Bringing an idea to life is not an easy journey but it can be done. New products seem to pop-up every day and each one took someone with tenacity and courage to breathe life into an idea and see it evolve into a product. It may not be easy but, by following a few simple rules, it can be a rewarding and energising experience.
Nurturing the Idea
There are many estimates of how many thoughts you have in a day. It can range from 50,000 to 100,000 but a thought is not an idea for a business. A business idea combines experience, with practical skills and original thought to come up with a solution to a problem.
Ideas are sometimes a flash of inspiration, sometimes borne out of sheer frustration and sometimes a niggling thought that have been surfacing every now and again for years.
No matter what kind of idea it is and no matter what solution you have invented or devised, every idea is valuable. Like anything new, an idea is also vulnerable.
Ideas are attacked by competing thoughts, self-doubt and a lack of focus, time, resources and know-how. As quickly as an idea arrives in your head, it can be gone again. If you really want to bring your idea to life, you need to be prepared for a rollercoaster journey with its breakneck speeds, thrilling climaxes and unexpected curves. Like all rollercoasters, it is time to put fear aside, enjoy the anticipation, be excited by the journey and arrive at your destination, trembling and invigorated.
How to go from Idea to Product
Growing and nurturing an idea to bring it to market as a product takes belief and commitment from the very start. Without this your idea will quickly flounder. If you are lucky, it may come back to you later for a second go, but if you are unlucky, it comes back as a product that someone else has brought to market. Not only that, it is a huge success!
Nearly everyone has had thoughts like ‘I had the idea for Uber five years ago’ or ‘Tinder stole my idea’ and the only way to avoid these thoughts is to take your idea, believe in it, turn it into a product and bring it to market.
I define tech products as those delivered through the power of software. They are attractive as there are no factories to build, materials to buy, warehouses to run and no physical products to sell. It appears that tech products have low production costs, are updateable in the field (so you don’t have to get it right first time) and with zero cost to replicate, require no logistics, storage or transport appear to be the ideal product. Perhaps you don’t even need to spend money on the skills to create it because you might have dabbled with software development yourself?
But tech products have their own rocky path to market, including:
- Great flexibility brings analysis paralysis
- Complex development processes that lead to faulty products
- Low barriers to entry creating crowded marketplaces
- Rapid copying that can undermine your product
Indeed, many of the reasons you may have selected a tech product to build are reasons why you can face strong competition. To get to a product, you must be actively aware of these characteristics and take actions and decisions to win despite them.
The general advice is to go fast, fail fast, fix fast and leave your competitors in your wake.
Product not Project
Remember, a product is not a project. Unlike a project, a product is not something you start and then finish. When your product goes well, it will constantly evolve and go from strength to strength.
This means that this is not a sprint to a 100m finish line, rather a life-long journey of exploration and learning. You need to be prepared for going fast, failing fast and fixing fast becoming a way of life, not just a once off project.
Avoiding Obstacles on the way
Many ideas face obstacles on their way to becoming a product and fail. You may hear many reasons and excuses for why a product failed to get to market but the top 5 would likely include:
- Procrastination
- Lack of commitment
- Lack of resources
- Insufficient patience
- No understanding of what to do
1. Procrastination
Procrastination kills any progress rapidly. I find that people generally procrastinate when they do not know what to do or when the task they face is difficult or risky. When you start a business for the first time, you are very likely to face the unknown and you will find procrastination soon sets in.
Something worse than procrastination is productive procrastination. This is where you find something to do that has intrinsic value but does not help you achieve your main goal. In your mind you justify the task you are doing based on it being something that is not wasting time.
Maybe you are finding that the inspiration is not flowing, that you have hit a technical problem or you keep making changes to the product and cannot get past it so you turn to updating your website, creating some documentation, looking at your finances or doing some market research.
These are all valuable activities and ones that you have to perform but, if you have no product, you have no business and all these other activities are of no use. When you realise you are procrastinating, stop and work on your product. Choose something simple and achievable to do and just do it. Remember, you initial aim is a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), something that has some worth to your customer but is not a fully-fledged product.
Always tend to your product before your business.
2. Commitment
Even if you avoid procrastination, commitment can fail. In the early days when you have a lot of energy and excitement, commitment is easy to find. However, if you are working from home, commitment may be challenging with lots of competing distractions and responsibilities, especially if the rest of the household is with you due to COVID-19 lockdowns. This is where you need to make time to be single minded.
