Here is a free chapter of a book I recently started reading.
You might find it very very useful.
http://www.newbusinessroadtest.com/documents/TheNewBusinessR...
Ask HN: Ok you've built a rudimentary prototype – how would you proceed next?
21–25 of 25 posts
Re: Ask HN: Ok you've built a rudimentary prototype – how would you proceed next?
#22Agree with the comments about talking to users and doing things that don't scale, which is some variation of #1.
Also learn as much as possible from the lessons of similar projects that failed. The one that came to mind is Flowtab.
http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/31/the-decline-and-fall-of-flo... HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6307068
Re: Ask HN: Ok you've built a rudimentary prototype – how would you proceed next?
#23Save yourself a massive amount of time / strife and just do not do it. - someone who spent a year and a half of their life working on this exact thing
As someone else that also spent a year and half working on something not exactly equal, but still very similar, I'd say:
- Decide if you want to be in the business of serving food. It's full of problems, but plenty interesting.
- If you really, really want to go there, discover how to make this work at the local level, in a way that isn't all or nothing (hint, people won't install an app for a bar they'll go once - or maybe they will and I'm wrong, but I don't really see that happening), and go for a small business deployment.
- After you cleared both of the above, yes, talk to bar owners. They'll make you throw your plans away, so talk to them before implementing too much.
Re: Ask HN: Ok you've built a rudimentary prototype – how would you proceed next?
#24Do whatever it takes to get enough daily usage to see what's working and what's not working, then iterate. Trying to guess what your product needs is incredibly hard. It's much more likely to be a case of you not fully understanding your customers needs/wants than a missing feature [1]. Until you have it working where N leads turn into M recurring customers, don't try to scale.
[1] http://andrewchen.co/the-next-feature-fallacy-the-fallacy-th...
Re: Ask HN: Ok you've built a rudimentary prototype – how would you proceed next?
#25http://www.tabbedout.com/ When I was looking at this awhile ago, these guys had gotten pretty far with the concept. I think they had a blog article detailing why POS companies were a pain to work with and in some cases very expensive (they charge partner companies for access to their "APIs") A business plan might be a good idea. Who is going to pay for the service, are you going to charge the bars or the consumer or…
Interesting, I'd not come across tabbedout. I'm hoping a business plan will form when we follow the good peoples advice in this thread. Doing a plan at this stage feels a bit like waterfall to me. I realise you can't get far without one but sitting down and writing one before we've established the pain points, opportunities & demands feels too early. Maybe I'm just naive
You need a Lean Canvas, not a full business plan. It will take a fraction of the time. I know a good Lean UX expert and The Lean Start-Up is on the dining table ;)