Introduction
According to statistics, the vast majority of web projects fail. Probably, your project is also in stagnation.
This can happen at any stage — endless development, commissioning, monetization, etc. The key factor of stagnation is that you are not achieving the goals set for the project.
In this article, we will focus on finding ways to further develop the project and offer options for saving it.
Determining the reasons for a startup’s failure
We have 2 articles on the topic of startup failure:
Both articles address the factors of failure of the project as a whole. At a minimum, it will be useful to know what exactly you can fail the project.
Main reasons:
- No one needs the project. You’ve made a project that no one wants to consume.
- Poor implementation. The product is too weak in terms of implementation and does not meet the requirements of consumers.
- Incorrect price / value ratio for the consumer. You overestimate the importance of the product too much. The consumer doesn’t see enough value in your product.
The main reasons are tied in one way or another to the consumer. It is he who votes in rubles for your product. There are a lot of imperfect products (for example, 1C) that remain afloat for only one reason — they are needed by the consumer, and he is ready to pay for it.
A simple startup paradigm
So, what to do with the frozen project? How to stir it up?
Let’s take a step back and consider the key paradigm of the startup movement.
This is a cycle — We put forward a hypothesis, implement it, quickly check it, and draw conclusions.
When developing a startup in this paradigm, you will strive for the following points:
Test multiple ideas, not just a single one
You think you’ve come up with one killer idea, but what happens if it doesn’t go off? All right, let’s break up? You need a lot of small improvement ideas for the project. And something is sure to catch the consumer.
Test the hypothesis in the market as quickly as possible
The faster you test your idea, the faster you will understand what the consumer needs, the less resources you will spend on stupid ideas.
How to think of a typical beginner startup? I will be sawing my product for a long time, and then I will bring a beautiful, sleek site with all sorts of functions to the public.
As a result, all the work is done without feedback. That is, it would be possible to understand at the very beginning that some elements are not needed in the project at all and not spend precious time and money on them (which the startup does not have very much anyway).
Speed up the idea testing cycle
The more ideas tested, the more likely you are to find your product that will be in demand. You will find it before the external financing of the project ends.
A slow start means more costs, delayed feedback from the consumer, and higher risks.
Launch a minimal product, then refine it based on feedback and add new improving hypotheses.
The key principle is to face the truth and relate your capabilities to reality. Sooner or later, reality will manifest itself.
If you plan to make a Russian equivalent of vacap, and you have the resources to create a small platform, most likely nothing will come of it. But no one will stop you with the inscription: “You can’t do a startup here.” Sooner or later, reality will put everything in its place and the project will slowly bend.
Evaluate your capabilities and the scale of the product you are making. Correlate the real needs of the market and your product. Don’t protect your product from the market — get real feedback on the product as early as possible, even though it will be sharply negative.
Points of application of efforts for resuscitation of a startup
A web project is not something set in stone once and for all. Its parameters can be varied. You can review a lot of things, redo them, cut them down, modify them, serve them with a different sauce.
In this section, we will look at what we can change in the project in order to stir up the project.
Startup Marketing
You can change the offer of the project — offer more buns, lower prices, improve conditions. That is, make your offer more attractive to the consumer. This makes sense if the consumer sees at least minimal value in your product.
The offer should really be profitable for the client. Do not think that the client is stupid and will fall for some nonsense. Take his place — would you be interested in such an offer?
Remove all the water from your offer. Do not need your opinion about your product, give the facts. Let the consumer create their own opinion without your “quality product”, “first-class service”.
Learn how to extract feedback from the market. You can’t do a project in a vacuum. You need to get a response from the consumer, understand what they like and what they can’t stand.
Conduct customer interaction sessions. It is important to understand what their problem is (and not what your problem could be solved by the product).
Go not from your product, but from the customer’s problem. That’s where the source of the future deal is.
Think about how to link your product and the outline of the consumer’s environment. The goal is that the customer uses the product constantly, and does not pay at the first stage (he invests time). What kind of product or tool does your project compete with for the time of the consumer? How can your product be better? How can this be clearly shown to the consumer?
