Our top tips for startup product strategy

During the past 16 years (and counting) of our work with hundreds of startups and small businesses we have come across a lot. We’ve seen single students starting with almost no money but amazing skills and dedication make a simple idea become a great success (with a little help from us). We’ve also seen very senior and experienced groups with loads of money with really good software idea fail miserably (and taking us down with them).

Startups represent about half of our everyday business. So they are super important for us and we just love working with them - for the energy and optimism they usually bring, for the quickness in their decisions and the cool technologies they work on. But every new startup we meetup we try to warn them about how difficult the path in front of them are and share our ideas about survival and things we’ve learn works really well for startups. We’ve written about many such tips in the past, here’s a popular one about 5 things that the founder should keep in mind One thing we see a lot is that many startup founders are all over the place about product strategy - how they are going to put up the product, what should they focus on to bring in more customers, etc. Here’s a short list of such strategy advice we share with our customers. These are tips that we know works 100% of the time…
 

Make sure you know the pain point you are solving

Every new technology is (or should be) to solve an existing pain point. If there is no pain to solve, then the new technology and startup that is making it will fail. So first make sure there is a pain point that your solution solves and know it well. That should be the sole focus of everything your software does.

Keep things simple

Your software will be new to users. It’s interface and probably all of it’s features are likely to be alien to every user you manage to acquire. If you don’t keep things simple you’ll lose them fast. Don’t hide your features in complex interfaces with features after features. Show them one thing that you do well (your pain point solution) and only show that. Things like simple UI, obvious CTA buttons, easy to organize dashboards can make or break your software business.

Offer different levels of subscription

Making packages that are modular or subscriptions that offer features that expand upon the base level, allows your software to cover a variety of budgets. You should always, ALWAYS, offer a trial or free level so that the decision for the initial buy is without any barrier.

Offer integration with other applications whenever it makes sense

Your software is not the only thing that your user will use. Your application need to talk with other applications that your user will use. At the very least there should be an export feature of the data. Without the option to integrate or with the fear of locked down with a particular software most new users will decide not to buy.
 

Consider additional services

Always consider if there are any non software services you can include for added value. Things like 24/7 support, or initial customization, or free setup will give you a big leading edge. They sometimes become the reason why customers will take your software instead of your competitor’s.
 

Plan for a great customer service

Ultimately, one thing you know can set you apart from the competition is great customer service. Offering ways to interact with customers, answer questions and guide them to new solutions is a sure way to retain customers, and get new ones via word of mouth. You’d be surprised as to how many startups in out there think of customer service as an after thought (or sometimes not at all) - yet it’s usually the cheapest HR cost in the budgeting.
 

Analytics and data will help you show the right direction

For any new software it’s hard to find out what needs to change to make it better. The hard way to find this out is give it enough time to fail and let your customers complain and leave. A much easier way is to setup data analytics to keep track of the metrics and act on them. Setting up things crash analytics, google analytics for visits, on page statistics are extremely easy and usually takes less than 1% of the full effort of making the software, yet they are extremely important for the survival of the startup at it’s early days.