Validated Minimum Viable Product Roadmap
Step 1: Niching
In general, as an entrepreneur with limited financial and network resources, you might not be able to dominate the global market immediately.
But you can dominate a small, local market.
As Sam Walton famously mentioned in his book on the legendary Walmart, Walmart was never able to compete with local businesses who knew their customers on a deeper level than Walmart was capable of allocating resources to.
This is what makes the process of niching a necessary tool. The tighter you can narrow our customer profile, the easier we can identify common threads between customers, the faster you can communicate with them in a compelling way, and the easier it is to deliver a solution that actually adds value to their lives in someway.
Secretly, there are other benefits as well, since a tight niche allows higher performing marketing, non-competitive pricing (meaning you can charge much higher prices), and easier targeting and access.
At this step, you must determine the niche that will easily accessible you - the people that you will inevitably help with your product.
Everyone who has worked for more than a few years has access to an existing set of potential customers they know really well.
So at this stage, hone in on where you have a natural competitive advantage and determine the character profile that you serve.
Step 2: Research and Interviews
Once a niche is selected, the next step is to know as much as possible about the customer profile.
Things that initially appear insignificant could be discovered to be a gold mine of untapped potential later.
Once enough deep customer conversations are completed, a solid picture of the customer profile, their pains, their hopes, and more should start to become obvious to you. The marketing and sales communication is easy to build from this point, and also the value gaps for that person are clear, so the initial ideas for product should now come into shape.
Once a targetted list of niche customers is identified, find out where they hang out, online, and in person.
Knock on doors, email, DM, or whatever it takes to have conversations with them aiming for 30-50 discussions.
In this case, shadowing them for a day is superior to speaking to them which is superior to an online quiz. Even just 2-3 shadowing processes can reveal innumerable potential products. Whereas 50 quizzes could potentially result in none.
Step 3: Hypothesize and Build
Only at this point does a hypothesis have a high probability of being right. This is simply the ideation and build step of the product which is most well understood by most.
We synthesize the data from the customer interviews and use the hypothesis from the interviewing process to be able to build, specifically a SaaS product that will hit with the target market.
If you have coding experience, now is the time to start building, or to manage the vendors who do.
All the risk in this step is generally mitigated through customer conversations. So even if you have to invest money at this stage, it's unlikely to be a complete loss, even if the initial hypothesis is wrong. As an aside, be prepared to build something that can be tossed away or rebuilt later is intelligent at this stage of the business.
Step 4: Initial User Onboarding
Once the product is built it's time to start onboarding users.
This is where you harvest information related to user ROI, work out the kinks, errors, and other problems in the system, and start making it into a streamlined experience for your users.
This will make sure that new users, especially those you don't know personally, have a good experience, leading to more efficient marketing pushes later in the user aquision step.
The users you will onboard are specifically the people you interviewed at the start of this process. At this point it's pivotal to keep good ongoing dialogue with users, and watch them use the system ideally.
Information from those conversations will inform ongoing development, and help make the system efficient to get into and easy to use.
At this point, determine princing structure, incorporate payment, and do all the additional setup required for a revenue generating SaaS application.
Step 5: User Acquisition and Scaling
Once the initial users have been onboarded, pricing has been determined, and we know we have product market fit, we are ready to scale.
This is where the entrepreneur's business becomes a real value generating and cash flow positive machine, and is the ultimate goal of this process.
Learning how to various cold customer acquisition channels work like Meta Ads, Email, Direct Mail, etc. are a good place to go. All thecustomer conversations you have had will allow you to use these platforms effectively in communicating to new users.
Preparation for system scaling is important here. Hiring experts that can take you to the next step is maybe more important. You might have to raise money, etc, depending on how quickly you would like to grow.
Congratulations! But, prepare to change mentalities. What got you to here, is not going to get you to your next stage of growth.