The Disruptware Podcast: Online business | Lean startup | Internet Entrepreneur

How to design // Video Transcript: Paul: Hi, it’s Paul Clifford from Disruptware. In today’s session what we’re going to talk about is how to create a design. It’s the most common question, “How do I get that idea out of my head and into the head of my developer or my technical team?” The key things to understand here is that the more time you spend in this process then the less cost your overall project will be. I know in a way that makes sense, but literally if you spend more time in the design process, just yourself mapping it out, then you’ll spend less money on your development, your communication, your changes, your bug fixing, your testing, everything like that because you would have thought through a lot of issues that your developers will come back with and a lot of issues and bugs and things would already be taken care of. It’s really worth investing some time in this process. 3 Things You Need to Know: Persona (user, client, administrator) Wireframe (picture of what's on screen) Use case or use story (interaction) There’s three essential things you need to know. First of all, define what’s called a Persona. A Persona is basically a description of your user. So what type of users are you going to have for your system, are they just going to be administrators, clients...what are their roles and rights? What interaction will they have? Will they have access to everything? Will you limit them? Will you have different license restrictions around certain people? Will you have power users in the system? You just need to define what type of users you have and their called Personas. The second thing then is you need to Wireframe. A Wireframe is essentially a picture of the screen. You could just draw that out on paper to start with or even a white board - I use this a lot. You just map out and draw on screen what it’s going to look like. Draw your forms, your labels, your buttons, lists, all that sort of stuff. Draw it out on screen and make sure it’s logical. It makes sense. Once you’ve done that process then transfer it to a wireframing tool. A wireframing tool is a tool that is a bit of a design tool, but has a lot of the widgets all built-in. The thing is if you want a button you can just drag a button in, if you want a list, you just drag a list in and basically enables you to build the screen really, really quickly. With these tools what you can also do is link screens together. If you build a wire screen of your login screen then you can link login buttons for example to the next screen within your wireframe. So the whole wireframe starts to become alive. When you go through this whole process then you’ll start to really understand how your application can work and you could even then at that stage take it to someone and show them and communicate it really easily. You can even take it to a customer and get their feedback to make sure you’re actually building an application that is actually going to sell. The third thing you need to know is Use Cases or User Stories as their more commonly used within the leading start-up world. Basically, what all this is describing is the interaction between your users, or your personas, and the screens. So behind every button, behind a list, behind any action that you want a user to take you just need to write a couple of sentences on what result when the person clicks on that what’s the result in terms of the users eyes. Basically that’s it, your three factors. You’ve got your Personas, your Wireframe and your User Stories and when you put those together and map that out on your wireframing tool then you really start to get a design that makes sense not only to your technical team, but also to you because remember the more time and the more effort you put into this whole process then the less cost and the less risk your whole project will be at the end. I hope you found that useful. This is Paul Clifford from Disruptware.  

How Do You Know If Your Business Model Will Work? // Video Transcript: Paul: Hi, it's Paul Clifford from Disruptware and today I want to talk about your business model. How do you know that what you're building or your idea is actually going to sell? Okay, and it's the crucial thing that you should be looking at right from the start and I'm sure you are, but how do you actually know? What sort of questions can you be asking yourself and your prospects to understand whether anyone's actually going to buy your solution. Well first of all, the core things you need to know are; does it save time, does it make money or does it replace an existing process. If it saves time then what's the value of that time? Because if the value of that time is not really big, then it's still not enough for them to actually buy it. So think about are you selling to a lawyer or are you selling to a school, okay? So think about the value of the time, whether it's enough for them to actually put a hand in their pocket and buy your solution. If it's solving a real problem, how much of a pain is that problem to them? How much does it really stand in their way of their doing their everyday job and how can your solution actually solve that pain? Then look at some more general factors, is it a trending market? Is it growing? Are there a lot of people in the market and a lot of customers? Are there enough customers out there who are willing to buy your product? How large is it? Does it scale across different boundaries, different countries? Is it global or is it just in one region? Unlike a traditional business, a software SaaS business you don't have to worry about the supply so much. So traditionally when you're asking yourself these questions one of the questions you should also ask is do you have enough capacity to deliver? Well in this case that doesn't really matter so much because being an on-liner, you can scale to thousands of thousands of customers and by the time you actually want to or need to increase your server capacity, well that's a good problem to have. Look at your business and try and identify the key factors, is it solving the customers problem. This is something that 'The Lean Startup' which is a great book by Eric Ries talks about. And he talks about how quickly can you get your product out to market. And even before it becomes a finer product, can you take like a prototype or something you know just... even a manual process to a customer and try and identify whether it's enough for them to actually commit money to. Get his book. It goes into a whole load of different paradigms and methodologies, but it's essential reading for anyone building a SaaS model and essentially it's all about getting what's called your minimum viable product out and tested in front of a customer as soon as possible so that you can validate from them whether the thing is going to sell. I hope you find that useful, this is Paul Clifford from Disruptware.   Recommended Resource: 1. The Lean Startup - http://www.amazon.com/  

