Build a proper product: step-by-step software development
Sell before you build! Sell before you build! 12 products in 12 months challenge. I read a lot of similar topics here, and I don't really get it. Is it a good idea to develop a business like this? In my opinion, it's like reading one page of a book a day when you can read the entire chapter. You probably can, but what would be the result?
According to the statistics, in 42% of analyzed cases, startups fail due to misreading market demand. In turn, the other 29% of analyzed cases show that the reason for the failure is due to running out of funding and personal money. Other causes for such a sad outcome for startups are lack of understanding of the target audience, inability to beat the competition, product mistiming, etc.
Let me share my opinion on why thoughtful development would be much more profitable in advance.
The development of any solution is a time-consuming process with a long list of stages. This article says that there are several main stages of software development.
👉 Pre-development stage
👉 Development phase and business analysis
👉 Design
👉 System architecture
👉 Development
👉 Testing
👉 Product launch
Of course, certain stages mentioned on the list above may vary depending on your project specifics, but it can help overcome the majority of the mentioned reasons for failure and increase the degree of the product's success.
Anyway, share your opinion. Do you follow these steps?
I don’t think these ideas actually conflict.
A proper product process matters, but “sell before you build” is usually part of that process, not the opposite of it.
The mistake is treating development as validation. A lot of teams spend months moving through analysis, design, architecture, and engineering before confirming whether the market really cares.
The strongest teams usually do both: validate demand early, then build with much more confidence and better scope control.
That’s something we see a lot at Foundersbar , early market signal tends to make every later stage of product development faster, cheaper, and far less risky.