Who cares about product bugs if it sells successfully

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According to venture investor and programmer Leo Polovets, in today's world of Saas, APIs and cloud infrastructure, a well-developed technical component rarely causes a software product to succeed or fail. Modern technology now allows you to develop it very quickly with minimal cost. It would seem that this is exactly what startups need.

According toCB Insights, only 5% of startups burn out due to poor technical implementation. Most failures result from incorrect product positioning, a lack of a competent marketing strategy, poor sales specialists, and an incorrect business model. The presence or absence of highly qualified engineers practically does not play any role, the researchers conclude.

If we turn to the example of the most successful technology startups in the world (Uber, Airbnb, Snapchat, Pinterest and others), we will not see complex software solutions. But the obvious advantage of these companies is a successful business model. Together with active promotion, these services were able to become one of the most popular and expensive startups in the world. But it is unlikely that they hired dozens of engineers to develop the service and prepare it for launch, Polovets doubts.

However, he admits that there are companies with sophisticated technologies that require careful and accurate implementation: SpaceX, Zoox, Rigetti Quantum Computing. But, in his opinion, these exceptions only confirm the rule.

Released funds and resources Polovets proposes to direct to the study of market needs and the selection of a suitable business model. All this, of course, provided that there is a target audience for this product, which is also ready to pay for it.

This leads us to believe that, from a business perspective, software itself is not a product or service.

“A product is not software, not a website, not an application that you have made. A product is a set of properties that you sell to a potential customer. ” Arkady Moreynis cited several examples as an illustration at a lecture in the Technopark:

Example number one. A letter comes from the programmer - he is developing a trading platform where sellers can place their goods: “I am a programmer, I have already completed the project, I have already completed the site, there are only two little things left - tell me how to find buyers and sellers. Everything else has already been done. The project is 95% ready. ” This is just a common mistake. If you don’t know where to get buyers and sellers, you don’t have a product on hand. You have anything on hand, but not a product.

Second example. The same technology or technical component may be a different product, depending on how you apply it. For example, a blender and a meat grinder. We understand that from the point of view of an engineer, this is one and the same thing. What's the difference? There is a certain shredder that rotates on the axis inside the tank, horizontally or vertically, the shredded product can be squeezed out or remain inside the tank. But still, these are two completely different products. They are advertised in different ways, designed for different target audiences. As advantages, completely different properties are put forward. Therefore, what you program or do with your hands and what you sell are exactly two completely different things. You can even sell what is not yet.

However, for several years now, investors have been blaming startups for selling air. In fact, it turns out that the product is not ready, unfinished, has not taken off. With all the modern technological capabilities, not all software can be done quickly, "without noise and dust, without leaving the cash desk."

John Evans of HappyFunCorp draws attention to the quality problem of Startup Software Quality Problem. Many projects are developed under the flag of Minimum Viable Product (MVP), which often creates more problems for startups than benefits.



“MVP (minimally viable product) is the simplest working prototype of a product that tests demand before full-scale development. This approach insures the entrepreneur from the lack of demand for the final product and the loss of resources spent on the development. " (Entrepreneur Dictionary: MVP | Rusbase).

The fact is that after launch, startups want to quickly finalize the software, fix problems that arose during its use and take into account the wishes of users. Sometimes entrepreneurs make a decision about pivot. In this case, the software product faces more serious changes.

But be that as it may, the developers soon realize that the software made in haste needs serious processing, and sometimes is generally not suitable for further development and maintenance. In such cases, the best solution would be to rewrite everything from scratch.



Evans explains this with poorly thought out architecture and no less mediocre implementation. The software product is studded with bugs that are also difficult to reproduce. As a result, developers have to spend many times more time than they planned.

Often in this situation, they try to work harder to finish corrections faster, but because of this they make even more mistakes. Out of this vicious circle, only luck will get out. At the same time, time passes, and demand begins to fall. This leads to a drop in sales and, worst of all, to a drop in investor interest.

At the same time, Evans admits that MVP should not be perfect and well “combed”. However, a balance must be struck between the desire to launch the product on the market earlier and the creation of sustainable demand for the product. This will give you the opportunity to buy time for processing software. Otherwise, the project will not be able to compete with teams that work better, faster, or have more money.

However, entering an empty market, startups for the time being may not worry about the speed of product development. Taking advantage of the position of the discoverer, it is easier to achieve commercial success.

Unfortunately, not all entrepreneurs think about confirming that their idea solves such problems that are important for people, and they will want to pay for it. So, an entrepreneur can ultimately settle on an idea whose viability is confirmed by inaccurate user comments or prejudiced opinions of the creators.

If the project idea is really worthwhile, then competitors will certainly appear. And perhaps large companies will join the game. It’s pointless to compete with the latter on the marketing field, because usually from an opportunity in this regard, it is obviously much wider. Then the speed and flexibility of development, as well as the uniqueness or complexity of the technology itself, which underlies the product, comes to the fore.

Many startups like to call their products and technologies unique. If you rely on the technical component, these statements will be not just an advertising move.

Evans agrees that quality software does not guarantee commercial success. The role of this factor may vary from project to project. However, the higher the quality of the software, the higher the development speed of the project.



Another example from Arkady Moreynis is the situation when the role of software is secondary:

One American company had the idea that they would sell people sets of ingredients and recipes right away for cooking for a week. That is, people can order a menu once a week, receive sliced ​​products with the courier and cook a week from this. Where would the average boob in a startup start? From a simple: he would program a site with a selection of recipes for the parameters. And what did the authors of the idea do?

They went to the nearest supermarket and began to catch aunts. That is, they literally approached the aunts who went to buy this supermarket and said: "We have a service - for $ 9.95 a week we can bring you food and recipes for a whole week of cooking."
They found the first aunt who agreed to pay them $ 9.95. After that, they again did not run to program. They began to pick up recipes, buy goods, cut, lay out in bags and every week bring all this to aunt and listen to all the feedback from her last week from her. And get your legit $ 9.95.

In parallel, they molested other aunts. They started to make some kind of service out of it only at the moment when they stopped dealing with the flow of aunts. They realized that they had groped a topic, and people need it. This is one of the examples when you can and should start, without completely making the product.

Netflix example

Start with the product as a service - from that started its activities Netfix.

Netflix was born in California, its founders were two men: Reed Hastings and Mark Randolph. Hastings had to pay a huge forfeit for the late return of the movie he rented. It was then that he came up with the idea to create a service that will allow you to order movies by e-mail without penalties for delays with their return.

Immediately after that, they began to rent their friends a collection of their films - that was how Netfix was born. This may seem obvious, but if you ask most entrepreneurs how they would start their own Netflix today, you will get very detailed technological answers.

For a startup, it’s vital to create a product that people really need. As already mentioned, a product is not only software. But if a startup is built around some kind of software, then even with initially high demand, the project may come to naught due to software problems.