When developing your MVP mobile App, the first thing you need to define is the limits of how far you want to go. You need to decide how far you want to enhance the user experience in juxtaposition with the need to develop the essential functionality required to test it as a MVP. Sometimes keeping a balance between the two needs is challenging
In this article, I would like to share some online education resources that you can use to help you in the early stages of developing your invention or idea as an entrepreneur.
These online educational resources includes videos, podcasts, recorded interviews and articles that often times are mostly free allowing you to easily prepare for yourself a self training plan on almost any subject, giving you the opportunity to listen to some of the most experienced entrepreneurs or lecturers explaining their views and experiences as well as giving their sales pitch.
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While you strategize about your startup marketing strategy, you also need to consider the several ways you are going to promote your product. Investing in your site’s SEO infrastructure is part of a long term strategy for developing your product and its brand.
Search engine optimization (SEO), as a sole strategy, will not bring quickly enough the large amount of target audience users you are expecting to show your product to. SEO should, first and foremost, be considered as a way to strengthen your brand or product visibility and as a way to gain trust among users. In a secondary sense, SEO can be used as a way to support your cross channel efforts, because users these days tend to move more and more between channels while looking up solutions for their needs. A good SEO strategy balances the requirement of being there when they need to find you, so when they look they can easily locate you in all available channels, with the long term approach of building your product presence overall and bringing masses of customers to become acquainted with it.
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Social media marketing has revolutionized the way young startups gather and interact with their target audiences and consequently it has influenced the way that we gather potential new customers. Social Media marketing is a good way to test your MVP assumptions and gather user requirements. It may also help when searching for a monetization model, and nonetheless aids in finding users for the beta release of your MVP.
There are four keys to utilizing the power of Social Media. First is understanding the different methods and possibilities available when using social media. Second, prepare a plan for what is needed and expected from using the social media. Third, design and test the methods you plan to use to achieve your goals. Finally, execute your strategies while continuously adjusting your techniques and method, depending on the results you get.
Taxonomies systems for naming and organizing things into groups that share similar characteristics. Initially emerging from Biology and Library Sciences, we increasingly tend to use Taxonomies for describing the outcome structure of buildings, or for labeling the navigation system of a given application.
Creating a product’s set of taxonomies is part of the User Experience and Information Architecture process. It is therefore an important aspect of communicating the product offering to the target audience in a way that will help them understand the product’s functionality, while at the same time, minimizing the amount of time they spend in order to get their bearings and find what options they need to control within the product
In this article I share a recent experience of a user testing session that was conducted. I believe that this experience shows how much easier things become when user testing is performed. Not only does it yield data about your MVP, it is also important to meet regularly with real users to gather user requirements during the initial stages of the development of your product - before it is offered to the market - for these reasons.
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Wire-frames are useful in the preparation of mock-ups and are also helpful in the process of developing your MVP. Wireframes are the output of choice for interaction designers and product managers, because it allows them to easily and quickly draw a page schematic or screen blueprint that represents the skeletal framework of the application or any part of it. Wireframes enable developers to envision not only how the product works but also gives them the opportunity to explain any perceived user flows at the design stage.
This article discusses one of the more important trends in current application design and development, cross platform application, which impacts your product’s ability to reach different types of audiences that use various devices. When developing your Minimal Viable Product (MVP), cross platform application support immediately becomes a big challenge to the problem of reaching your target audience.
DNA usually refers to the fundamental and distinctive characteristics of someone or something, especially when it refers to those properties that are regarded as hereditary or unchangeable. The study of DNA is becoming a major field of science, and the study of manipulating an organism’s DNA is becoming more and more possible. In business, we sometimes use the term DNA to describe an organization’s essential qualities and therefore study its non-organic DNA as a way to try to improve an organization’s behavior as well as to be able to predict, or sometimes even change, those qualities that lead to its success.
Gathering User Requirements involves a process that uses several different methods and sources to find and collect data. This can be comprised of information from interviews, questionnaires , A/B testing and focus groups that will then, in turn, be analyzed along with your Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s).
A common mistake people make is that they tend to treat themselves as one of the users. Like a horses with blinders, we often myopically base what we think the requirements list is, solely on one’s own selfish needs and not on the real and objective needs of the users. The correct way is to first adhere to the process of gathering User Requirements before deciding on what you think those requirements ought to be.
All successful products have, as their most important component, a well developed User Interface. Because it is very important that your product is launched with an easy to learn user interface, your team needs to have both an excellent User Interface expert and a great Visual Designer. JumpstartCTO explains how to use an Interface Designer and a Visual Designer to help you build your product.
It is easy to understand what a Key Performance Indicator is by way of metaphor, because what the term KPI stands for, comes from our interactions with the human body. The most common KPI that is monitored in Western society is found by studying a person’s health condition, specifically by taking the body’s internal temperature. This is one of the most important indicators that can instantly tell us if someone may be sick or not. A gradual change in temperature or a quick fluctuation can indicate that the human body is recovering or fighting infection. There are several other indicators but only few of them are as important as the body temperature. Body temperature therefore defines by metaphor what is known as the Key Performance Indicator. In the study of Chinese medicine, there are other important KPIs which are measured to determine the human body’s condition. Demographically, the KPI is determined by a wide range of considerations, from the standards of measurement for the conditions of the prospective study, and from the background of the subject to the setting of the testing environment. These are all factors that contribute to determining the meaning of the KPIs we observe.
I often have meetings with entrepreneurs who are in the early stages of their ventures and are trying to approach seed investors while, at the same time, cope with their product offering on a narrow budget.
Approaching investors is not an easy process. While finding investors may be easy, the hard part comes when you need to pitch your idea to them. There are many kinds of investors, so there isn’t only one right way to approach an investor, but there are proper ways to pitch your idea and also to anticipate and cope with some of the feedback you might receive.
In a previous post we established a working definition of the Minimal Viable Product (MVP) and argued that it is more a process within one’s product development strategy that is supported in different scenarios, than it is a definition of a goal in itself.
In this post is meant to extend the discussion of development processes that determine the MVP into areas of what functionality to include, as well as what to exclude, when designing your product’s offering.
JumpStartCTO is a New York based consulting firm that helps entrepreneurs with the early stages of ventures. Our goal is to help build working partnerships between entrepreneurs who have ideas for products and those professionals who have the knowhow and ability to productize their ideas and bring them to the market.
By focusing on proven leadership strategies and management skills, a Consulting “On Demand” CTO streamlines the processes needed to develop a product. A part-time chief technology officer (CTO) is efficient at identifying the required framework and IT infrastructure essential for taking ideas and making them into a minimal viable product that is ready to be tested in the market.
JumpStartCTO is run by David Rashty. An entrepreneur and one of the early web pioneers, he has over twenty years experience as a CTO and a CEO. David has been involved in several start-ups and established companies as well as being the founder of two successful ventures.
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