How to Transform Your Ideas Into Software Products

How to Transform Your Ideas Into Software Products PDF

Author: Poornima Vijayashanker

Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform

Published: 2014-11-01

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 9781535562317

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Create products people will pay for before they're even built. You have an idea in your head. Maybe even more than one! But you're stuck simmering on it because you just don't know if it's the right one to pursue. You're wondering whether people will even use your product, let alone pay for it. The uncertainty is overwhelming, so you do ... nothing. But what if you were confident that your idea would help people? How would you feel if you turned your passion into a living, breathing software product ... and you made money from it? Poornima Vijayashanker has founded 3 startups and personally guided 100+ people who have launched products that make 6 and 7 figures per year. Everyone started with varying levels of technical and business know-how-or none at all-but everyone was passionate about an idea. Now, Poornima travels around the country teaching people how to bring their ideas to life. With the right roadmap in front of you, you can launch a winning software product too. "But I don't know how to code or run a business." The tangled world of startups and software development is intimidating and hard to navigate. To start with, not every entrepreneur knows how to code. Even the ones who do still need other skills to succeed; they need to design a good user experience, figure out how to attract paying customers, and hire and fire technical talent. There are hundreds of tools and services to help build products, and they need to know which ones are useless and which ones will save them time. They'll eventually run out of cash to keep paying rent and developing, and will need to figure out whether to get investors, apply to an accelerator, or bootstrap. Trial and error takes years of research, setbacks, and heartache ... not to mention a lot of money. You could go to design school, teach yourself how to code in the off-hours, and spend thousands of dollars testing marketing campaigns. Or you could... Follow a proven guide for turning your ideas into successful products (and even 6- to 7-figure businesses). This book will teach you how to: - Validate your idea before you spend time and money on it. - Talk to prospective customers without feeling awkward or pushy. - Leave competitors in the dust with good design and positioning. - Save time and heartache by building only the features people will actually use. - Hire talented people to build your product for you. - Get more paying customers with scrappy marketing strategies. - Find money to fund your business. This guide includes time-tested strategies and tools that entrepreneurs love: Over 13 case studies with the inside scoop on companies like Mint.com, AirBnB, and Zappos. The exact systems and tools Poornima and other startup founders have used to build rock-solid products. 7 interviews with successful startup founders and early employees like: - Melody McCloskey, CEO & Co-Founder of StyleSeat - Brittany Forsyth, Head of Human Relations at Shopify - Ben Congleton, CEO & Co-Founder of Olark - Julia Grace, Head of Engineering at Tindie - Thomson Nguyen, CEO & Co-Founder of Framed Data - Alyssa Ravasio, CEO & Co-Founder of Hipcamp - David Cummings, CEO & Co-Founder of Pardot

The Cold Start Problem

The Cold Start Problem PDF

Author: Andrew Chen

Publisher: HarperCollins

Published: 2021-12-07

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 0062969757

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A startup executive and investor draws on expertise developed at the premier venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and as an executive at Uber to address how tech’s most successful products have solved the dreaded "cold start problem”—by leveraging network effects to launch and scale toward billions of users. Although software has become easier to build, launching and scaling new products and services remains difficult. Startups face daunting challenges entering the technology ecosystem, including stiff competition, copycats, and ineffective marketing channels. Teams launching new products must consider the advantages of “the network effect,” where a product or service’s value increases as more users engage with it. Apple, Google, Microsoft, and other tech giants utilize network effects, and most tech products incorporate them, whether they’re messaging apps, workplace collaboration tools, or marketplaces. Network effects provide a path for fledgling products to break through, attracting new users through viral growth and word of mouth. Yet most entrepreneurs lack the vocabulary and context to describe them—much less understand the fundamental principles that drive the effect. What exactly are network effects? How do teams create and build them into their products? How do products compete in a market where every player has them? Andrew Chen draws on his experience and on interviews with the CEOs and founding teams of LinkedIn, Twitch, Zoom, Dropbox, Tinder, Uber, Airbnb, and Pinterest to offer unique insights in answering these questions. Chen also provides practical frameworks and principles that can be applied across products and industries. The Cold Start Problem reveals what makes winning networks thrive, why some startups fail to successfully scale, and, most crucially, why products that create and compete using the network effect are vitally important today.

