Last week I had a mentoring session with 3 founders - 3 different businesses, teams and phases - and it turned out that the answer to all 3 major questions they had was 1.
Question 1
The first founder that presented themselves came with a startup where the team has a member with extensive domain knowledge, experience and community around it. Their main question was how to find and manage a software development team.
Question 2
The second founder seemed happy to have a technical co-founder. Their main question was which features to build first.
Question 3
The third founder has a contract with a software vendor that is already building their product. Their question is how to go about adding 3rd party integrations.
The Answer
Although all three founders came to the session ready to ask technical questions, what really seemed to be the next crucial step in all cases was: talking to the customers. And then fine tuning the lean canvas and mapping out the story board based on that input.
In order to know which specialty to look for in software developers, understand your product first. Leverage the domain knowledge and network to start a digital community, facilitate initial transactions manually (in this case it’s in the beauty&wellness services space) and understand the pain points better. This same community will be one of the main channels once the product actually launches. In order to arrive there, run your community manually (actually using the existing platforms for communication, booking and payments) as much as you can and use the learnings to map your story board. Based on that, a fractional CTO can suggest the optimal tech stack and the dev team structure.
In order to decide which features your technical co-founder should start building first, execute initial services manually (in this case it’s in the legal services space), in order to find out which features your customers absolutely can’t go without if they are opting for your SaaS subscription. Map your storyboard and then let your technical co-founder focus on making it happen.
Prior to selecting the integrations and the ways to implement them, let your customers use your core product first. That way you might spare yourself trouble of finding another vendor with more experience with the API that your customers didn’t even need in the first place.
Software product is merely a tool, what a business is about is a solution to customers problems. If you’re looking for an answer to your question, book a call with any of us CxO in residence at https://linktr.ee/canopy_inresidence