How Early Testing Can Build a Path to Success for Startups
The startup culture is more prevalent now than ever before. Whether you are a seasoned industry player or someone kickstarting your career, people today are more frequently giving serious thought about whether to take the established player route or the startup route. However, raising funds as a startup has become more difficult than ever in recent times.
The angel investors and venture capitalists are cautious about which project they pick and the kinds of information they need before channeling funds in a certain area. One recent study shows that investors are moving toward a trend of wanting to see a physical product to decide on their funding portfolio rather than just betting on an idea.
Testing strategies can help to validate the idea and verify a prototype. It could be as simple as explicitly talking about the idea in public. There is a recent school of thought that you are better off discussing your idea in relevant forums, including at social gatherings, which in one sense is testing your idea rather than holding it in stealth.
This might also open up opportunities for partnerships, expediting your path to reaching the right investors and capitalists. Social media can be leveraged to test and spread your startup idea’s reach. That said, merely talking about your idea is only going to get you so far.
Most startups these days are mobilizing funds, often self-generated to sustain themselves at least for a few months to a year where they can build a prototype that is adequately tested and ready to be demonstrated to investors. The entrepreneur needs to keep in mind that testing for a prototype is quite different from testing for a full-fledged product.
It’s imperative to target areas such as core functionality, the required levels of user interface, performance, and security with the goal of wow-ing the investing group. The investors are not only looking at your technical depth and the unique selling point of the idea but also at your implementation strategies, professionalism in running a project, thought leadership, capabilities of the founding team, and going to market strategy. It is thus important to validate and verify all of these.
It is interesting that in most startups the entrepreneur is executing in a solo operational mode or at the most may have a very small team that is engineering the whole effort. So, they may not have the luxury of an independent test effort, which is OK, but understanding the importance of testing everything right—the idea, the processes, the strategy, and the implementation—is going to be invaluable in getting the required levels of validation and verification.
That validation and verification makes it so much easier to win the investing group’s confidence and trust in you, your idea, and the prototype that you have built. This will go a long way in both getting your required funds and building a strong relationship—and putting you on the path to establishing a successful startup.
