Surely each of you came up with ideas for new interesting useful products - services, applications or devices. Perhaps some of you even developed and published something, maybe even tried to make money on it.
In this article, I will show several methods of working on a business idea - what you should think about right away, what indicators to calculate, what work to plan first of all in order to test the idea in a short time and at minimal cost.
Why do you need this?
Suppose you come up with some new product or service (I will call it a product, regardless of whether it is a service, device or software). The first thing, in my opinion, is worth thinking about - what will work on this product give you, why do you personally work on this product?
The most popular answers to this question (the order does not matter):
- I am interested in this idea and I want to develop it regardless of whether it is possible to make money on it.
- I want to learn new tools and technologies for myself, apply them to a new task.
- I want to create a product that is in demand and make a lot of money, much more than you can earn by working for hire.
- I want to improve some processes, someone's work or life, to make the world a better place.
- I want to work for myself, on my ideas, and not “for my uncle”.
And so on. There are many more different answers. The ones I have listed are the most common. At this stage, it is important to be honest with yourself and not engage in self-deception. Of the above 5 answers, in fact, only one leads to the creation of a business - No. 3, the rest are about interests, dreams and one's own comfort. Starting your own business allows you to earn more than working for hire. However, you will have to pay for this with hard, sometimes uninteresting and routine work, discomfort and often a deterioration in the standard of living at first. Suppose you are going to make a business out of your idea, then move on.
Prerequisites for starting a business
For your business to succeed, you need to want to create and develop a product, have the necessary skills for this or be ready to acquire them (both to learn on your own, and to attract partners and hire employees). But perhaps the most important thing is to find a sufficiently capacious and solvent market for your product, to set the price of your product so that the business makes a profit, not a loss. And also gain an accurate understanding of how and why consumers will choose and buy your product. Businesses most often die not because they have a bad product, but because no one needs this product at the price that will enable the business to operate at a loss.
Suppose you want to work on a product, you have the necessary knowledge and skills, you have the time, and you are even ready to invest some of your savings in the project, which should be enough for the first time. What do you do next, what is the plan of action?
Action plan
Very often it happens like this - the idea is transformed into a more or less detailed terms of reference and the project team (consisting of the authors of the idea and sympathizers) begins to implement the project. In the process, they think through the details and after a few months, an alpha or even beta version is born, which can be shown to potential users. Until this moment, not everyone survives, I would even say - a small part and this is normal. In the early 2000s, everyone in software development did this, and so did I. In those days, the public met any new software or service mostly favorably, and it was possible to immediately make sales. Somewhere after 2007, something broke (the market was saturated) and this scheme stopped working. Then it became fashionable to do freemium - the client starts using it for free, and then we try to sell him additional functionality. The product will have some users, but it is not at all clear how and how much it will be possible to earn on it.
Around the same time, Eric Ries's book Business from Scratch was published in the United States. Lean Startup Method. Lean - means "thrifty, economical." The main idea of this book is that the management and planning methods adopted in large and long-standing businesses are not suitable for new businesses. The new business does not have reliable data on the market and sales, which does not allow making the right management decisions. Therefore, it is necessary to formulate and quickly, with small budgets, test many hypotheses about the needs of consumers and the functionality of the product.
Lean Startup is far from the only methodology for working on new products.
Back in 1969, Herbert Simon published the book "Sciences of the Artificial", in which he described the concept of the so-called "design thinking" - a new (at that time) approach to finding new solutions to creative and scientific problems. Combining this concept with the Lean Startup methodology and several other methods, the team of the Russian investment fund and IIDF accelerator created a startup development concept - a “traction map”.
In the accelerator of the Southern IT Park (Rostov-on-Don), we used the IIDF methodology for 7 sets of the accelerator (3,5 years), and then finalized it taking into account the experience gained. The methodology of the South IT Park accelerator is distinguished by the essence and content of the first, earliest stages of work on a business project. The need to create our own methodology is explained by the fact that IIDF works with projects that already have an MVP and first sales, since this is primarily an investment fund. The Southern IT Park accelerator works with projects of all stages, and the largest number of projects come to the accelerator with an idea and a desire to develop it. The IIDF methodology is poorly developed for the early stages of project development.
Having summarized my own experience as an entrepreneur, as well as as a startup tracker and business consultant, I formed my own methodology, which also differs in the first stages from the methodology of IIDF and South IT Park. Next, I will talk about the initial stages of working on a business project, according to these techniques.
