Marketing a Product - Part 1

Recently I was fortunate enough to be able to participate in a 54hr Hackathon. And we were able to work with experts from the industry. This is a glimpse of what I was able to learn from that Hackathon.

Presenting your idea

When it comes to entrepreneurship, the most important out of all is how you present you idea. You can have a great idea, but if you beat around the bush, while you’re explaining it to potential stakeholders, you can’t be successful. Define your problem and explain him how you address it. Show that you have identified where things can go wrong, by stating the risks. If you creating a presentation, for a 5 minute time, 5-8 slides is enough. Don’t have artwork, where you want to highlight the unique features of the idea. Have them as bullet points. Also you need to defend your idea against the questions from the stakeholder. Promote your branding as much as you can in presentation (have the company logo and product logo in the presentation background. Mention product name often)

Developing your product

There’s no point in having an idea and not implementing. Somebody needs to implement your idea. Either you or, you should outsource it someone. For a quick PoC type implementation,

•  Define use cases 
• Use case will help you to identify the most intuitive screen flow and logic flow
• Identify the key features of the app. Think what a user will do when see first sees the application
• Prioritize the features. Develop the key features first. Don’t get stuck on optimizations. But know about the libraries/tools used for optimization.
• Break down tasks (share the tasks among team members if it’s a team)
• Make sure your app is usable by the targeted audience.
• Don’t develop an English language app for an person in a rural area in Sri Lanka
• Make sure resources you use (3^rd party) are commercially usable. Read terms and agreement
• Think big!!!!
• Think of the scalability of the product. What if your product starts to grow and your 3^rd party tools are not. It’s going to be a painful thing to overcome.