3 Tips For Developing Your Early-Stage Tech Startup 2019

In the early stages of a startup, you are convinced that you have the most disruptive solution for a need in the market. You develop an MVP and test this hypothesis in search of the golden product-market fit. If you can successfully find some level of product-market fit, that means your solution brings positive value to society. However, even good ideas can fail due to poor execution. Here are three ways that early stage startups can increase their chances of success in the long term.

Tips For Developing Your Early-Stage Tech Startup

1. Stay Agile:

If you still haven’t completely validated your idea, the best way to move forward is often the easiest way to move forward. This could be a landing page from WordPress or Squarespace that you can build in a couple of hours to start gauging some interest in your idea. Once you have validated the idea, then it is crucial to remain agile with your development. Do things one step at a time. Get your first feature going, then the next, and then the next. Continuously take user feedback while your system is running so that you can constantly reiterate and improve the system. There is no point spending six months building a product that may become obsolete by then or may turn out to be unfavorable for the market. I believe getting to market in the leanest way possible is the smartest way early on.

Tips For Developing Your Early-Stage Tech Startup

2. Remain Customer-Centric, And Ask The Right Questions

Success for a startup usually means making your customers happy. Asking the right questions will help you pick the right technology. What is the problem you are trying to solve? Who’s going to be using your system? Are they mainly on the web or on mobile? How will you provide them with the best user experience? Will you need to migrate your data? Is security important for the data you're handling? Once you start asking yourself questions like these, you will get closer and closer to picking a technology that will be best for your requirements, since different technologies have different advantages. For instance, I've found that Python is a very strong language for statistical use cases.

Tips For Developing Your Early-Stage Tech Startup

3. Pick The Obvious Winners:

Sometimes adopting a new technology can sound exciting, but when you're trying to scale and grow a new product, I believe it’s always better to be safe than sorry. Mature technologies are generally more reliable and have longer market life cycles. Look up your industry’s preferred technology choices: That may be a great place to start when you're trying to find the right fit for your product. On top of reliability, the more mature technologies generally have larger support networks and communities to help you in case you have any issues or need to make updates. Finally, recruiting the right talent to use these technologies will likely be much simpler since the availability of the skill set in the market will be much more widespread. I've found that it's harder to train people on a new technology than it is to let them stick to their comfort zone.

Tips For Developing Your Early-Stage Tech Startup

In the end, I believe the top reason early stage tech startups are wrong about their approach to technology is because they prioritize the technology first. Validating your business idea quickly is one of the initial keys to success. Once you have successfully managed that, then you can prioritize selecting the right scalable and flexible technological foundation. As you obtain more and more understanding of what the market really wants, you will be able to make the right updates and pivots, and eventually create the right product. Starting any type of business is more like a marathon and not a sprint, and you want to plan your methodology accordingly. Creating the economies of tomorrow and disrupting or creating entirely new markets is a grand endeavor and can be achieved slowly and steadily -- with the right mindset.