How Startups can secure their first and fragile, steps

<short version>Use Functional Prototypes, save time and resources for later!</short version>

The most important step in a Startup is to Secure Product-Market Fit. Many Startups start building their Minimum Viable Product (MVP) before having Secured Product-Market Fit (PMF) and most of the time, they believe that they can’t Secure PMF if they don’t have an MVP.

The threats that appear in those situations are:

• If you haven’t Secured PMF you can’t have a clear scope for your MVP.
• If you don’t have a clear scope for your MVP, you don’t know when to stop and test it in the Market.
• The Market constantly changes and if you can’t build your MVP soon enough, you might end up chasing the Market, constantly changing your MVP continuing the burn rate.
• If you haven’t Secured PMF your MVP might fail and the cost of making changes in MVP is high and might be too late.

A valuable Step Startups can use to rapidly build something that’s good enough most of the times to Secure Product-Market Fit, is Functional Prototypes. My colleague Michalis Dobekidis has posted some very helpful examples: Supercharge your Prototypes & Hardware enabled Prototypes.

A Functional Prototype, many times can offer what is needed in order to conduct your Market Research, Secure your Product fit and conclude on your MVP scope.

Using a Functional Prototype, you can:

• Reduce drastically the amount of time and the resources you need to go to the Market and test your assumptions.
• Make changes easier, most of the time within a couple of days and retest the Market.
• Have a clear scope of your MVP and how the Market will use it.

A good friend of mine says, “let’s start from the end”. The successful end of a Startup is the Market to love the product. Test that on the beginning of your journey.