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Intro
I am Gunjan Karun and I love you ❤️
What are you working on these days?
I am building a platform to help you create an extensive and structured plan for your next app idea using a mix of community + technology + expert marketplace.
The idea is to enable you to plan your app like a seasoned product manager, even if it is your first app.
I have onboarded a mentor/advisor who is a Ph.D. in strategic management and entrepreneurship and is currently a faculty in the Strategic Management area at the Indian Institute of Management, Indore (One of the top 6 management colleges in India).
This product is in ideation/planning phase.
Right now I am conducting a series of offline meetups with early/planning stage startups in my city to talk to my potential users before building anything.
The placeholder website is at https://appmakerverse.com
What can the WIP community help you with right now?
I would love to know how you plan your products, how do you decide what to build next, how do you estimate the time, efforts and cost of what needs to be built next and so on.
If you have already gone through the planning phase, what advise do you have for your younger self who has just started planning for his/her idea.
What can you help others with?
I have more than 22 years of experience of building products. I have personally built and launched multiple products. I can help you with technology, user experience reviews or simply act as a sounding board for your idea or the problem that your business is facing.
If you are about to build your product, I would love to listen to your product and business ideas and provide my 2 cents based on my two decades of experience of building b2b and b2c products.
I am waiting for you at https://calendly.com/quadralyst/30min
Something else you want to know?
❤️ What is the one thing that I can do today to make your day better?
👋 Join WIP to participate
Hi Gunjan, welcome to WIP!
Ap Maker Verse looks intriguing. @hailcaesar just joined the community as well and we're discussing this topic in his intro post: wip.co/posts/hi-i-m-marcus-wb…
Curious to get your thoughts on it as well.
Thanks, @marc, for pointing this out.
Let me explain the problem I am trying to solve (maybe you can confirm if the problem is real or not).
When you have a product idea, you must work on two aspects BEFORE the building of the product starts.
First, you need to be very sure of WHAT you are building i.e.
* what problems are you solving,
* is that problem worth solving,
* what do your users feel about that problem,
* come up with some suggestions for a solution,
* engage your users and get their feedback on the problems and solution
The priority here is to find a handful of users with the problem you plan to solve and then keep them involved during the product planning and building phases.
The second part is HOW you solve it. It involves
* Prioritizing the features
* Planning an MVP
* Figuring out how much and how long will the proposed solution take
* Creating a user flow of the recommended features
* Plan the screens and screen flow for each user type
* Creating the UX of your solution
* and so on.
The last part is building the product, which is easy if you take care of the first two parts of planning.
A solution that I have in mind addresses the first two parts of planning using a combination of
Technology: A system where users plan the features, collect feedback, create user flows, plan the screens, use a mood board for UI/UX inspirations, and so on.
Community: Where the (potential) users of their app can vote/discuss these features/screens/releases etc.
Marketplace: Where experts can be hired for specific tasks like creating UIs, Logos, Wireframes, and so on.
Right now, I am still in the exploration phase.
I am conducting a series of in-person meetups in my city, talking to all the startups and people with ideas and figuring out what is essential for them.
BTW, @hailcaesar best of luck. I will continue the discussion in your thread.
The process you describe sounds theoretically correct, although practically I skip most of these steps as a solo founder.
The goal in an early-stage product should be to get as many useful insights as possible. What the market wants, whether you can reach your customer, if you can technically build what you envision, etc.
This means that if you do your job right, you'll keep getting more information that will guide you forward. That means that whatever you plan quickly becomes outdated. You don't want to execute on old ideas that didn't take into account the new insights.
For that reason I find planning more than a few weeks in advance not that useful.
Additional, as a developer, I prefer to build an MVP as quickly as possible to see what resonates with the market. Rather than doing a ton of research which is time consuming and something I simply don't enjoy as much.
I expect that for companies with (larger) teams the steps you outline become a lot more important though. So I think it all comes down to who your target market is.