Continued from: Start-up Series (Part I): What we do for the start-up entrepreneurs that hire us

Last time, we talked a bit about what we do for entrepreneurs that come to us with an idea for a consumer web or mobile start-up. Today, we’ll quickly go through the process we use to get to BETA.

First, it’s important to remember that there are usually two challenges that most startups face when they start building their BETA.

1. Somewhat blurred product vision
2. Limited capital

Having blurred product vision is pretty common. This comes in many shapes and forms. For instance, we often see a fairly decent vision, but a long list of features. Parts of the product may have been worked out, but other key parts, such as the user experience is full of holes. This is OK. It is often the reason why entrepreneurs come to us in the first place.

Having limited capital is a given. Sometimes though, there are also limited resources available as an entrepreneur may not have the time available to put 100% into the startup and often is not familiar with the large work load that comes with starting something from ground up. This is where our process comes in handy.

The basic steps are:

1. Entrepreneur provides all documents to Fabric for review
2. Q&A session with entire team – including product leads, design, experience, marketing, and tech
3. Fabric will produce a high-level estimate (Scope of Work)
4. Entrepreneur Funds Project
5. Definition: Detailed definition is developed for the first release of the product
6. User Experience Design: Wireframes and Functional Specifications
7. UI Design: Making it look great!
8. AJAX (or Flash is you are crazy)
9. Development: Database and Programming
10. Hooking to 3rd parties (most web startups are full of API hooks)
11. Admin Tools and such
12. Deliver website or application on Staging Server
13. Testing & QA
14. Deliver Alpha or BETA website/app to Production Server
15. Deployment: Tell everyone you know about your amazing product!

This is the quick and dirty work flow. In some cases, we have to work hard on concept development while other times it's more a matter of focusing on key user experience challenges. There are two rules we always follow:

Keep it simple and focus on the one thing you have to get right for users

Get your BETA up fast!

Once the BETA is up, we start working on the Product / Market fit, which is really just all about user feedback loops and product iterations. In our experience, this is really the hard part, but it's also the fun part. There's nothing as exciting as getting real people to give you feedback on your invention!

Next time, we’ll look at what kind of documentation we are looking for when we start working with you (hint: it’s not your business plan).

Start-up Series (Part III): Where is your business plan?

If you care about the environment, check out GoodGuide. It's an excellent guide to healthy products. Here's what I like about it:

They stick to the basics. Design is clean with enough white-space to let the eye rest.

The “Quick Product Picks” section is really useful. I imagine they did a study on what 90%+ of their audience look for most often - then they designed the “get recommendations” engine. I used it right away.

Immediately under “Search” they mention that they have “61,041 products.” It makes sense to do that. I would make sure that number is updated frequently (ticker-style) to ensure that people are reminded that the product selection is growing. That's an easy thing to do.

Good people at GoodGuide: Cool product!

When we wake up every morning, we drink coffee… and then we get on with it. We develop products - web products mostly.  We love this! In fact, we've found this type of work so challenging and rewarding that we created a Product Development Group within Fabric Interactive. Next to our Social Media Marketing Group, it is our main focus area at Fabric.

For the past two years, entrepreneurs, media, agencies, and brands have come to us with napkin ideas, business plans, or complete Product Development Plans for various consumer products or applications. In some cases, we've found that the expectations for what is possible and realistic outpace the budget and experience of the team we're working with. This means that our first job is to close this gap, provide leadership, and to focus the product development process.

I know many of you are thinking about developing your own web product or already have plans for launching a new business or product line based off an application or website. To help you, I want share our experiences with you. From our experience shelf, here are some of the challenges you're likely to encounter as you blaze down the path of product development:

Initial Product (Version 1.0) does not meet audience needs

Relax. It is highly unlikely that your product will connect with your audience right out of the gate. In fact, it may take 12-months to get the traction needed to meet user acquisition requirements needed for your next investor round. The cost of Product Development over 12 months may be significant and most certainly will match your initial investment.

Product does not deliver clear differential value for core audience

Right. Most web products – advertising or subscriber supported – are unable to fix this problem. In our experience, this comes down to a lack of focus. To win today, you need to focus on one specific audience and one particular unmet need. If you try to do too much for too many audiences, you will likely fail. This is universally true for ventures with limited funding. Again and again, we see small fish trying to compete with big well-funded players without laser focus on brand or audience. You must narrow focus. Then, you can execute brilliantly.

Attracting users to a new brand/product

Starting from zero can be very hard and quite costly. For instance, organic growth (from Google natural search index) will be very slow for 12 months for a new domain in a competitive area. Many co-marketing or traffic partners won’t partner until you have traffic and a tested product – so it can be a chicken and egg problem. For many, the only way to gain traction is to buy traffic in the beginning.

For some new ventures, it may be worth acquiring a blog or two (many are for sale) and grow your product from the established acquired audience. Part of your traffic – and product strategy – may be to build a network of sites all with a slightly different value proposition for your audience(s).

