I have an idea but don't know where to start.
Ideas are surfing around my mind and I feel like it is a right time for take action as a university student.
As a 20 year old curious boy, I want to consult you few things;
What should the product road map look like ?
How can we build product from scratch, where should we start from ?
I have been reading and listening everything I found related with entrepreneurship. However, when the time comes to take an action, I stuck.
You my friends can help me and mentor me along my path.
Thank you.
Tayyar.
I think everyone has been on that situation where you get kinda stuck, some ideas could help you is:
Go for no-code tools to validate your idea, use landing page builders to share your idea here are some
If you want to try some tech stack and don't know how to start, share your idea with a friend who is more experienced in that stack.
Also, keep in mind this is a process never ends, the entrepreneurship path is learning all the time how to do things, how to improve things, how to tackle problems, and so on.
Exactly, imo. If your 20 y/o and already thinking about no-code/entrepreneurship your ahead of the curve. You've got years to figure it out, and along the way you might even hit gold.
Usually experienced engineers will at least point you in the right direction as far as building something. That just means, in my experience, they'll tell you their approach generally towards it, but thats just to get the gears in your head turning.
Test your ideas at a rapid pace. You don't need to build anything to test the ideas.
A great framework for this is the "Pretotyping" framework. Here's an overview of the principles. Some of the more interesting/relevant ones for SaaS are:
"Facade" - CarsDirect is a site that sells cars. The way they tested the idea is by creating a simple website to see if people would actually buy a car. When people would click on the 'buy' button, they'd go and buy the actual car and deliver it to the customer. Sure, they lost a bit of money on every transaction but validated the idea.
"Fake door" - One food brand literally tested if people would be willing to buy a new item they had on the menu by...putting it on the menu. When someone would order it, they'd say it's not currently available, apologize and offer them a free burger instead. See this post on how to do this with SaaS.
Reading about pretotyping and lean startups in general really opened my eyes. You don't even need an "MVP" to test an idea, often an "MVT" (minimum viable test) is enough.
Curious to hear what others think about this.
If you are stuck, stop doing what you are doing and try something else.
Listening others is something but not everything, those paths are theirs. It's hard to follow them step by step. Way too easy to blame others when things doesn't work as it worked for them.
I've read your idea from your previous comments. Sounds interesting, basically a digital version of the yellow buses in Istanbul.
Here are the actions I'd take, no roadmap tho;
Is there any law preventing me to do this?
Is it legal to display any ad on any vehicle?
There is taxation ¹ does this screen going to fit their criteria?
How much does current solutions costs?
How much to cover a car with an ad?
Is it possible to beat those numbers?
How much do people earn with those ads?
What would be the cost of that digital display?
How to reduce it?
Does it needs to be seen in pure daylight and also be water-proof?
So how much does is costs again?
How to reduce it?
How about security, what happens when it's either broken or stolen.
How about replacements, how about life-span...
Where would be the pivot area, Nişantaşı? Beyoğlu?
How many displays and vehicles would be a good number to start?
Who will you start to talk with, taxi drivers?
I don't think you are nowhere close to being stuck. Unless you have answers to those questions that came to my mind within 5 minutes. I believe if you talk with a VC they probably have better and neater questions that needs to be answered.
Beyond that, in general I'd suggest you to attend every startup meeting, grow your network, listen every pitch and study how to prepare a great pitch as well.
BTW, I'm not sure about this part but in Turkey, due to some legislation. This kind of startups doesn't exist. To be able to pay a third party, in this case the owners of those vehicles. They kinda need to be your employee, it's not possible to say alright they are freelancers I pay them occasionally. In the end government expect you to pay for their insurance etc. So they need to be registered within your company or they need to become a company. I still don't know if there is a way to work around this. So just be aware.
Try My Idea Validation Hack "Dump It and Break It " to get clarity
Focus on the problem that caused the Idea, and then try to prove your Idea wrong as much as possible.