Turn Ideas Into Products

Turn Ideas Into Products PDF

Author: Steve Johnson

Publisher:

Published: 2017-04-02

Total Pages: 143

ISBN-13: 9781520728544

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We've all heard stories of amazing product successes: the brilliant college kid who started a business in his dorm room; the team who built a business from the back of a napkin with just a few friends and sold it for millions. Yet for every amazing success story, there are thousands of stories of products that went nowhere. Most of us aren't looking at billion-dollar valuations; we're not looking for an exit. Instead we have a few ideas -- some innovative, some not -- and we're trying to determine which to pursue. Likely, you're working for a company today and you need a step-by-step approach to turn ideas, regardless of their source, into businesses. In Turn Ideas into Products, author Steve Johnson introduces a nimble idea-to-market process with strong emphasis on personal experience with customers. From business planning to product launch, this approach for managing products empowers your product team to work smarter and collaborate better with colleagues and customers.

Testing Business Ideas

Testing Business Ideas PDF

Author: David J. Bland

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2019-11-06

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 1119551412

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A practical guide to effective business model testing 7 out of 10 new products fail to deliver on expectations. Testing Business Ideas aims to reverse that statistic. In the tradition of Alex Osterwalder’s global bestseller Business Model Generation, this practical guide contains a library of hands-on techniques for rapidly testing new business ideas. Testing Business Ideas explains how systematically testing business ideas dramatically reduces the risk and increases the likelihood of success for any new venture or business project. It builds on the internationally popular Business Model Canvas and Value Proposition Canvas by integrating Assumptions Mapping and other powerful lean startup-style experiments. Testing Business Ideas uses an engaging 4-color format to: Increase the success of any venture and decrease the risk of wasting time, money, and resources on bad ideas Close the knowledge gap between strategy and experimentation/validation Identify and test your key business assumptions with the Business Model Canvas and Value Proposition Canvas A definitive field guide to business model testing, this book features practical tips for making major decisions that are not based on intuition and guesses. Testing Business Ideas shows leaders how to encourage an experimentation mindset within their organization and make experimentation a continuous, repeatable process.

Generating Product Ideas

Generating Product Ideas PDF

Author: Artiom Dashinsky

Publisher:

Published: 2020-08

Total Pages: 134

ISBN-13:

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Find ideas for your new next business, side hustle, or indie startup. FROM THE AMAZON BEST-SELLING AUTHOR Today every skill for building a product can be learnt online -- coding, design, marketing -- besides one: generating new product ideas. With this book, you will learn 17 actionable techniques for finding ideas to start your next profitable SaaS, physical, digital, services or content business. "The way to get good ideas is to get lots of ideas..." -- Linus Pauling, Nobel Prize laureate What will you learn from this book? Find ideas -- Discover actionable techniques to immediately find problems to build businesses around. Notice opportunities -- Learn the mental models that will help you to start noticing problems in the future and convert them into products later. Find niche markets -- Learn how to define the audiences that you'd enjoy serving and explore opportunities in their niches. Prioritize ideas -- Sort ideas with the biggest potential impact to fit your business and personal goals. What's inside? 17 actionable techniques for finding business problems through scientific research, web search analysis, market trends, your own experience, open data sets, unrelated industries, business model patterns, etc. 60+ examples of product ideas 6 printable PDF canvases for practicing the techniques No upsale, no fluff This book will benefit indie hackers building a bootstrapped business from home, entrepreneurs starting a lifestyle business, full-time employees exploring a side hustle, freelancers diversifying their income, or students looking for ideas for their school projects.

EMPOWERED

EMPOWERED PDF

Author: Marty Cagan

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2020-12-03

Total Pages: 435

ISBN-13: 1119691257

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"Great teams are comprised of ordinary people that are empowered and inspired. They are empowered to solve hard problems in ways their customers love yet work for their business. They are inspired with ideas and techniques for quickly evaluating those ideas to discover solutions that work: they are valuable, usable, feasible and viable. This book is about the idea and reality of "achieving extraordinary results from ordinary people". Empowered is the companion to Inspired. It addresses the other half of the problem of building tech products?how to get the absolute best work from your product teams. However, the book's message applies much more broadly than just to product teams. Inspired was aimed at product managers. Empowered is aimed at all levels of technology-powered organizations: founders and CEO's, leaders of product, technology and design, and the countless product managers, product designers and engineers that comprise the teams. This book will not just inspire companies to empower their employees but will teach them how. This book will help readers achieve the benefits of truly empowered teams"--

Change by Design

Change by Design PDF

Author: Tim Brown

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 2009-09-29

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 0061937746

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In Change by Design, Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, the celebrated innovation and design firm, shows how the techniques and strategies of design belong at every level of business. Change by Design is not a book by designers for designers; this is a book for creative leaders who seek to infuse design thinking into every level of an organization, product, or service to drive new alternatives for business and society.

Lean UX

Lean UX PDF

Author: Jeff Gothelf

Publisher: "O'Reilly Media, Inc."