The main task of all these methods is to push your idea with consumers as early as possible and either confirm its usefulness, or deploy and change your idea in the direction of market needs as early as possible. If at the same time you find that no one needs your product at all or it has many very cheap competitors, then this is also a good result. Because you will find it out as early as possible without wasting several months of your life on an unviable business idea. Sometimes it happens that during market research for one product, a startup team finds current needs among consumers and starts making a completely different product. If you have found the client's "pain", you can give him a solution and you are interested in doing this - you may well get a good business.
It may seem that I am against working on projects that do not bring in money. This is wrong. You can engage in any, including non-commercial projects, and I do not blame you. I only warn you against dangerous delusions. You should not deceive yourself and your comrades by telling everyone about future commercial success if you have not done elementary research and calculations, which will be discussed later. If you do not count on the commercial success of your project and do it because you are interested in it or you want to make the world a better place - that's good, then present your project. By the way, it is possible that over time you will find a way to make a business on such a project.
IIDF Traction Card
According to this concept, for the development of a new product, it is necessary to consistently go through a series of stages. This is a common place for all the methods under consideration - we do everything step by step, it is impossible to jump the stages forward, you will have to go back.
The first step after you have an idea for your product is to come up with a few customer segments - groups of consumers who may need your product. These are hypotheses, you come up with them based on your life experience. Then you will check them. Do not be afraid to come up with many hypotheses or try to immediately come up with hypotheses that turn out to be true. Until you start checking them, you will not be able to determine which of them are correct.
Customer segments should be immediately characterized - assess their capacity in your region, country, world, highlight the distinguishing features of this segment (what distinguishes the consumers of this segment from other consumers). It is not bad to immediately assume the solvency of the segments. You shouldn’t get too carried away with the accuracy of segment assessments, it’s important to follow common sense and understand that, for example, there are more car drivers in Russia than drivers of heavy trucks every 100 times. If you make a mistake, the proportion will be different - 50 or 200 - at this stage it does not matter. It is important that this is approximately 2 orders of magnitude.
After the client segments are described and evaluated, you need to select one of the segments and go to the next stage of the traction map - this is the formation and testing of hypotheses about the problems of the client segment. Previously, you decided that a group of consumers needed your product, and now you have to come up with hypotheses - why do these people need your product, what problems and tasks they will solve with the help of your product, how important and valuable it is for them to solve these problems.
It takes just a few hours of thought to come up with and evaluate customer segment hypotheses, as well as come up with customer problem hypotheses. Already at this stage, your faith in your product may be destroyed, and you will continue to live, burying your idea without regrets.
After hypotheses of consumer problems are invented, they need to be tested. There is a great tool for this - problem interviews. In his article I briefly described the basic rules for conducting problem interviews. Be sure to read the book "Ask Mom" by Rob Fitzpatrick - this is a very interesting, small and useful guide on how to ask questions to find out facts and weed out judgments and assumptions.
It is strongly recommended to work with only one segment at a time to focus efforts and increase the reliability of the results. If you talk to representatives of several customer segments throughout the day, you can get confused about who told you what.
An alternative name for the first stages of generating and testing hypotheses is Customer Discovery.
If you are honest with yourself, ask the right questions and record the answers of the interlocutors (ideally - on a voice recorder), then you will have factual material, on the basis of which you will confirm or refute your hypotheses, find (or not find) actual consumer problems, for the solution of which you can suggest a product. You also need to figure out the value of solving these problems—why solving these problems is important, what benefit the consumer gets from solving these problems, or what pain and loss it saves. The value of solving a problem is related to the future pricing of the product. If the consumer is aware of their benefit or savings from solving a problem, then it is quite possible to tie the price of your solution to this benefit.
When you know about the actual problems of consumers and the value of solving these problems for consumers, then you can do MVP. What is not called this abbreviation. I will now try to explain the meaning of MVP, as I understand it. An MVP is the kind of thing that allows you to convincingly demonstrate your solution to the problems you've found to consumers and verify that the solution is appropriate and valuable to consumers. Consumer response to an MVP gives you the opportunity to validate or refute your hypotheses about consumer problems and the value of solving those problems to consumers.