Ask yourself the following questions and dump all the answers you can think of:
What is the problem?
Is it a current problem?
Is it a problem in the future?
Why would someone care about the problem?
How big is the problem ?
What's in it for people?
Why do I believe this Idea will solve the problem?
What alternative ideas already exist?
If the idea already exist , How my Idea is different?
Where can I apply this Idea?
Are there any obstacles to using the Idea or reasons why it might not work at all?
How am I going to overcome these obstacles or make these obstacles irrelevant?
At the end of this exercise, you should have an actionable idea to solve a current problem, not some fancy vision from the future.
If you do this right , You can take your brain dump, turn it into a 3 min pitch, and use it to validate externally.
Ideas
If you have ideas about businesses you'd like to start, then the next step is to narrow down those ideas to a small number. Courtland has a great post on coming up with good business ideas. You should read that if you haven't already so that you're thinking about all the pieces that make a business idea worthwhile to work on.
Validation
Generally speaking once you've narrowed down your ideas to a few, it's time to start the validation process. This means collecting real-world feedback of some type. The ultimate feedback for businesses is if people pay you. Some indie hackers will actually put up a way for customers to pay without even having a product or service, just to see if people think the idea is worth paying for! Up-front payment is a very good sign that your business is valuable in some way.
Another way of validating is to put up a landing page with an email signup form and share the page with your potential customers. Getting subscribers to your email list is a sign that there's at least an interested audience, even though you don't know if they'll pay. And you can email them when you have something ready or want to ask questions.
Another way of validating your business idea is to do market research. If there are existing successful companies close to your business idea then that's a pretty good sign that there's at least general demand. Then it's up to you to figure out if the things that differentiate your business might be valuable enough for people to use instead of your competitors. People tend to worry about competitors but from what I've seen on here people generally take it as an encouraging sign that they're on to something.
You can also do market research by finding out roughly how big the total market is for you product or service — e.g. if you're making an app for plumbers, you could see how many plumbers there are in the country or region you're targeting.
You can also do market research by talking to people in your market. Just talking to a bunch of people and asking them about their problems without leading them to your idea specifically can be a good way of understanding what they find valuable. The book The Mom Test is usually cited here as helpful. You'll also learn the language they use and probably get some good ideas about how you can sell it to them. You can also look in different kinds of online forums to see people talking about things related to your business idea and that might give you clues that your business is valuable.
It's also possible to skip the validation process and just build a product, but the risk there is that you waste time building something no one wants, which happens very frequently for people without much business experience. It's usually nice to have some kind of initial validation before you spend too much time on an idea.
Minimal viable product
Once you have enough validation that it feels worthwhile to build something, the general advice in the Indie Hackers community is to build a product or service that has the bare minimum number of features that your customers would find valuable and try to get them to use it. Why? Mostly so you don't risk building some huge complicated app with tons of features only to find out that your customers don't care about any of them. A minimal product given to customers gives you more feedback / validation about the core value of your business than the validation you got before you built something.
No-code tools are popular these days for getting something up and running quickly. If you know a programming language, that is probably the best case since you can build whatever you want. As another commenter pointed out, you'll be continually learning new things as an entrepreneur so coding might be part of that, or teaming up with someone technical. Either way, initial products or services can be programmed horribly or basically put together with cardboard and tape, as long as it presents something that might be valuable to your customer.
Then you try to attract users to your product. Reaching out in emails or one-on-one is a good way to start, or you can share the site here on IndieHackers or ProductHunt or wherever your potential customers hang out. Hopefully you get good feedback — either positive or negative is helpful! — so you can refine your product or move on to something else.
If you keep finding that your project is gaining momentum, that's a really good sign. Then it's time to start making ways you can consistently get your business in front of potential customers. Here's a great post about 11 marketing channels that consistently worked for founders.
And if you've made it this far then you're in really good shape. :)
Did I miss anything?