Don’t Build An App — Period
First of all, building a startup is hard. The odds are stacked against you throughout the process. You will be sacrificing a lot of family time. The least you could do is minimize the chances of failure. You kind of owe it to yourself and your time.
I think many of us entrepreneurs get convoluted with the rosy idea of building a technology company without understanding the underlying business. And this is a major flaw. Do not make an app just for the heck of it.
Building an app is an incredibly expensive process and requires expert guidance (which you probably don’t have at this stage). This is especially hard for teams without any technical co-founders. You would need to know your business in detail (which you probably don’t at the beginning). Focusing on the technology from the get-go does more harm than good to your business.
“User needs first. Technology second. “— Don Norman (Author, The Design of Everyday Things)
I actually recommend sticking to spreadsheets and making progressive iterations to make your operations and record-keeping relatively more scalable. AND FOCUS ON BUILDING AN AWESOME BUSINESS. This means hiring an awesome team, acquiring awesome customers, providing awesome customer service, and documenting every step to make the whole process better and scalable. It is highly essential that you seek out repeatable patterns or processes in your business from the get-go. That is what can essentially be automated and then scaled. We have to first remind ourselves that automating anything requires centralizing information and processes for faster access.
Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Design is knowing which ones to keep. — Scott Adams (Author, How to Fail at Almost Anything and Still Win Big)
Meanwhile, keep updating your spreadsheets and redesigning them until the point of hyper-growth, that you can’t live without automation. Walking this line would probably help you practice lean development processes and filter out the need to build expensive technical features that do not immediately recognize the customer needs, or benefit the customer or the process of customer acquisition.
This will actually help you in a couple of ways:
- You will think of the customer more than your own growth. This will enable you to dive deeper and understand the critical business problems, and their bottlenecks to growth. You can safely conclude that fixing it has a large economic upside for stakeholders. (Note: Thinking of growth and thinking of bottlenecks to growth are two separate things.)
- You will think about how you can be operationally efficient. You’d be forced to think of boring & mundane (but necessary) topics such as unit economics and wondering how to make sense of it. You’d also think about hiring the right people, building a scalable database, and keeping your finances in check. As a result, you’d be exercising your EQ more. A wrong hire will teach you to go the extra mile on due diligence in the hiring process.
“Do things that don’t scale.” — Paul Graham of Y Combinator once famously said.
I never realized the importance of the above quote until recently. What would eventually matter is how much you actually know about your business, how fast can you learn about things you don’t know, and how much of that can you execute/implement immediately. The more we know about our customers, the faster our chances of achieving a product-market fit. With a few happy clients who are doubling down on their orders with you, it's time you double down on your love for those customers and give them something to remember you by. This is probably the stage where you think of optimizing your customer experience and scaling such experience to other customers with technology implementation.
Now, at this point, your insights into the process are going to be a lot better because you started off by thinking about solving the customer’s problem. You are also more likely to avoid a lot of initial application development mistakes which could be expensive. You are also better equipped to answer the hard business questions which are critical in building relationships with investors. For example, in our case, the truck owners and brokers were the least technically adept. And we needed to figure out a way to earn their trust. And that happened by solving their one critical business problem: Giving them consistent loads along selected routes. This process has to continue until you reach a critical mass. At which point, you probably would have to create the next big wave of mobile users by supporting each of them with a smartphone and training them on its usage.
And this is probably the stage where you should start thinking of raising money through reputable investors with some domain expertise to help you with.
Despite all this, if you fail, it’s ok. It was all still worth it. Just pat yourself on the back and start all over, on a brand new problem.
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