🧠 How we develop our product

Creating a startup may seem like an easy thing to do especially if one looks at it through the prism of celebrity founders who post on social media about continuous growth and success. Anyone who has tried to grow their startup knows that it is a rather hard road. There is no shortage of challenges and even a seemingly simple task, like choosing what you want to create, can give you a headache.

In this short post I would like to share with you information on the topics:

👉 where we get ideas for the further development of Zencal

👉 how we decide what to implement first

👉 why our users are impressed with the speed of product development

Ideas

If you're reading this article then I bet you have thousands of different ideas for your own product. One of the most important rules I follow when throwing tasks into our backlog is to thoroughly check that the idea ===value. If you start thinking about the value your product brings to the user's life instead of focusing on functionality, it becomes apparent very quickly that most ideas are not worth pursuing.

Secondly, it is also worth vetting the market for competition. If no one in the market is doing what you have thought of it can only mean one of two things:

• you have found a USP (Unique Selling Point) for your product 🎉 congratulations
• the idea is not worth pursuing because users don't need it 🎉 congratulations.

The second scenario is the worst thing that can happen to you, which is spending time doing something that is pointless. The easiest way to avoid this situation is to talk to your users. Don't have users? Ask potential users. Just talk to people.

Decision

If we have already collected a list of functionalities that we have filtered for pointless ideas, the next thing is to decide the order in which to do them. In the case of Zencal, we can divide this decision-making into two periods:

• the time when there were no users
• the time when users came into the system

In the case where you have no users, the decision should be down to your intuition. If you have a Co-Founder, talk through the list and agree with the order together. It is worth having a second person with whom we can bounce the ball and do a little brainstorming. Remember, if you are starting to build a product, the list should first include everything you need to publish an MVP (Minimum Viable Product).

When you get your first 50, 100, or 200 users treat them like investors. Especially if they are paying users then you should listen to their ideas and implement what they tell you themselves. At this point, you have a bit of a head start. However, be careful! The smaller the sample, the greater the risk that you will run into so-called 'liars'.

To this day, I cannot forget how I tried to win over my first users and was fooled by promises that they would give up a competing product if I added XYZ functions. Having learned from experience, I developed a small system of grading user requests.

During conversations, write down all ideas and collect them in a list. I personally use Notion.so for this purpose. Make a simple table to which you add the ideas and emails of users who have raised the topic with you. This approach has two advantages:

✅ You know how many people are realistically interested in a particular functionality

✅ You have an email list of the people you need to inform when it is ready

User impressed

Most companies make a lot of promises in their conversations with users, but most of them do not end up implementing the user's idea. Worse still, even if it does come to fruition few companies come back with feedback to the user. You can gain a lot from this.

Contact === relationship, and it is by building a strong relationship with users or potential users that you are able to develop the product. Imagine how much you gain in the eyes of the user when you fulfil their vision and inform them of the results. The sooner you meet the demand, the better the effect.

In my experience, the greatest effect is made on users by functionalities that are trivial from a developer's perspective. I often exploit this when a user is typing in Zencal chat and I know that I am able to execute on the spot. From a user perspective, how many times have you been in this situation?

That's about it for this post, but if you find content like this interesting then drop by my blog https://octocode.io and remember, if you need an app to make and sell appointments, there's only one correct address https://zencal.io

I also invite you to follow me on Twitter https://twitter.com/octocode, where I share my loose thoughts every day, from which I also apparently derive value 😂 that's what she said.