Getting people to use your product

Beyond getting users to your site, the main challenge is to get them to use it. For example, acquiring your first 5,000 users can be a major challenge. For instance, gaining momentum is a major issue for most social networking sites and absolutely critical to all reputation based products. There are no short-cuts really. It’s just hard work.

Unknown Brand and User Generated Content model

It can be difficult and costly to build a new brand where User Generated Content (UGC) is part of the model. Beyond the importance of appearance (design) the main challenge is in the actual UGC itself. It is hard to get people to do stuff. Also, from a management standpoint, even with the best of systems, there is cost in maintaining UGC quality and relevancy. The cost of scaling is – naturally – variable in that you’ll need additional human resources in managing increasing user numbers.

Underestimating Competitors Strengths

Competition is usually much stronger than it may seem. The attention of your audience (what did you say?) is limited and you will have to fight hard to win their trust. For instance, there are many well funded competitors targeting the “new parent” market and acquiring new users from this audience may be difficult for a start-up.

Underestimating the in-house resources required to build and grow a web product

Building and growing a web product is a 120% full-time job. We have seen many start-ups trying to do this on 50% of the founder’s time and they have all failed. The truth is that if you launch a venture part-time, you will likely lack the pace and commitment needed to win. “Oh, once I get this going, I will quit my day job.” To which we say, no you won't, because if you were committed you wouldn't be in your day job. To succeed, it is likely that you’ll need several people full-time for 12+ months. Anything less than that makes for a half-effort and will likely lead to frustration and failure. (Most start-ups take 3 years to build and does not make much money for founders until year 2+. Can you handle that?)

Those are some big challenges, right? Well, it doesn't matter to you, because you're going to do it anyway are you not? You are going all the way. You'll make it happen. Yes, you will. If you just focus and put your mind to it. Let's go!

We get a lot of questions about this, so we thought we should just do a quick summary of what we’ve done and what we’re interested in doing for you entrepreneurs out there.
First, we’re just really passionate about start-ups because we enjoy the process and we love to see new underdogs challenge the big boys. Some of the people on our teams have done their own start-ups in the past including the fun task of raising capital from investors. Some would say we’ve learned the hard way. You can take advantage of all that learning so you don’t make the same mistakes we made. (Good right?)

We are mostly focused on consumer web start-ups because that’s what we know. For instance, right now, we’re working with three consumer web start-ups in BETA. Through our agency business, we’ve learned how to work with big brands and we understand how small start-ups can become valuable to potential acquirers or partners – such as big media or publishing.
Our Product Group has years of experience developing actual web products and this experience has made our team a perfect partner for two different scenarios:

1. The entrepreneur is technical, but needs help with product, user experience, and design
2. The entrepreneur lacks the product or technical team to build the BETA version of her dream

In most cases, we come in to build the Alpha – or first release (BETA) version of a web or mobile product. Fabric’s Product Group adds what is needed to the mix and usually delivers a complete product. During our process, we work with the Entrepreneur from the initial concept stage, through experience design and development and into Alpha or BETA. Once the first release is out, we often help entrepreneurs get to their first 1,000 or 10,000 users.

Next, we’ll go through our process in more detail and we’ll tell you what we look for when we consider new projects:

Start-up Series (Part II): BETA Build Process

Start-up Series (Part III): Where is your business plan?

We're looking for a passionate web/mobile app developer with 3+ years of experience and PHP in particular. Straight out of school with raw talent is fine. We are looking for an independent thinker, problem solver, and curious mind. You must be a strong team player looking for a challenge. We offer a casual work environment, flexible hours, nice people, and interesting projects. (We work with start-ups in the areas of geo-location, real-time-web, SaaS, mobile lifestyle, and data aggregation.)

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with design team to find optimal technology solutions
• Assist in delivering accurate project documentation and development specifications
• Design database schemas and databases
• Write clean and structured PHP code
• Work closely with QA Lead through testing/QA phases

Required Skills

• PHP 5
• PostGreSQL/MySQL
• HTML, CSS, XML

Additional preferred qualifications

• Zend Framework
• HTML5
• JavaScript
• Facebook Connect / API’s
• iOS/Android SDK
• Server Tech (BSD/UNIX)

Come on! Call or e-mail us.

It's really fantastic to see that people are pouring energy into the LA startup scene. Several new incubators have popped up and some, such as LaunchPad LA, are offering serious cash for young startup entrepreneurs. Thanks to people like Mark Suster, who has become a top five VC blogger over the past few years, the energy in LA is real and it seems as if the city might just explode with tech startups.

Working with entrepreneurs in the early stages (pre-seed) is very exciting. We're super lucky to have the chance to work on some interesting products with some amazing people. Watch this space for the next few months. I think you'll see a few strong companies unveiled. Thanks!

For the past few years, we've worked with several startups. Most of our work has been from idea/concept stage. Our team is passionate about this work. We love working with entrepreneurs. We love the energy of it.

So, what kind of startups are we looking for?

Our expertise area is consumer web and mobile. We've built social networking sites, transaction/commerce applications, and self-help products.