Marketing is the most flexible and important part of your startup. You can twist it any way you want and achieve big changes in the project at the expense of low-cost changes in product marketing (for example, find the right narrow target audience).
Product scope and functionality
The simplest thing you can do is to cut down on unnecessary functionality. Try to make an airplane-remove all the unnecessary things that prevent it from flying.
Ideally, at the very beginning, you should give up everything that is insignificant. Thus, you save your budget, speed up the startup process, and minimize the number of errors.
Find out what is most important for users in the product, and make it as high as possible in terms of quality and convenience. The rest can be removed, and this will improve the product. This will make it clearer, more focused.
Try to look at your product through the eyes of a consumer who sees it for the first time. Is it clear enough and easy to use? Are there any annoying difficulties in using the product?
What is good about Notepad: it can be used by a person who has sat down at the computer for the first time.
The main recommendation is to get rid of the excess that does not give value to your consumer.
Product quality
Establish a constant collection of feedback from the consumer. Study this feedback and develop hypotheses on how to reduce the problem factor. Take the negative feedback as the most valuable information and process it systematically.
Close work with defects and complaints allows you to improve the quality of the product and create a loyal user.
By solving the problem of one particular user, you solve the same problem for future thousands of users (who will no longer address this problem, because you have worked it out systematically).
Develop additional quality improvement measures. This may be an additional external team of testers who periodically conduct exploratory testing and usability analysis.
Polish your content, make proper links between articles, improve documentation, provide good examples and illustrations in the documentation, describe howto for various actions on the site.
Web Project team
It is necessary to understand what competencies are missing in the project.
This can be a designer, a promoter, a programmer, a content author, a layout designer, a customer service manager, etc.
It is important to systematically close the weak points in the project. This is far from the key point, and it makes more sense for those who are already firmly on their feet.
However, if a certain work is not done in the project even at the minimum level (for example, the project is promoted by the owner himself, and he does not understand it at all), then this can become one of the key factors for the failure of the project.
Evaluate your project by competencies, identify critical areas that need to be closed first.
In my practice, it’s usually either promotion or design. There was a case when the promotion of the site of executors/customers was handled by a relative of the customer, who was quite a novice.w. Of course, nothing good came of it in the end.
A similar case was with the design. The client begins to get carried away with the stylization of the site, as a result, it turns out a terrible awkward monster, which contains a little bit of everything from different sites.
You must cover all aspects of the product:
- promotion
- analytics
- support and development
- content
- user service
- polishing design and usability
If any part of it slips, it will degrade the quality of the product.
Product owner
The site owner is the most important element of a startup. All product decisions depend on it.
The stronger the owner, the better the team will be, and the better the solutions on the project will be.
You need to learn the basics of creating web projects. Without this, nothing good can be done.
You can trust the contractors, but they can lead you to the wrong place. Be sure to have a basic understanding of how to create and develop a project without relying on expert opinion.
Working with a weak product owner is a real pain:
- doesn’t know what he wants;
- changes the requirements for no reason;
- does not trust and does not listen to arguments;
- blames the contractors for everything (“you wrote the TOR, and I didn’t even read it”);
- obsession with styling (“let’s make the button a little more saturated”);
- long “water” calls where you need to tell the obvious things;
- explanation of the logic that the client laid down;
- non-environmental decisions on the project that do not take into account the consequences (“let’s make a video hosting”);
- reducing the importance of the performers ‘ work (“it’s easy to do, I would do it myself in 15 minutes”).
Strong product owner:
- understands that it is necessary to move iteratively;
- delves into the details and makes a decision taking into account many factors;
- will listen to the arguments of the executors;
- checks the result of the work, and does not rely on the words of the contractors;
- ready for close interaction, does not let everything take its course;
- understands that it is impossible to “cram the non-cram”, looks for compromises and better solutions together with the team, and says “I want it that way, period”.
Improve your skills. Investigate thoroughly causes. Don’t be a complete layman.
