Use the following space to document your core values.
CULTURE
Culture is what happens when the CEO steps out of the room. In the beginning, most entrepreneurs don’t think about culture. They’re simply too busy doing what needs to be done. By the time they begin to recognize its importance it’s too late. Once you’ve defined your core values culture will automatically begin to form. Thinking about culture now gives you the opportunity to decide how those values to show up in your work environment.
Use the following space to document your desired culture.
STRATEGY
Your core strategy represents the playbook you will use to get your product built and ready to sell. This will be constantly evolving and may shift dramatically with the state of the market. But without a reasonable strategy from the outset you will waste enormous amounts of time, effort, and money building a product that may have a near-zero chance of success. At a minimum, your Strategy should address your Unique Value Proposition, Competition, Personas, Ideal Client Profile, Go-To-Market Strategy, Monetization, and Budget.
Unique Value Proposition
What is going to make your product standout among the crowd? Do you have expert knowledge that your competition does not possess? How about a unique set of features or a lower price point? Any of these could become your unique value proposition when combined in the right way.
Competition
First determine if you have a unique idea or if someone’s already painted your masterpiece. If you can’t find anyone already doing it then you may have a good shot at being the first. If there’s competition already in the market then you’re going to need more money or a truly unique approach to catch up.
Personas
Who are you planning to sell your product to? Personas are a semi-fictitious representation of your buyer. They will contain both demographic and psychographic information about a few key groups of prospects and clients.
Ideal Client Profile
If a persona represents an individual buyer, then an Ideal Client Profile represents an individual business that you’d like to sell to. If you’re selling a B2B product then your ideal client profile could include information on yearly revenue, number of employees, industry or vertical, and location. If you’re developing a B2C product you can omit this step.
Go-To-Market Strategy
If you’ve gotten this far you’re ready to put the pieces together and figure out who’s going to buy and sell it. Many factors make up your go-to-market strategy including its complexity, price, value, and sales strategy.
Monetization
In most scenarios the reason we’re doing all this is to make money; at least enough to keep the doors open and food on our table. This is not as easy as it seems so take your time on this step. Since its founding in 2006 Twitter may have changed the world but it still hasn’t generated a profit—and they generated $1.5B in funding. Is your idea that groundbreaking?
Budget
Now that you understand how you’ll generate revenue, next you need to figure out how much. Oh, and you also need to understand what it’s going to cost you. Unless you’re a triple threat with an expert understanding of all things engineering, design and business, you’ll need other people to help you; usually employees and contractors. Unfortunately, both of those groups like to be paid for their expertise so shelling out some cash or giving up equity will be right around the corner. Your budget is the plan you’ll start from to make all those decisions. In my experience, enter the numbers you think you’ll earn and half-them. Then enter the number you think you’ll spend and double them. Finally, add 25% for all the things you haven’t thought of yet.
CONCEPTS
If Core Values are what drives your team and creates your Culture then Core Concepts are the glue that binds your product together. These are foundational drivers that will propel the technical initiatives of your new software business. In the very early stages you may find yourself skimping on one or two concepts. That’s fine providing you realize that you will have to redevelop those pieces all over again as your company grows. If you’re developing a mission-critical portion of your platform, don’t skimp on the eight S’s: Scalable, Stable, Secure, Simple, Supportable, Self-Serviceable, Standardized, and Synthesized.
Self-Similarity
If you search for stochastic self-similarity on Google you (and I) could quickly become overwhelmed with talk of astrophysics and fractals. A quick search on Wikipedia states, “Self-similar processes are types of stochastic processes that exhibit the phenomenon of self-similarity. A self-similar phenomenon behaves the same when viewed at different degrees of magnification, or different scales on a dimension (space or time).” The first time I unknowingly interacted with the idea of stochastic self-similarity was a rather fantastic night in college spent staring at fractals till 4AM (let your imagination fill in the gaps). Fractals have a unique property that they look the same regardless of the degree of magnification. In laymen’s terms, regardless of how far you zoom out or in, a fractal looks exactly the same.
Why does it matter to you? Because the first time you decide to build something that falls outside the lines of your agreed upon process you introduce irregularities into your product. This, more than anything else I’ve encountered in all my years of consulting, is the cause for platforms, process and systems to fail and a major cause for tech debt. The concept of this framework is to provide a repeatable set of steps that seek to achieve a similar desired outcome. The same goes for your product. The first time your Engineering teams builds a feature without the help of Product or UX they have introduced an irregularity into your system that fails to maintain the property of self-similarity. I’m not immune to the reality that this will happen; maybe even frequently. But I can assure you that each time you fail to maintain a process you’ve developed (especially those in the SDLC section later in this book) you degrade the quality of your platform. Document the best process you’re capable of achieving to build a single feature then repeat that process again and again and again. Be as strict as possible maintaining your processes and eventually the quality of the end-product you build will have a similar quality to the individual feature you’ve built (i.e. Your product will look the same regardless of the degree of magnification). When you package hundreds of quality features into a well-designed product your customers will absolutely recognize your efforts and discipline.
Scalable
Building your product with the understanding that one or two clients are going to use it is a great way to approach your minimally viable product. But what happens when 10, 100, or 1,000 clients start using it? Was your product and infrastructure built to handle that level of use? Were features designed and code written to be built on or ripped out? Once you’ve proven your initial concept scalability should be top of mind for your product and engineering teams.
Stable
Trust is a hard thing to earn and an easy thing to lose. Bad press and negative reviews in the early stages of a startup can sink any chance you may have for success. It only takes one or two outages before you’ve lost the faith of your clients. If your product is held together with duct tape and bailing wire your churn rate will be high because your customers don’t trust you with their data.
Secure
What kind of data are you storing and how important is that data to your customers—or in some cases their customers? If you’re not taking security seriously now, then I can assure you you’ll have to later. It’s just a lot less fun when the attorneys