Based on this idea of MVP, I argue that in many cases, the MVP can be a presentation (personal or landing page on the site - landing), which tells about the problem and your solution and implies that the consumer performs a targeted action - a call, a message, an order , concluding a contract, making an advance payment, etc. In some cases, the solution can be implemented manually for several clients. And only in a small percentage of cases, it is really necessary to develop something to confirm the hypotheses of problems and value. In this case, you need to implement the most basic function that solves one of the most common consumer problems. The solution should be visual, convenient and attractive. When faced with the choice of designing a product with a single feature or implementing multiple features, choose to develop an attractive design.
If a potential customer is willing to give you an upfront and is looking forward to your product, then this is the strongest confirmation of your hypothesis about their problem, your solution, and the value of your solution. In most cases, no one will give you an upfront payment, but having an MVP allows you to discuss with your customers your solution to their problem and the cost of your solution. Very often, when you tell someone about your product, you meet with approval and participation. However, when you offer to buy a product, you learn a lot of useful things. For example, that the problem is not a problem at all and does not need to be solved. Or that your decision is bad for a variety of reasons. Or that the price is very high because there are more affordable competitors, etc.
The first sales or contracts signed are considered confirmation of hypotheses about the problem, your solution and value. After that, you can start making the first version of the product, taking into account all the information received, and develop sales. This is where I will stop in describing the IIDF methodology and show how other methods differ.
Methodology of the South IT Park Accelerator
We proceeded from the following considerations - in addition to the recommended course of action, it would be nice to give the recommended work tools and a formalized description of the desired result. If the result is not obtained, then you need to continue working at this stage or return to the previous one. Thus, the methodology acquires the features of a framework, as it contains fairly strict instructions - what and how to do, what tools to use, what results should be obtained.
When you have an idea for a new product, the first thing you need to do is figure out what real, existing, and current consumer problems your idea can solve. Therefore, we removed the client segment hypotheses stage and immediately moved on to problem hypotheses. To begin with, it is important to find any group of people who can benefit from your product, and then you can understand what they have in common and segment them.
Thus, the first stage of the development of the project is the compilation of a set of hypotheses of problems. To draw up hypotheses, it is proposed to think about the problems of potential customers, as well as delve into these problems. For each suspected problem, you need to describe the steps (tasks) that you need to perform in order to solve this problem. And then for each step to assume tools for solving problems. You should not strain too much in inventing tools, but if they are obvious to you, then you should immediately fix them. Let me explain with an example.
You came up with a certain service that helps in choosing and buying a used car. The problem is - to choose and buy a used car without hidden flaws at an adequate market price in the shortest possible time.
Steps (tasks) of a potential client:
Decide on the model and modification, years of manufacture
Find variants (instances)
Evaluate, test, compare instances
Select a specific instance
Carry out an examination of the technical condition
Negotiate the details of the transaction and make a purchase
Register a car
Each of these tasks can be solved in many ways, and for sure there are tools that solve all these problems in a complex way. For example, car dealerships with used cars. They will be a little more expensive, but they give a guarantee.Let's still try to pick up tools for each of the tasks. More experienced acquaintances, viewing reviews on the network, going to car dealerships will help you decide on the model. Each of these solutions has drawbacks, it is desirable to fix the most obvious of them.
Please note that at this stage we do not think about who our client is and what his properties are - how qualified he is in choosing a car on his own and what his budget is. We decompose the problem into parts.
This work on the decomposition of possible problems of potential customers of your product is conveniently carried out using mental maps (mind maps, mind map). In fact, these are trees into which you sequentially reveal the levels of problem elaboration. I have about it , where the methodology for working with hypotheses using mental maps is considered in more detail.
So, you have spent several hours thinking about problems, tasks, tools (solutions) and their shortcomings. What does it give you?
First, you looked at and organized the landscape of the "battlefield"—thinking about a lot of what you'll have to deal with if you do go ahead with the project.
Second, you have a detailed plan for conducting the problem interview. All you have to do is come up with questions to find out how your assumptions match the real world of your potential customers.
Thirdly, the hypotheses you come up with are related to your future product in the following way: existing solutions (tools) for consumer tasks are your competitors, competitors' shortcomings can become your advantages if you find a way to overcome them, and consumer tasks determine the main functions (core features) of your product.