Hire people only after a basic understanding of the field. The better you understand the area, the less likely you are to be deceived by particularly enterprising citizens.
It is impossible to effectively manage what you do not understand.
Product metrics
Do you keep product metrics? Even if there are no sales, there may still be metrics.
The simplest thing is the traffic metrics. How many visitors a day come to the site? How many of them have registered? What is the failure rate?
If you already have some money movements, you can track your finances: deposits, debits, etc.
Highlight the key actions on the site and focus on their metrics. What can be the key action: placing an order, putting it in the shopping cart, filling out a brief, viewing a demo, adding money to your balance, applying for a project, etc.
It is important to analyze both absolute values and relative values. It is important to take into account the dynamics of growth over time.
The information “we have 1000 users” gives almost nothing. But we have grown the user base by 23% in a month can say a lot.
Why do I need metrics? To see if we’re jostling in place or moving in the right direction. It is very easy to deceive yourself when there are no metrics — “you just need to be patient”, “everything will work out”, “now I will give advertising and trample”.
An enterprising person by nature is always an optimist (otherwise he would not have started such a risky complex business). Metrics help you feel reality.
Metrics also give you an understanding of what works and what doesn’t. You can log your embedded hypotheses. By analyzing metrics, you can understand which hypotheses had an impact on the growth of indicators.
What does everything often rest on in a startup? Startup budget
In most cases, this is a budget. It is the budget that lets everyone know that it is time to finish. The budget is a litmus test for the project.
If you have a large budget, then the disease of the project will simply not be visible. They will also be, but they will be brightened up by the fact that the money is still there.
So what if the product is not needed by anyone, it works crookedly, poor usability, and the product owner in general does not quite understand the business logic of the product?
But we have a full range of opportunities, and the budget is still enough for a year.
Sooner or later, this will all end. When the budget runs out.
Based on this, let’s start from the budget as a key parameter
What you need to do:
- Reduce your appetites. Slow down. Don’t burn your entire budget so quickly. Remove unnecessary features in the system.
- Speed up. The faster the customer feels your product, the faster you will understand what to do next.
- Reach the nearest milestone, get the minimum profit and gradually increase the trickle. Your global task is to create a stream that will then turn into a river. Create only what the trickle will give you. If the stream is not visible, you do not need to do this (external money will still run out and the project will come to an end)
A startup is a test of value hypotheses for the customer until the money runs out.
Therefore, it is necessary to test as many hypotheses as possible as quickly as possible.
What if we haven’t found the Grail? Everything is simple — we make a Pivot (turn) in the direction of another hypothesis. Each failure of a startup gives food for thought: what exactly is wrong with the product, why it is not used, etc.
It’s sad when the startup owner doesn’t think about it at all. His super-idea did not go, and at this point he loses interest in the project (despite the large resources invested).
Do you need an extra budget? With the wrong approach, the budget will not help in any way. Most likely, it will be merged into another complex feature in the product, the value of which is not confirmed in any way. An additional budget will only help a product that consistently goes through good hypotheses and immediately tests them on customers.
Do not look for an investor at the “dead startup” stage, look for how to remove the husk in the project, develop a new package of hypotheses and launch the main value core with minimal effort.
Conclusion
The main idea of the article is to move the project iteratively, set specific immediate goals, and strictly focus on the consumer. It is he who ultimately determines whether your startup will live or sink into the abyss.
Marketing plays a key role in the product. You can create a technically beautiful, high-quality product. But it is important to convey all this to the consumer. Put marketing at the forefront, and build your product around the consumer and their needs.
A concrete action plan to bring the startup out of the crisis:
- identify the causes of startup problems;
- create hypotheses of changes in the product;
- estimate the approximate cost of the changes;
- as quickly as possible to implement this and push the product to the market.
Keep going through the ideas in the product and get feedback on them. Form the right expectations from the process, no one said that the market will immediately accept your product. Look for your combination of factors that will lead consumers to you.
The failure of the project occurs only when you have recognized it as a failure and closed the project.
Did you do everything you could for the product before you froze the project?
Originally published at https://falconspace.site.