A CTO’s View of the Startup Process

Stage 5 – Measuring, analysing, and getting feedback:

No matter if you found an investor or you are funding it yourself, from this stage on much of your product development will be a repetition of stages 5 and 6 (measuring, analysing, and getting feedback and then scaling and expanding).

✪	While the app grows in popularity, you will collect information about the way your users interact with the app according to the metrics selected.
✪	Analyse the information you collected, and if you find that you need to adjust things to get better results, plan them in a similar manner as you did in stage 1.
✪	Come up with ideas on how to make your app better, add features you had planned but didn’t make it to the previous version (or your MVP), and maybe consult specialists like UX designers, gamification consultants or well-renowned designers.
✪	This is also a good time to check if your team is the right size to handle all the tasks, and if needed – hire developers, as well as a project manager, customer support, your own designer and so on. You may also look into outsourcing some of these functions. In many cases, a good indication to the right time to hire is ‘not before you desperately need to’.
✪	Ask your users for feedback, but don’t take it overly seriously – many times people say they want a specific feature, but when you develop it, they don’t use it, or they don’t like the way you executed it (even if they were the ones who suggested this way of execution in the first place).

My part in this stage:

✪	I will help analysing the results and bring ideas for additional technologies that can be used, or services that can be added (for example, in advanced stages you can add machine learning features for recommendations, Natural Language Processing for chat bots, and so on).
✪	I will give advice on what features are easier to develop than others and will explain the different reason to choose one solution over the other.

 

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