Want Your Startup to See the World - Learn to Delegate
June 20, 2022
Alex Shubin | Founder & CEO at SDA
As you know, there is a well-known statistic: 90% of startups fail, and 10% fail in the first year. However, there is an equally popular opinion that the best way to get rich is to go into business, in other words, create a startup.
Put it another way, only one in 10 traditional businesses in the startup category ultimately survives. Now, of course, you may ask how to scale the idea of a startup so that it does not die? Or how to get into the happy 10% of startups that become successful?
The task of any startup is to develop the same idea and business model that could be replicated in several other options or products, or scaled up to a full-fledged business model.
Your idea or skills correlate with the success of a startup, as does the number of telegraph poles that affect global warming. That is not the case. They can increase the chances of success from 0.001 to 0.01%, but much more significant factors – entrepreneurial, startup ecosystem: the availability of personnel, experience, expertise, a large amount of money, which should be enough.
Recently, investors and professionals are getting on to the fact that 20% of success is an idea, implementation and team, and 80% is luck and favorable conditions.
The message is that you need to clearly understand how and why you want to create a startup, as well as get rid of inflated illusions and only then start doing something. There is good news: this is exactly what we often help startups with.
We have seen many brilliant ideas that could lead to success, but novice entrepreneurs are just afraid to implement them. As a result, their ideas are taken the credit by other, riskier people, or they become completely obsolete. Due to misunderstanding the business case of their company, aspiring entrepreneurs often put their efforts into a notoriously unprofitable business.
The most common reason startups die is the lack of a product or service necessity. First, a startup has to solve problems. Therefore, even at the preparation stage, it is necessary to test the idea of what solutions it offers. Startup entrepreneurs need to understand how significant it is not to get stuck at the startup idea stage. After all, because of this, many startups have not seen life.
Many of these entrepreneurs go further with their enthusiasm and desire. They start doing everything they think is right and begin hiring specialists and splitting. How far will this passion last?
Of course, it depends on the people, but as a rule, they do not even manage to put together a pretty good minimal development team. Even worse, they will try to do everything themselves or attempt to give tasks to freelancers. It is where chaos and distraction of attention to tiny problems and tasks begin.
Because of “we want to do everything we possibly can”, “we try to save money and hire a freelancer” or “we hire people off the street”, many great projects, unfortunately, failed to appear.
Want to test out an idea – create MVP
That's lit when a startup idea comes up, but then comes the question of how to test hypotheses and get feedback from customers. It is where the creation of an MVP product rises to the challenge.
It is a tool with which a startup can quickly validate its ideas. MVP is needed to quickly enter a market and test the idea on real users. The app always works for the end users, so it is significant to ask their opinion at a very early development stage.
MVP can be changed as many times as needed to make the app ideal. Based on user feedback, you will understand what to do next with the product: introduce new features, add integrations or improve the design. MVP is not a black box. It is a product version that can be variously changed and improved.
Do you have an idea for a complex and multifunctional project but no budget to implement it? Not an issue at all! You can also say that MVP is a budget choice for a product that does not require large investments.
Create an MVP with core features, test it with real users and can confidently go to investors, and then gradually improve the product. Even entrepreneurs with flawless intuition make mistakes about what features customers will like. They then have to spend more time and effort covering up bad decisions.
Developing MVP apps allows you to see the future of the product and implement only those features that will be used.
Why startups run into issues
Starting a business is very exciting, but many burgeoning entrepreneurs do not realize what difficulties await them. Starting a startup requires resilience, clarity of purpose, the ability to inspire and convince others of the correctness of your ideas, as well as constantly expanding your knowledge to keep in step with market trends and innovations.
Startups face challenges for many reasons. It may lie in the company culture, in the product-to-market mismatch, or in some unique problems of a particular industry or region. At the beginning of its activity, the business is most vulnerable. Startup founders need to be able to handle multiple deals, teams and goals early on in a way that keeps customers, investors and other stakeholders glad.