If you can, lock yourself away. Make it known that you are working and not simply playing or doing your hobby. If you do this, you will be more successful. However, do not fall into the trap that your product is your life. It is important not to forget others.
Commit to ‘me’ time, ‘work’ time, ‘partner’ time and ‘family’ time.
3. Resources
Almost every start-up has limited resources. This may be your savings, donations from family and friends or disposable income from a job. Each time you purchase resources using these limited funds, you are making critical decisions about your business. It is very easy for a fledgling business to fail before it starts due to lack of financial care and due diligence. You need to manage your cashflow.
This does not mean locking down the piggy bank and stopping all spending. A business is just as likely to fail if it does not have access to the cash it needs to survive and grow. It means being diligent and ensuring that you get the ‘bang for your buck’ that you need from each purchase.
There are many services available to help you on your journey but use these wisely. Financial services such as Xero, MYOB etc can seem a drain on the funds but they free you up to work on your product, and that is worthwhile. Hosting services allow you to have a web presence that can answer many questions people have and so that is worthwhile too.
Fund the services you need right now to get to the next step in product development.
4. Patience
Success does not happen overnight, no matter how you might measure it. It is easy to look at successful products and think that they appeared in a puff of magical smoke, but they didn’t.
- Angry Birds: Ravio built over 51 games before achieving success
- Airbnb: Idea formed 13 years ago, launched 3 times and received 7 funding rejections
- Starbucks: Started in Seattle in 1971 and took 16 years to expand outside of just that city
There are many more examples. As a founder, you are impatient and you want everything to happen now but it is important to realise that success takes time.
On the road to success, there will be set backs, U-turns, competitors, pivots and failures. The trick is to go fast, fail fast, fix fast, learn, recover and move on. If you understand this and realise that you do have a lot to learn, then you will see success (eventually). Remember, the huge successes will be some way off so reward yourself on the way by celebrating the smaller successes too.
Remember that you can only climb learning curves with tools you get from experiencing failure.
5. Understanding
It is likely that your idea has been formed based on some level of subject matter expertise that you have. It is also quite likely that this expertise is in a field that has nothing to do with building a tech product. This makes you an expert in your chosen field but a novice in software development.
For instance, you may be:
- A lawyer with a great idea on how to simplify case management
- A dentist with an idea on how to streamline patient care
- A florist with an idea on how to get fresh flowers to your customer quicker
In each case, the person with the idea may have no idea how to turn that idea into a tech product.
Whilst this may seem daunting, it is actually a wonderful place to start. Having the subject matter expertise you are fully familiar with the problem and the solution. The rest is just engineering of the product. Too many times, products fail because they are a solution looking for a problem but you are in the ideal position to have the problem that needs a solution. This is a strong position from which to start your product development. Others can help fill in the technology blanks.
Find the problem, design the solution and then get help to build the product.
Seeking Help
Once you have decided that want to make the move from idea to product, the one thing you will need in spades is help. It is important to get that help from the right place because sometimes, even with the best intentions at heart, the help you receive is not the right help.
I once wrote a novel. It took a lot of time, effort and dedication. Sometimes it was a chore. Sometimes it was exciting. Sometimes it was highly rewarding. After I finished, I sought feedback from a family member who told me the book was great and a fantastic read. Years later I found the manuscript and read it. It was awful!
The lesson I learnt was that those who you trust and value sometimes want to please you rather than tell you the truth. There is room for that when you need motivation and reassurance but sometimes you need to hear the cold, hard truth, no matter how difficult it is to hear.
Throughout your journey from idea to product, you will need help from others. Make sure that the help you get is for the right reason and that is to see you and your product succeed. Any other reason for which people give you help will not be in your best interest.
Bring Your Idea to Life
So, next time you are in the shower, baking a cake or doing whatever you do best at and you have a great idea, remember, it is possible to turn it into a successful product.
Just make sure you:
- Stop procrastinating and do what you need to do to build your product
- Are prepared for setbacks and know they will help you on your journey
- Commit to your product and getting it into market
- Have patience and celebrate every little win on the way
- Know that you are not alone and there are people who can help you
At Requillion Solutions we believe that it is about bringing your idea to life and that, given the right support, you can build a tech product that delivers your dream.