Working on Something that Matters

One of the things that we commonly see in Carbono is that many first-time founders that reach out to us for developing the first version of their mobile or web apps, are working on something that is not creating a real value for their potential clients. This often results in a product that has no market and therefore fails eventually.

When we first hear an idea we ask them to tell us about the validation process they have followed for proving that someone out there is willing to pay for that service/product. Basically we ask for traction, not because we need this in order to accept a project but because we know how important it is to validate your hypothesis before you built even the most basic product. Most of the times they haven’t talked to any potential user yet and they are developing the idea on their own. We strongly advice them to launch a simple MVP (Minimum Viable Product) that don't require any code developed, using tools already available in the market to see how their early adopters respond to it.

This process shouldn’t take more than a couple of weeks and will help the founder to understand what part of their service/product is more valuable for his/her early users. This in order to focus all the efforts on these few relevant functionalities and built a lean first version of the software product that would be able to grow according to what users really need and not only assumptions. 

Once they realize this step could save them a huge amount of time and money they make this a priority. It is also important to mention that building something that helps you validate your idea and get some traction is fundamental in order to raise funds from external investors, which is a critical part of launching a software product: it requires more capital that you have in mind.

Working on something that matters seems pretty simple (it matters to you right?) but it is actually one of the hardest things to do when building anything: you don’t know how people will respond to it until you launch it, this is why we recommend you to launch a prototype first and get a ton of feedback from whom you think are your early adopters. This is the simplest way to start working on something that has future. Don’t rush to anything.