Customer-Driven Development
For lean start-ups and new businesses
From initial business planning to supporting a profitable software product, we help you ascend each step of the customer discovery process while minimizing waste.
RoleModel Software has a passion for helping entrepreneurs grow their ideas into successful businesses. We are proud to have worked with dozens of start-ups and small businesses over the years. Our extensive experience with small businesses has instilled in us sound strategies not only on the software development side but also on the business development side. In fact, we have come to believe in an optimal strategy for start-ups that tightly integrates business development with software development. The foundation of this strategy is the concept of Customer-Driven Development.
What is Customer-Driven Development?
Customer-Driven development, as the name indicates, is development focussed on reaching and satisfying early customers. These customers not only provide a stream of funding, but they also provide critical real-world product validation. By keeping real customers in focus throughout the development process, we help you minimize waste and risk.
The RoleModel Approach
Crafting a successful software product step by step
Phase 1 - Planning Package
You benefit from the knowledge we’ve gained
In the Planning Package, we establish a firm foundation of strategy and perspective that will guide us through the rest of the development process. Because of the extensive experience that we have working with start-ups and entrepreneurs, we strongly urge our clients to spend the first week letting us walk them through some fundamental business strategies.
You’ll learn from the experts we’ve learned from
Using select chapters from “Four Steps to the Epiphany” by Steven Blank as a textbook of sorts, we help you apply the strategies and concepts he outlines to your business venture. If you are unfamiliar with the customer discovery process, or if you want help applying the process to your own product, our seasoned verterans are ready to lend you their guidance.
Phase 2 - Product Presentation Package
Get valuable feedback before spending tons of $$ on software
After establishing a firm foundation of strategy and perspective, its time to test the waters and see if your product idea can float. If there’s flaws with your product’s premise, we want to find and address them now lest we start heading down the wrong path. Therefore, in this phase of the customer-driven development model we build for you a mock product that you can show to investors and potential customers and start getting invaluable feedback.
Avoid traps, discover new opportunities
In many cases, significant problems with the product’s design that would have otherwise remained undetected are made obvious in this phase as users and testers interact with the demo. This can save thousands of dollars and weeks of unnecessary delay as the product goes forward. Additionally, many great opportunities that may have otherwise been overlooked are often brought to light during this phase. Sometimes an entirely different product is conceived of during this phase.
Phase 3 - Minimal Viable Product Package
Work the kinks out before shipping the product
After planning and successfully demoing a concept product, we’re ready to begin building a Minimal Viable Product (MVP). The MVP is the minimum feature set necessary to attract early customers. Usually, while these customers are often given a discount or some other incentive to sign up, these are people excited enough about the product to be willing to pay something to get in on it early. Your product won’t start turning a profit in this phase, but it will gather invaluable information about the market and feature validation from these real-life users.
Make big direction changes while its cheap
Just like the concept product in phase 2, we will no doubt discover many kinks to be worked out in this phase, but because we are dealing with a minimal feature set and small set of users rather than a full set with many users, making necessary changes will be less complicated and cost less.
Phase 4 - Viable Product Package
Release your product with confidence
In this phase we flesh out the skeleton MVP created in the previous phase with the goal of releasing a complete product to the market. While most businesses these days essentially attempt to begin at the Viable Product phase, you will have the advantage of months of planning, product testing, market validation, customer discovery, as well as the beginning of a steady income stream from early customers upon stepping into this phase. Having a validated feature set and an early customer base will allow us to forge confidently ahead into this most intense phase in the process.
Ready to take the plunge?
We understand that for small businesses and start-ups, it can be overwhelming trying to figure out how to translate your ideas into working software affordably. That’s why we at RoleModel have broken the process down into a logical progression of steps that minimize waste and risk. The principles we follow when developing software for startups are principles that we’ve seen proven in the real world time and time again.
If you think you’re ready to take the plunge, please contact us. We look forward to helping your business succeed.
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