Today, we're looking for big ideas from passionate entrepreneurs. For instance, we're frustrated by the inefficiencies in every day life. We look at food, waste, energy, transportation, and the endless data silos - left over by legacy systems - just making our daily life a pain. We focus on startups that go after problems we understand.

For instance, right now, we are working on a smart dating product (sort of the anti-eHarmony), a useful recommendation site for parents with young kids, and a crowd-sourced fashion site. All cool stuff!

We also like simple B2B stuff, like what Basecamp did for project management and collaboration. Game changer. Simple. Solved a lot of problems for millions of people. Complex? Not really. Hard to execute? Yes, but mostly because it required dedication and focus on user problems.

We like simple ideas. Solve one problem. Keep it focused.

In short, we want to build kickass products that solve real problems we understand and care about.

Feel as if you should call us? Do it. Ask for Erlend.

We spend a lot of time working with web/mobile entrepreneurs and we're super lucky to be working with amazing people with cool ideas, tons of energy, and a lot of passion. For the past six months, we've tried to pull our clients, both startups and brands, into following our methodology: Lean Product Development. The benefits with Lean are clear: better products from a science/testing approach, less time to market (or less time to get in front of users), and less waste.

For our clients, the “trouble” with Lean is that you never really know “what you will get.” You don't know what you will eventually build even when you've spent 25% of your budget. You cannot, and you should not, estimate the “entire” project up front and you should not spend time on specs and documentation of “features” that you may or may not build.

This can be unsettling to clients. We understand why. The traditional model, most often used by agencies is very clear and straight forward. It goes like this:

1. You make a range of assumptions - maybe 20 - about your users needs and then create a list of “features that fulfills those needs”
2. You build a detailed spec, estimate, and schedule of the exact hours/cost and timeline to build “it”
3. You then start by wiring up the experience, design the screens, develop the features, before you launch “it.”

In the traditional model, because you “know what you are building” up front - you can tell how much it will cost and “what you will get.” This is a great feeling. It seems less risky. I can touch it. It's a “deliverable.”

The problem is that this “method” does not work at all for consumer web/mobile product development of any kind today. The reasons are many, but the main one is: You will most certainly be wrong about “what you need to build” and you can be sure that what you build - the whole thing - won't really work or connect with users until you are well into future releases.

Despite this, this “waterfall” model, is the standard among most agencies and many development shops. Most of our clients who have interactive or agency experience are familiar with this model. We understand why it seems to “work.” The problem is: We cannot build products that way, because it is wrong. We know that it doesn't work.

The truth is that you never know what you will build

You don't know what you need to build in the beginning of the project and you don't know what you have “left” to build when you are 50% “there.” It is wasteful to do big estimates and loads of documentation up front - before you get users engaged. It is wasteful to spend time on spec writing and requirements that does not center on specific assumptions, test cases, data from learning, and/or user feedback.

It is true, neither you nor we know “what it will cost” and exactly “how long it will take.” You don't know when you will be “done.” In fact, being “done” is not a possibility. You will never be done. (Unless you sell your product or exit in some way.) You have to get used to it. There are no “complete estimates” and no “complete specs.” You don't need it.

You should focus on what matters. That is not documentation. That is not estimates. Those are wrong always. What you need is what every scientist spends her time doing every day: EXPERIMENTS. Well structured experiments.

This is what we try to do with every client. We do it because we have tested the traditional model vs the Lean model and Lean wins hands down every time. We hope you do it too. Do you?

For the past year, we've spent most of our time focusing on a new path - a new strategy - for Fabric.

Today, we announce (officially!) that we are 100% committed to helping entrepreneurs, brands, and media build new digital products and drive key usage metrics for those products.

So why would a Startup or brand work with Fabric and not just hire it's own team?

It's fairly simple. Most startups or brands that come to have two key challenges:

• They have limited cash ($60k-$250k) and need to bring a new product to market (for testing or raising Seed capital)
• They need an experienced product/technical team with a proven process for Alpha/BETA builds

What we offer is a faster and less costly route to market for those who do not have their full teams in place. We are focused on the first 6 months of the product cycle - taking a product from zero to 100,000 users. Fabric's teams and process is focused on driving key usage metrics from fast learning and rapid product iteration.

At the product development level, we bring:

• Product focused design and engineering teams (2)
• Rapid Product Iteration Process (Lean Startup)
• Advice from experienced entrepreneurs and product designers
• Experience of success and failure
• Large existing code base and tools to speed up development

We know that the most challenging aspect of bringing a new product to market is to get initial traction and drive usage. Therefore, in addition to our Rapid Iterative Product Development Process we also offer go-to-market services for new products and Startups:

• Initial user-acquisition support
• Marketing and social media programs and teams
• Advice and support on core metrics and processes for measuring what matters
• Access to deep network of potential launch partners in most verticals

If you have a new web/mobile product, with a budget in the $60-$250k range, we want to talk to you. Right now, the product we build sits within social, mobile, geo-location, and SaaS, but we're open to any project that is utility based and/or is attempting to solve a real problem. Call us!