Published: 2013-03-15

Total Pages: 152

ISBN-13: 1449311652

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User experience (UX) design has traditionally been a deliverables-based practice, with wireframes, site maps, flow diagrams, and mockups. But in today’s web-driven reality, orchestrating the entire design from the get-go no longer works. This hands-on book demonstrates Lean UX, a deeply collaborative and cross-functional process that lets you strip away heavy deliverables in favor of building shared understanding with the rest of the product team. Lean UX is the evolution of product design; refined through the real-world experiences of companies large and small, these practices and principles help you maintain daily, continuous engagement with your teammates, rather than work in isolation. This book shows you how to use Lean UX on your own projects. Get a tactical understanding of Lean UX—and how it changes the way teams work together Frame a vision of the problem you’re solving and focus your team on the right outcomes Bring the designer’s tool kit to the rest of your product team Break down the silos created by job titles and learn to trust your teammates Improve the quality and productivity of your teams, and focus on validated experiences as opposed to deliverables/documents Learn how Lean UX integrates with Agile UX

Transforming an Idea Into a Business with Design Thinking

Transforming an Idea Into a Business with Design Thinking PDF

Author: Muhammad Mashhood Alam

Publisher: CRC Press

Published: 2018-10-30

Total Pages: 161

ISBN-13: 1351266543

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We are living in fascinating times, when the power of technology is not just reshaping, but is transforming the globe in unprecedented ways. These include the ability to connect with anyone across the globe in an instant using a tiny device in the palm of our hands to the availability of self-learning systems to take over, not only the most mundane of tasks, but the most sophisticated tasks previously thought to be performable only by superior human faculties. Regardless of whether you consider this progress to be beneficial to society or harmful, these technological advancements are here to stay. On one hand, these current transformational technological advancements threaten this stability of society. On the other hand, they present an opportunity for all of us to awaken our inner entrepreneurs. This book makes the transition from an employee to an entrepreneur smooth for the masses. Many of us have ideas to improve this world in some way and even feel strongly about some of those ideas at a deeper level. However, we find ourselves perplexed on two levels: 1. Where to start when building an idea into a business? 2. What are the various dimensions and activities needed to launch an idea into a business? This book will introduce you to a structured framework, called Transform3+1, to transform your idea into a business by following simple and specific steps spread across four stages. The framework is grounded in the belief that all solutions solve human problems using technology or otherwise. The first stage will help you understand the problem facing your target user by building empathy. Once you understand the problem, comes the stage of devising a solution in an iterative manner through prototyping the new concept and validating with the user. Most start-ups fail not because they didn’t find the right problem to solve for the target user or that their solution lacked technological prowess but because they could not figure out a sustainable business model. Third stage will focus on crafting a business model. And the final stage introduces you to a unique approach of managing risk associated with your venture. This unique framework leverages the principles of Design Thinking, agile development, and lean start-up combined in an easy to follow manner by anyone and helps transform ideas into business in a short timeframe with little or no investment.

Software Development From A to Z

Software Development From A to Z PDF

Author: Olga Filipova

Publisher: Apress

Published: 2018-10-12

Total Pages: 299

ISBN-13: 1484239458

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Understand the big picture of the software development process. We use software every day – operating systems, applications, document editing programs, home banking – but have you ever wondered who creates software and how it’s created? This book guides you through the entire process, from conception to the finished product with the aid of user-centric design theory and tools. Software Development: From A to Z provides an overview of backend development - from databases to communication protocols including practical programming skills in Java and of frontend development - from HTML and CSS to npm registry and Vue.js framework. You'll review quality assurance engineering, including the theory about different kind of tests and practicing end-to-end testing using Selenium. Dive into the devops world where authors discuss continuous integration and continuous delivery processes along with each topic's associated technologies. You'll then explore insightful product and project management coverage where authors talk about agile, scrum and other processes from their own experience. The topics that are covered do not require a deep knowledge of technology in general; anyone possessing basic computer and programming knowledge will be able to complete all the tasks and fully understand the concepts this book aims at delivering. You'll wear the hat of a project manager, product owner, designer, backend, frontend, QA and devops engineer, and find your favorite role. What You'll Learn Understand the processes and roles involved in the creation of software Organize your ideas when building the concept of a new product Experience the work performed by stakeholders and other departments of expertise, their individual challenges, and how to overcome possible threats Improve the ways stakeholders and departments can work with each otherGain ideas on how to improve communication and processes Who This Book Is For Anyone who is on a team that creates software and is curious to learn more about other stakeholders or departments involved. Those interested in a career change and want to learn about how software gets created. Those who want to build technical startups and wonder what roles might be involved in the process.