Posted by: Daniel Boterhoven on Fri Aug 11
Before diving into a new web or mobile app development project it’s important to sure up your commitment, define and understand your market, and identify your niche.
G’day, I’m Dan from Denim Development.
Today’s topic is the question of “Should I build it?” This question can be broken down into 3. The first being, is it worth the effort? The next being, will my venture be successful or will it achieve it’s goal? And the third being, where is my niche in the market.
For first question of weather it’s worth the effort, consider the pros and cons… The pros would be that you have a career change potentially, or you will improve your business, or ultimately you’ll be your own boss. The cons are that it will involve a lot of effort. There’s limited free time potentially. And also the potential financial exposure that you’ll encounter.
Then we move onto, will my venture be profitable/successful, or will it achieve it’s goal. First you need to make sure that you have a market for your product. That’s probably one of the more important items. So you need to spend a fair bit of time in market discovery. You will need to consider things such as are you solving real problems? Are people willing to but or subscribe to the product or service? And you’ll need to drill down into the nitty-gritty of market research. This involves things like finding your target audience, and identifying personas and things like that. Then you’ll also need to analyse trends and identify competitors, read surveys and publications about your market, and to really drill down and define your market well. This will likely change though, along the way. That’s just fairly natural. It’s essentially an ongoing journey of really trying to identify who your market is and how they evolve.
The third item is identifying your niche. There’s always copycats out there. Niching down into a strong position will give you a way to help you stand out in a market, and if you get really good at your niche then it’s going to be a lot harder for copycats to come in and copy what you’re doing. So identifying a niche is really important, particularly when you are just starting out with limited resources. Pursuing just one niche will help you focus on that and there’s less scope that you have to worry about as well.
So, if you are keen to put in the effort and you have the potential financial resources available or you can pull those financial recourses together, and also you can see your niche working in your well defined market, then you should probably be considering pursuing your project. There’s no better time to do it, the technology where it is now, the technology costs have come down a lot and there’s a lot of people online obviously.
The next steps would be to start with an MVP, that’s a Minimum Viable Product, where you can release a small subset of features early, and get them into the hands of your market early. Then they can provide feedback. There’s more about the process of MVP on our website. It ultimately means that you’ll be committing less upfront and building small features early on and building your product in small incremental pieces. Which is a well established way of doing it.
You also might want to consider the Lean Canvas approach. This is a quick and effective supplement for the traditional business plan. If you want to learn more about that, you can Google “the lean canvas by eric reis”. There’s also content about it on our website and blog also.
Hope this was useful, thanks for listening.
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