Making Sure You Are Ready to Begin Building Your MVP

I'm presenting Making Sure You Are Ready to Begin Building Your MVP next week at Coloft (Details/Registration).  I'm going to be looking at aspects like:

• Things to consider before building your MVP
• Features often overlooked when documenting an MVP for developers
• Understanding important metrics you want to measure
• Risks and challenges in developing an MVP.

It should be a fun evening with lots of interesting conversation.  This post will provide links to participants as well as to readers.

What's Going to Go Wrong

A lot of founders don't really understand Lean Startup principles.  They look at the following high level definition of Lean:

and they interpret that as write up an executive summary with your ideas and hand it to developers to build.  What's going to go wrong?  Well I often get the unfortunate call from startup founders where all kinds of things have gone wrong:

• Built the Wrong Product
• Poor Product Quality - Code is really bad, full of bugs, missing critical features
• Doesn’t Scale Past a Couple Users
• Not Protected – Access to Code, Rights on Code

MVP Homework

Why are you building your MVP in the first place?  See Investors, MVPs and Evidence of Traction. 

Have you conducted Problem, Solution and Feature Interviews with customers?

Have you Documented Your MVP for Your Developers?

Have you looked through Things You May Have Forgot in Your MVP and provided answers to these?

Do you have a Technical Advisors: Every Web/Mobile Startup Must Have One?

Don't be fooled by a Common Misunderstanding in Agile Software Development.

While You Are Building Your MVP

Look for the following Symptoms of a Weak Development Team.  Correct your course quickly.  And when you have Poor Software Developers - Pull the Plug Early.

Learn how to test and possibly use testing and load tools.  See: http://www.softwareqatest.com/qatweb1.html

Additional Resources

• How to Hunt Programmers for Your Startup - A Field Guide
• Finding a Technical Cofounder for Your Startup
• Choosing a Programming Language and Framework for Your Startup
• Startup Founder Developer Gap
• Startup Software Developers
• Technology Roles in Startups
• Startup CTO or Developer
• Startup Metrics
• Building Your MVP as a Non-Technical Startup Founder