, users, and founders (even some who were potential competitors). The reason I did this is because I wanted to understand the problems users were having, how investors evaluated the market I was in, and the approach other founders had taken to address the needs of the first two.
Once I thought I handle on the problem I was trying to solve I transitioned to creating a solution, through paper prototyping. I ran usability tests with paper prototypes, because I wanted to make sure that what I wanted to build would be a value to them. I did several iteration of this on a wide audience.
I stuck a fork in the process and decided it was time to build. Realizing that I couldn’t build everything and also trying to plan for future hires, I broke down the prototype and created a product roadmap. During the course of this process I thought about what the most compelling feature would be and to me that translated to what was the most pressing user pain point.
Prototyping
Before I wrote a single line of code, I first wrote a formal spec on the first feature that would be released. This may seem counterintuitive to running fast, but I wanted everyone on my team to be on the same page about what we were building, why we were building it, and then work together on the how. I included mock ups for the designer, system interactions for developers, and finally suggestions for usability testing. Then I sat down with each group. My designer and I talked about simplifying the design – taking away components and streamlining a user’s workflow. The engineering team and I talked about data modeling, error handling, and how to architect our code base.
Once we released the first iteration of the prototype I had everyone on the team play with it for a couple days and send me feedback on what they saw as show-stopper bugs and any functionality that wasn’t intuitive or user-friendly.
The standard to determine the first iteration’s success was for users to tell us that they wanted to use the product immediately as is.
Pitching
Before I even thought about pitching, I spent sometime understanding the investment market and conditions. Since my last startup the investor market has changed a lot, and not just because of the recession. There has been an increased presence of incubators, Angel Investors, and seed funds. And they are all competing against each other. There are also a wider variety of investment vehicles to choose from these days: bootstrapping, convertible notes, and seed funding.
The key for me has been to find the right investment vehicle and investor relationship that will get me to my next milestone. Putting together a business plan helped me evaluate what it is I needed.
The next phase was to pitch. I’m not going to delve too much more into this: know your audience and know your business.
The past 6 months have been awesome, while the process has been time consuming its been incredibly engaging! It’s been a series of coming up with experiments and executing them. What has been extremely valuable for me has been taking the time in the first couple months to explore, learn, and understand in three market segments: product (existing and tried solutions), user (pain points), and investment.
I’ve seen a lot of startups that just start executing and maybe that works for them, but I guess I’m more of a girl scout 🙂