Armed with hypotheses, you can move on to the next stage - confirming hypotheses with the help of problematic interviews. This stage is similar to the stage of the IIDF traction map, but again there is a slight difference in the tools and fixing the results. In the methodology of the South IT Park accelerator, we insist on determining and fixing the level of awareness of problems, tasks, and difficulties of the interviewed potential consumer according to the levels of the Ben Hunt ladder. It is important to understand how much the consumer is worried about this or that problem, task, lack of an existing solution, whether he is ready to put up with it or has already done something to correct the situation. This is important because if the interviewee confirmed to you that he has a problem, this does not mean that he is ready to buy a solution to this problem. If he told you about his attempts to solve the problem, the methods and tools that he tried, then he is probably ready to buy a solution. However, the question of price remains open, and therefore it is important during the interview to find out the budgets that were previously spent on attempts to solve problems, tasks, and difficulties. The budget in this case is not only money, but also the time that the consumer spent.
Analyzing the results of the interview, we single out groups of respondents who confirmed the same hypotheses. In fact, we are looking for patterns of consumer behavior - the same unmet needs. At this stage, we are trying to segment consumers around patterns of their consumer behavior. Segmentation of consumers after interviews based on the facts obtained seems to us more reliable than segmentation at the stage of hypotheses.
If the results of problem interviews satisfied you - you found patterns of consumer behavior, common problems and successfully managed to segment potential customers, found their budgets for solving problems, then you can move on to the next stage - product modeling and MVP. Before implementing anything, we propose to design and simulate it. During the product modeling phase, we strongly recommend that you describe the customer business processes that you plan to change with your product. It is worth understanding well how your consumer lives and solves his problems now. And then embed the business processes of your product into the business processes of the consumer. Having done this work, you will understand well what you are going to do, you will be able to explain the essence and place of your product in the client's processes to any interested person - a potential partner, investor, developer, and the potential client himself.
Having such project documentation allows you to estimate the costs of developing a product and highlight the most basic functionality that we can quickly and inexpensively implement in an MVP. You will also be able to decide on the essence of the MVP - will it be a presentation or a “manual MVP” or will you still have to develop something to demonstrate value to a potential client.
An important element of the product modeling phase is the evaluation of the economics of the project. Suppose there are specialists in the project team who can develop the MVP on their own and the development will not require funds. It is important to understand that this is not enough. In order to sell your product, you need to attract consumers - use advertising channels that are not free. For the first sales, you can use channels that do not require large investments - make cold calls yourself or distribute flyers in the parking lot, but the capacity of such channels is small, your time is also worth money, and sooner or later you will delegate this work to hired employees. Therefore, it is very important to choose several customer acquisition channels and evaluate the cost of customer acquisition in these channels. To do this, you can use data from different sources, ask experts for indicators, or conduct your own experiments.
The cost of attracting a paying customer is one of the most important parameters that determines the cost of your product to the customer. Your product cannot cost less than this amount - as in this case you will definitely generate a loss from the very beginning. Your product development and support budget, as well as your profit as a business founder, is contained in the difference between the price of your product and the cost of acquiring customers.
At this stage, many projects are tempted to say - we will attract customers through organic search traffic and virality - it's practically free. They are right about the cheapness of acquisition, but they forget that these channels are slow, take a long time to spin up and have a small capacity. It is also important to keep in mind this circumstance - professional investors invest in projects for which there are understandable and cost-effective, scalable, capacious paid channels for attracting customers. Under only organic traffic, investments are not given.
If at this stage you have no problems - your product is modeled, the method of creating and functionality of the MVP is determined, the channels for attracting customers are determined and the project economy seems profitable, then you can move on to the next stage - creating an MVP. This stage is simple and practically does not differ from the previously considered stage of the IIDF traction map. After the MVP is created, you need to get the first sales, implementations. The process of concluding deals, sales, test use of your MVP can be delayed and will definitely bring feedback from customers - you will find out how bad your solution is, why it cannot be implemented, what are your shortcomings and what other competitors do you have that you did not know about before . If all this does not kill your product and your faith in it, then you can finalize the MVP and reach the next stages - meaningful channel sales. I will stop here and further consider the most common pitfalls that await you on the path of developing a business project using the methodologies described above.
Pitfalls that fall into projects that follow the methods described above
Let me remind you why the methods of working on startups were created. The main task is to learn how to quickly test ideas, identify and “bury” unviable ones, so as not to waste resources (your time and money). The use of these methods does not change the statistics, according to which 90-95% of new businesses die in the first year of existence. Startup development techniques hasten the death of unviable business ideas and reduce losses.