If the founders turned out to be not organized or were not ready for such activities, they might not be able to cope with their tasks. Therefore, we believe that novice startup entrepreneurs need to learn how to delegate technical issues for creating their site application and MVP to a team that is well versed in this and not be stuck on the idea stage.
For any startup, in order to develop these ideas, a team of professionals is extremely important and necessary. After all, how can you decide which solutions to apply or which idea is better to choose? Of course, it is the technical team that immediately comes to your aid. There is no way to do without it, so let's realize why?
Technical team for mobile app development
Today it is no longer necessary to prove to anyone that mobile apps are an indispensable tool for business growth and development. To create a quality app, you should contact experienced developers. Who exactly will be involved in the implementation of your project? What is your role in this process? Let's see who is on the mobile app development team.
Above all things, you must learn to delegate to team members and managers using their unique strengths and vision. Delegation builds trust in organizations by saving managers time to work on strategic goals. It also gives team members more autonomy and development opportunities.
When developing mobile apps, the team distributes roles among themselves so that the involvement of employees is as effective as possible. So, for example, developers are always closely related with QA, and the project manager in general can partially perform the tasks of any of the participants.
Below you can find out who can be a member of the technical development team.
Business analyst. The task of a business analyst is a full immersion in the client's business to choose the most appropriate tool that will ensure productive work and optimum solution to a problem. Also, such specialists are involved in the concept formation and review of customer requirements that determine the core nuances for development.
Designer. Only a good UI/UX designer can handle the application appearance, the fashion color layout, a sense of taste, as well as usability. Even if you have already imagined what the application will look like, then, perhaps, the designer will help to work out all the small details and correctly distribute the app elements so that it immediately plays out in fresh colors.
Team of developers. This team for mobile application development consists of at least two parts: mobile app developers and back-end developers. Due to this team organization, the most meaningful development stages can be carried out in parallel, which helps to reduce the time to app launch significantly. There should also be a Team leader, it can be an individual, such as a CTO, or just an experienced developer.
QA. The main tasks of a QA are to make sure there are no errors and bugs, because users will immediately stop using the application if there are any, to ensure the product quality and make certain that all customer requirements are met. It is so important that the application does not crash after the release on the first day, therefore you really need a QA.
Project Manager. Last but not least, a participant in the development process is the project manager. The PM controls all processes and monitors all specialists' fulfillment of the duties, as well as the schedule so that the team meets the agreed development deadlines. In other words, the main goal is to check the team is functioning like a single well-oiled machine. The PM is also responsible for organizing communication between developers and the customer's company representatives. The PM is the heart of the team.
How to launch your startup
Working at a startup often means taking on many organizational roles at once. Even in such a non-standard environment, the company culture and workflow must be based on accountability and organization from day dot, so we help our clients in the following ways:
- We analyze the market and potential users and write a detailed research report indicating the history of experiments in this field, current competitors, references to research by global consultancies and advisory conclusions.
- We help in marketing strategy development.
- Together with you, our company establishes a project test plan, makes a clickable prototype and organizes the data captured from the focus group.
We develop MVP, prepare for a soft launch and arrange the statistical information collection and processing.
We help with the launch: we monitor the technical status of the product, deliver support and set up testing of core functionality.
- If necessary, we organize communication with investors and help in negotiations on technical issues.
To tell the truth, we have seen many failed projects, some of them did not even appear, others we have fixed or created from scratch, and they are successfully working now. For this reason, we advise you to immediately contact our team of specialists because we will both save your money, nerves and precious time.
Many created mobile apps have developed our expertise in what should and should not be done at each stage. Of course, each product is unique, but there are common features of the production process that increase the odds of success.
Our company will help you at every stage of this hard journey and will be happy to share our experience with you. We will hand you painlessly to and show you all the magic, and you will definitely appreciate it! Doing something great together is always very interesting and exciting.
