Ben Schippers9 years
Ben Schippers is the co-founder and co-CEO of HappyFunCorp, a product engineering firm that helps businesses reach the cutting edge of creative software tech and create apps that don't suck.
More posts by this contributor
- A modest proposal to make apps suck less
- The technology industry needs to think more seriously about device addiction
Editor’s note:Ben Schippers is the co-founder ofHappyFunCorpwhere he spends his days building software for startups and fortune companies.
The tendency for entrepreneurs is to build big products. But theproblemwith big, feature-rich products is that they take substantial time andmoney.
People talk about this topic frequently, especially in the technology sector. What I’m laying out here, however, is slightly different. I’m discussing howbootstrappinghas evolved. Howbootstrappinghas become more of aproductproblemand anopportunity. If entrepreneurs can learn to release smaller products early and often, then the conversation about having to raise venture capital early wildly shifts and enables friends and family rounds to be much more impactful — an idea that is beneficial for all parties.
As bandwidth continues to become cheaper and technology more accessible, we’ve seen a huge shift in how technology is being built, deployed and consumed. Even though the technology landscape has changed, entrepreneurs are still very much set in a dated conversation surroundingbootstrapping.
The conversation has been, “When do I raise institutionalmoney, should I raisemoney, what’s my company worth and how muchmoneyam I going to need to build this business?” This style of thinking simply doesn’t complement the newer style of development where you can be fast and nimble without large sums of cash.
The difference between big, feature-rich products and small ones is that the small ones don’t require nearly as much time and capital.
You don’t need oceans of capital to start and build 95 percent of the technology that’s being consumed today. You need a strongproductteam that understandsproductfocus as well as the importance of moving fast. The boostrapping conversation should be focused around time-to-market and features,notraisingmoneyormoneyin general, especially during the early days. Entrepreneurs must think about releasing early and often and incorporating user feedback — creating a smaller, and more focused feature set that addresses a specificproblem.
The beauty of focused products is that they require less time and therefore lessmoneyto build. How many huge, feature-rich products fail? About as many as smaller ones. The difference between big, feature-rich products and small ones is that the small ones don’t require nearly as much time and capital, and you can get them to market in a few weeks/months and regularly iterate.
Bootstrappinghas become much more of aproductopportunitythan a capitalization concern. In the world of technology startups, the biggestenemy is time. Time is the ultimate equalizer and the only commodity worth fighting for — you can always make moremoney.
Top 10 list for getting started:
- Use tools like InVision or Omnigraffle, wireframe your idea so you can have presentation material – just a couple screens, keep it high level.
- Pitch your idea to friends and family and try to raise 200K (use your presentation material again, keep it high level)
- Start strategizing about features to include in your minimal viable product, fight to keep it small – break it down, keep it small
- Using your wireframes, either hire or take them to a development firm that can help round them out.
- Start the design phase; this shouldnottake more than 2-5 weeks to complete.
- Once you have 60 percent of the designs done, start building a clickable prototype (use this to raise moremoney; your clickable prototype should be built in 4-5 weeks following design phase).
- Spend eight weeks building out the data model based on the clickable prototype.
- By week 12, try to get a small number of people (15-20) to use your software. This is a very early release, expect many bugs – you want to watch people actually use it to see what needs to be changed.
- Incorporate that initial feedback while continuing to build toward your MVP. Do another small release, get more feedback on specifics
- MVP launch (13-16 weeks total) rinse and repeat. (Note: this can be done much faster but on average, this is what we see.)
Tools for maximizing time to market includeParse,Git,Seed,InVision, Omnigraffle, Balsamic,Heroku,Slack,Twitter Bootstrap,Google Analytics,Rails, WordPress, Django,Asana, Jira and Basecamp.
As more and more people chase the startup dream,bootstrappinghas very much taken on anewlife. The businesses that will succeed are those that will evolve to live in the cross section between releasing early and often and incorporating user feedback (see Instagram) as opposed to those that chase venture, stay stealthy and try to build big(see Color).