An idea that has been tested and “buried” quickly is a good result. An idea for which a product was developed and launched on the market, which then did not go on sale, is a bad result. A product designed according to the identified needs, for which pre-orders have been collected, the profit from sales of which covers the costs of advertising, production and development, and also allows you to return the investment in a reasonable time - this is a very good result. A product that has been redesigned and “deployed” at the stage of first sales, made it meet the needs of customers and cost-effective, taking into account the cost of customer acquisition, is also a good result.
The most common problem is incorrectly conducted problem interviews. She has varieties:
- Useless interviews - when the answers to the questions asked do not clarify anything, that is, the interviews were conducted, the questions were asked, but the answers did not bring facts on which to draw conclusions. This happens when bad hypotheses are chosen - obvious or not related to the idea of the product, or when questions are asked that are not related to the hypotheses.
- Too optimistic interpretation of the answers - when objectively the majority of respondents did not confirm any hypotheses, but 1-2 respondents confirmed part of the hypotheses. In this situation, you can try to understand who these people are and try to find other potential customers like them.
- Interviews are conducted with the wrong people - when the ability of respondents to make purchasing decisions is ignored. For example, you talk to children, they confirm the problem, but the purchase decision will not be made by them, but by their parents, who have completely different motives and they will never buy a cool but dangerous toy. Similarly, in B2B - you can interview users, but the budget is managed by executives who have other motives and the value of your product that you explore is not relevant to them. I believe that the South IT Park Accelerator methodology pushes you into this trap, as it lacks the stage of hypotheses about customer segments.
- Selling during the interview - when during the interview they do talk about the idea of the product and the well-meaning interlocutor, trying to support you, confirms your assumptions about problems and difficulties.
- Self-deception - when in fact the respondents did not confirm anything, but you interpret their words in your own way and believe that the hypotheses are confirmed
- A small number of interviews conducted - when you conduct several interviews (3-5) and it seems to you that all the interlocutors confirm your hypotheses and there is no need to conduct other interviews. This problem often goes hand in hand with problem #4, selling during an interview.
The consequence of incorrectly conducted interviews is usually an erroneous decision about the need for further development of the project (objectively - unviable and unnecessary). This leads to a waste of time (often several months) on the development of an MVP, and then at the stage of the first sales it turns out that no one wants to buy the product. There is also a more severe form - when the cost of attracting a client is not taken into account during the first sales and the product seems to be viable, but at the stage of meaningful sales, it turns out that the business model and product are unprofitable. That is, with properly conducted interviews and an honest assessment of the project's economics, one could save several months of life and impressive amounts of money.
The next common problem is the misallocation of resources between MVP development and sales. Very often, projects that make MVPs spend too much time and money on it, and when it comes time for the first sales, they do not have the budget to test sales channels. We have repeatedly come across projects that “buried” hundreds of thousands and millions of rubles into development, made not just an MVP, but a finished product, and then they cannot (or do not want to) spend at least 50-100 thousand rubles on testing channels and trying to quickly attract paid clients.
Another common problem is that during the interview, the project team understands that their original idea is not viable, but they identify several actual problems on which a business can be built. However, the team refuses to pivot and generate new ideas based on identified needs, citing the fact that “they are not interested in other topics.” At the same time, they can continue to dig a “dead topic” or even give up trying to make a startup.
There are 2 problems that I personally think are not well enough solved in the methods described above.
1. Estimating the cost of customer acquisition too late. The above methodologies do not require you to estimate the cost of customer acquisition until you have confirmed demand for your solution. However, conducting problem interviews and processing their results is a rather time-consuming task. This usually takes one to several weeks. To reliably test hypotheses, you need to conduct at least 10 conversations. On the other hand, you can estimate the costs of attracting a paying client in just 1-2 hours by searching the network for data and averaging them. I'll give you an example.
Suppose we are talking about some tender platform where customers place bids for a product or service, and suppliers offer themselves and their prices. The site is going to earn on commissions from transactions or subscription fees from users. Already at the idea stage, you can assume several channels through which users will be attracted. Suppose that we will attract customers with cold calls and advertising in search engines, and suppliers with advertising in search engines and social networks. Already at this stage, you can understand that the cost of attracting an active supplier will most likely be about 1000 rubles. Suppose that attracting suppliers will cost 200 rubles, then the completion of the first transaction will require approximately 2000 rubles. Further, we can conclude that it is desirable for us to earn at least 1000 rubles for each transaction. Accordingly, we need to correlate this minimum acceptable commission with our idea. If we are talking about a tender site where services are ordered up to 1000 rubles, then we will not be able to receive a commission of 1000 rubles. from every transaction. If we are talking about a site where services are ordered for 100 rubles, then such a business model may turn out to be cost-effective. So, even before the development of hypotheses and conducting problematic interviews, it is possible to identify the unviability of the idea.
