My Start-Up class: Product Development

1. Product Development
from ideas to products

2. Main Problem of Product Development
Lack of resources
• Human resources
• Technology / Tools
• Time
• Place
• Financial
This is true for Start-ups and established companies
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3. Build it yourself
• The cheapest!
• You are the only one who know and believe to the idea
• Examples
• Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo!, Google, Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp,
Telegram, ...
• But, takes a longer time to build
• Bootstraping
• Still have day job | school
• Until ready to … jump!
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4. Find Co-Founder(s)
• The best approach
• Don’t have money to pay
• Very difficult to find co-founders
• Criteria
• Have the same vision
• Complementary in terms of skills
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5. Outsource
• Developers are more expert in the field
• But, difficult to work with since during early stage there are a lot
of changes | pivots
• Requirement changes. Outsources do not like this
• Risky?
• Barter?
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6. Employee
• Already have enough cash to spin
• Need government support
• half-and-half
• happening in many countries
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7. Place: Where to Build?
• Own garage (Indonesia: kos-kosan)
• No need to spend money on fancy offices
• Campuses
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8. Features, Features, Features
• Focus on essential feature(s)
• But, which one? Need data / metrics to measure
• “Must have” vs. “nice to have”
• Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
• Examples
• Instagram: share everything vs. share photos
• Palm Pilot PDA
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9. Time
"70% ready right now is better than
90% ready but
6 months latter”
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10. Design for {Prototypevs. Production}
• Prototype
• To prove the concept: can or cannot?
• May be expensive to develop
• May use expensive components / modules / ingredients
• Must do it fast
• Production
• Must consider the cost of the final product
• Materials / components: the cheapest but not affecting quality too much
• How to make them in production efficiently
• can we used unskilled workers, automation, time to produce, material leftovers, …
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11. “Eat your own dog food”
• Use your own product to feel how the customers feel
• Palm pilot story
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12. Miscellaneous things to ponder
• Project Management
• Good Project Managers are hard to find
• Management of resources
• Products vs. Projects
• Bootstrap: Projects generate money to fund product development
• “Tim project vs. tim product” issues
• Forget to develop products because the money in projects is so good
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13. Reading Materials
• Budi Rahardjo’s Start-Up: Product Development
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_rSwQEb0T4
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