A CTO’s View of the Startup Process

The startup process 

Though every startup is unique and has its own path to travel, there’s a common process many startups follow and has worked for many before you:

✪	Stage 1 – Pre-MVP: Before you start developing anything, there are a few things you have to do to make sure you're developing the right thing. Planning every aspect of your product, creating a model, and checking your potential clients are happy with it will help you make it better before the first line of code was even written. This will save you huge amounts of funds and time.
✪	Stage 2 – MVP: Developing a minimum viable product (MVP) will many times mean creating a first, stripped - down, version of your app. This version will only include the bare minimum of features needed to show its ability to solve the main problem it was designed to solve.
✪	Stage 3 – Marketing, sales and networking: Growing your client base will put you in a better position and give you the information you need for the following stages. The more users you have, the more attractive you are to investors, the more subscriptions you can sell, and the more information you can collect.
✪	Stage 4 – Pitching to investors: Though pitching to investors is an art you will have to learn from a pitching expert or master yourself, you will need to be able to explain the technology behind your solution in a clear and appealing way. Doing the previous stages right will take you half of the way, now you will do the other half and get the funding you need to move from a startup to a scale-up.
✪	Stage 5 – Measuring, analysing, and getting feedback: Learning from your clients' actions, reactions, and complains is an important part of the process from now on. No matter how much you will grow, you will always have to measure, analyse and then decide the steps ahead.
✪	Stage 6 – Scaling and expanding or pivoting: If your measurements from the previous stage show you are going the right directions, or you need to make small adjustments, you will easily know what to do with this information. But sometimes the measurements tell you otherwise and you have to pivot - that means you will be changing the directions you are heading, or the problem you come to solve altogether. It's not always easy to pivot, but sometimes that's the best option.

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