A Frog in the Valley

This article is part of my build a web stratup from scratch serie.

You found interesting people. They have good ideas. You get to know them and you see that you could really see yourself working with them. A general direction for a product is set. The idea has percolated a while. This product will be a web application. Some pitch in money. Other pitch in time. Or both. It’s a go.

First thing first, this product should be roughly defined. The amount of rough is a tricky value to set. Rough enough to be explained in about 10-20 pages with wireframes describing the main funcitons should do it. More screen and schema than words. Meaty paragraph might work well for mega systems when consulting for a client at 150$/h but for a startup, less is more. Still, major functions needs to be captured enough for the team to have a common understanding.

Then you need to build it. It’s your job, your the CTO. Well, build it or have it built. Whatever. It needs to work. You’ve been thru this before. You know there is just a few (critical) steps next, I call this pre-production, it’s the stuff you need to do before doing anything else.

1. Take the functionnal and business requirements and translate them in technical terms (move from wireframes and screen mockups to data and object model). The intended audience for this will be your technical team.
2. Break down the process in chunks of work to be done, rough estimates, most important thing is to get the steps right, timing and budget are not the critical piece (yet) so don't bother. This is your development plan for phase 0 (initial barebones release). You will be sharing this document with the other startup founders (and funders a bit later).
3. Prepare a Roadmap document. The roadmap will help you decide what feature goes in what version. You will need this when you will start to factor in cost and time. The goal is to capture good ideas from the team and put them somewhere where you can prioritze them. Wiki are ideals for that type of task.

Once these steps are done, review them with your team. It’s actually a iterative process, the sooner you have something to share the better. The collaboration and cooperation that will be established in that phase of your business is the glue that will make this company stick together… or not.

The final step for this planning phase will involve taking the first three items here and combine them in the complete plan for your web application, factoring in constraints (money!) and pressure (time!). It’s only when you factor in features, time and money and need to make these three work together that the work start! After that, you will be faced by specific questions to get from idea to reality.

The three main areas of technology expertise you will need next are infrastructure, software development and operations. In big companies there is usually one manager/owner per role but in a startup, your on your own. Be realistic about where your strengths and weaknesses are. My next post will explore some questions and process related to making hard choices regarding those three areas.

The rubber hits the road and pain will come. Infrastructure cost money, software development is a hard process to manage when you are in a hurry and operation is super important but boring… stay tuned, it’s an exciting opportunity when you can be part of a startup, no pain - no gain!

Tags: web, startup, development, management, vc, web2.0