2. There is no attempt to test the solution through the sale before the MVP development stage. The techniques do not prescribe the mandatory testing of the hypothesis about the acceptability of your solution for the client before developing the MVP. I believe that after analyzing the problematic interviews, it is appropriate to think over the concept of solving the identified problems. In the methodology of the South IT Park, this is reflected as a solution modeling. However, I think it's worth going further and making a presentation of the solution, with the help of which you will get the opinion of consumers about your vision of solving their problems. This is sometimes referred to in the literature as a "decision interview". You actually present a model of your product to potential customers and get their opinion about the future product and, possibly, pre-orders and first sales. This allows you to test hypotheses of the value of your solution at a very low cost, and at the same time refine the estimate of the cost of customer acquisition, even before the development of the MVP.
Comparison of techniques and description of my technique – Problem-solution fit framework
The upper part of the diagram shows the methods of the IIDF and the Southern IT Park. Progress through the stages occurs from left to right. The arrows show the shifted stages, and the new stages, which were not in the IIDF methodology, are outlined in thick outline.
After analyzing my experience and the most common causes of startup death, I propose a new methodology, indicated in the diagram - Problem-solution fit framework.
I suggest starting with the stage “Hypotheses of customer segments and choosing a segment for study”, because in order to create and test hypotheses of problems, you still need to understand who you are dealing with and take into account the capacity and solvency of the segment.
The next stage is new, it has not been seen before. When we have chosen a segment to work on, we need to think about how you can contact these consumers and how much it will cost to try to sell them something. The availability of representatives of the segment for a conversation is important, if only because in the future you will have to meet with similar people to conduct problematic interviews. If finding contacts of such people, as well as calling and arranging a meeting will be a problem for you, then why write hypotheses about their needs in detail? Already at this stage, there may be a return to the choice of another segment.
Then - two stages, as in the methodology of the South IT Park - building a detailed map of hypotheses of problems, tasks, tools and difficulties of consumers, and then - problematic interviews with consumers to test hypotheses. The difference between my methodology and those previously discussed is that during problem interviews, more attention should be paid to understanding problematic business processes from consumers who have confirmed the existence of problems. You need to understand what they are doing, how, when and how often a problem arises, how they tried to solve it, what solutions are acceptable and unacceptable for them. By modeling the business processes of clients, we then build our solution into them. At the same time, we are well aware of the conditions in which we will have to work and the existing restrictions.
Further, understanding the essence of our future product and the environment of potential customers in which it will appear, we can evaluate the economics of the project - calculate investments, product cost, think over monetization models and product price, analyze competitors. After that, you can make a reasonable and balanced decision on the continuation of work on the project.
After that, you will have all the information you need to present your product to potential customers - you know what customer problems you can solve, you have come up with a way to solve these problems (product), you understand how your solution will benefit, and you have decided on the price of your product . The collected information is enough to create a presentation about the product and try to sell your product to the most active part of the customer segment - the early adopters. Show your presentation to potential clients and get feedback from them. Pre-orders in advance are a good outcome. If you were paid in advance, then your product is perfect for the client, and he is ready to buy it at any time. Crowdfunding platforms (for example, Kickstarter) implement this principle on the Internet. Nothing prevents you from doing the same yourself. If customers are not ready to conclude an agreement, then you have the opportunity to ask about the reasons and conditions - what needs to be done so that they buy your product. Contracts signed and advances received best confirm your hypothesis about your solution to customer problems (product).
After that, you can start producing the first version of the product that matches the description under which you received pre-orders. When the product is ready, you hand it over to the first customers. After a period of test use, you collect the opinions of the first customers about the product, determine the directions for the development of the product, and then build meaningful, serial sales.
Conclusion
The article is quite long. Thank you for reading to the end. If you go through all the steps according to any of the methods described, it means that you have a product that someone needs. If you have not used any of the methods and your product has sales, then someone needs your product.
Business is obtained when you understand who and why buys your product and how much you can pay to attract a client. Then you can look for cost-effective promotion channels and scale sales, then you will have a business. If you don't know who buys your product and why, then you should figure it out by talking to users. You won’t be able to build a sales system if you don’t know who to sell to and what important benefits the product brings to customers.
Source: habr.com