There’s a lot to keep track of as you’re building your product. It helps to have a place to organize everything. You may have heard of the Lean Startup before. It’s a great book written by Eric Ries and it helps people stay on track towards building a strong value proposition for their product or…
I grew up in the 90s watching a lot of football. Barry Sanders was the legendary Detroit Lions running back that seemed to perform miracles on the field. His ability to pivot on a dime would shake entire defenses and before they even knew what happened he’d be in the end zone scoring another touchdown…
I’ve been involved with building countless software products throughout the course of my career and I’d like to take you behind the scenes a bit so you can learn more about how it works for your own benefit. I’ll start with a simple question – do you know how we budget for a software product…
How would you like to spend $1 million dollars, lose 2 years of your life and get nothing? Well that’s exactly what happened to a county in Tennessee as they attempted to upgrade their court system software. The new software system was supposed to streamline their operation and save tens of thousands of dollars each…
Custom software is expensive to build. Even if you’re just building a prototype, you’ll likely need plenty of functionality that will drive the cost of development sky high. This is made worse when you don’t know exactly what you need to build. Many change their minds while they build. This is called scope creep and…
I’ve seen people spend YEARS building a software product only to never release it. Ouch. Software products can take a long time to build – especially if you don’t know exactly what to build. A productized service on the other hand is just a set of steps organized into a procedure. In fact, I built the first…
Building a software product is hard. The failure rate is rumored to be higher than 9 out of 10. There are many reasons why software products fail. In my opinion, the biggest reason is because people skip over the most important step, validating your product’s value proposition. Validating a value proposition requires flexibility so you…
I was so excited to start my first product venture. I couldn’t stop fantasizing about the possibilities and the wild success we were going to experience. Needless to say, I was naive. My first product venture fell flat and I was dealt a big slice of humble pie. This was also new to me because…
Years ago when I was recovering from the failure of my first product I was asked a pointed question by one of the members of the founding team of the startup that I was currently working… ‘How passionate are you about our mission?’ This question really made me think. It was a simple question but the…
It’s a great question, but whether or not you realize it – it may also be irrelevant. I say this because the motivation to build a product to solve your problem is all about you and your business. The key here is to make sure that your situation is much improved by this product. I’ve done…