Kiran Bulusu’s Blog

Q1. Why are you creating the new product?
a) Is it because you see a gap in the current industry offerings and trying to fill in.
b) Or if there is a similar product, you see that your product changes the quality of service or life of your customers. For SW companes, comparing and improving run times is not compelling enough to face competetion. Other tools might catch up. Similarly for HW companies, high clock freq (faster speed) etc cannot be the sole distinguishing feature . Unfortunately, this is not at all a viable business plan/strategy .
c) You are creating a hybrid product or creating a entirely new market space and market is ready for this.

It is very important to realize that your product definition needs to be accomadating in a sense, that customer requirements change over time or a competitor has released a product .

Q2. What is your market segment and who are your customers .
Targeting a wrong customer base is very costly . Did you talk to your customers already ? Do you have any beta customers? Choosing a right beta customer is very important and can affect your product sucess/quality.

Q3. Can you clearly justify why the customer has to pay for the “must have” features ? If not, you need to re-consider your product definetion and features.

Q4. Can you clearly distinguish between “should and must have” features? Many make mistakes here as they dont clearly distinguish between “should” and “must” and so the sales cant focus on the value offering.

Q5. Do you have the roadmap ? Having it helps when a customer would like to see what additional (nice to have) features will be coming in future. When you bootstrap, you already have a customer who pays for your development and so they might have already defined to some degree what will be present in the roadmap.

Q6. How are customers doing without your product? How are they surviving? How is your product going to address their issues?

In general, It is not advisable to proceed unless you have answers for all the above questions.