How To ReInvent A Better Wheel   // Video Transcript: Paul: Hi, it’s Paul Clifford from Disruptware and I want to talk about reinventing the wheel, or reinventing a better wheel. The fact is a lot of people might have an idea and they want to go out and create an app, but they’re put off by the fact that someone else might have done it. So in other words, they haven’t got the ground breaking idea that no one else has ever had. The reality is that not a lot of people and a lot of businesses ever come to market with something completely groundbreaking, completely new that actually sells. The key things around this is what a lot players and a lot of the most successful companies have done is that what they’ve done is they’ve taken an existing idea, an existing model and simply made it better. Or what they’ve done is taken it to a different market, or had a different approach, or a different delivery mechanism. These are the things that you should be looking at when you’re trying to work out what my new business should be. Stay within your knowledge area, so something that you know something about in terms of the market and model other businesses. Look at other people who are doing similar things  and all you got to do then is work out how can I make this better, how can I take this to a new market, can I take this global, can I take this from the enterprise space to the small to medium business space, can I take it to consumers? All those different things are options and angles which you can take on an existing idea. Never go into a market where there are no competitors, where there is no one there, because chances are that there’s no one buying in that market. Think about all that. Reinvent a better wheel. You won’t be the only person to have done that. If you look at some of the biggest companies out there like Google, like Apple, they’ve all done it. Google wasn’t the first search engine. They just made the existing web search that Yahoo built they just made it much, much better. Look at Apple. Apple didn’t invent the MP3 player, the iPod. The MP3 players were out and about, but Apple went in there and revolutionized that space. Think about all those things. Don’t be the first to market unless you know there’s a market there, and there’s competitors there. When you’re doing all that and factoring it in think about what your exit might be. If you’re going into a market where there’s already a big enterprise player perhaps you can build an app for a small to medium business with an exit in mind to sell it to players in the enterprise space. These are the kind of things you should be thinking of, or should be thinking about. Don’t be afraid to reinvent a better wheel. This is Paul Clifford from Disruptware.  

What is SaaS And Why Is It A Great Business Model // Video Transcript: Paul:  Hi, it’s Paul Clifford from Disruptware, and I want to talk about why the SaaS model is growing in popularity at the moment, and why it’s such a great business to be in. First of all, from the customer perspective, remember that any customer buying into your service recognizes it’s a very low risk. Basically they’ll use it for a month and if they don’t like it they can leave, which means that customer acquisition is a little bit easier then it is to try and get software onto a customer’s desktop. Secondly, remember that there is no installation headaches, so there is no IT to worry about. All they’ve got to do is just log in and they are up and running. Thirdly, they can access it anywhere, so from any country or whatever as long as they have a web browser then they’re taken care of. Because it’s a recurring revenue model then the long term value that customer’s worth quite a lot. You can make the entry price reasonably low to get them in - to get them hooked in. Remember software is a service, which SaaS is basically a rental model. You are renting use of your software to them, where as traditionally  it used to be a perpetual model where they would have to install the software but they would own the license. Where in this case you’re renting it to them and you’re taking care of all the IT for them. Now from a vendor perspective, or from your perspective, why is the SaaS model great? Well, first of all it’s one application you have to maintain and support, so it’s got quite a low overhead. Once it’s developed and built then most of your cost is really on the marketing and getting the customers in, but in terms of the operation it’s a lot easier to support and maintain than a traditional software business. You’re also selling to the end user, the people that are actually using it, and you’re solving their problem directly. You don’t have to get IT involved, or deal with any of the installation headaches, or compatibility with their desktops, or with Windows, or Macs, and all that other stuff. You don’t have to worry about that as long as they can access it and access the web then they’re up and running. Remember the SaaS model is a recurring model and that the subscription model is built in, so all you’ve got to do is focus on growth and get as many customers in as possible using your application as much as possible too. Lastly, it’s all about the valuation, and should you choose to go down a sale route, an exit route then you might be focused purely on how much can I make my company worth at the end. Valuations are directly related to growth. If you look at all the IPOs, trade sales, anything like that and look at the valuations they’ve achieved it’s a direct correlation between the valuation and the growth rate of the company not the profit. It doesn’t matter how profitable your thing is. What really matters is how quickly you can get customers on board and build your revenue as fast as possible. Okay, so I hope you found that useful. This is Paul Clifford from Disruptware.