Sixteen Ventures was created to help founders of Startup Software companies do two things:
- Reduce the chance of failure
- Improve the chance of success
These two items are very different. Without first eliminating the mistakes that lead to failure early in the process, anything done to focus on success later in the process will ultimately be met with failure.
You can look at the first item, reducing the chances of failure, as building a building with bricks rather than a deck of cards. No matter how sturdy the building looks on the outside, if its foundation is paper thin, failure is not a matter of "if" but "when."
The main thing to remember is that your product must add value. If you cannot explain what value your product adds and to whom, you should really figure that out before you move any further. Once you know who and why, the next items to figure out are what and how... in other words, what will those users need and how will they buy it. The latter will decide both delivery model (deployed, SaaS, hybrid, etc.) and distribution model (direct, channels, etc.).
Last and certainly not least is the Revenue Model... how will your venture make money? It is critical to have some idea of this when building the product, and it is often only possible to fully extrapolate the revenue points after the vision has been documented and vetted with market representatives. Therefore, skipping the process of detailing the vision (drawing screens, doing workflows, etc.) and moving right to building the product will end up costing you money down the road. This could be a direct cost by having to re-write the software to fit the correct revenue model or it might be indirect through lost revenue from the poorly designed product.
By simply exploring all of those options prior to building a product and "going to market" the chances of failure have been greatly reduced. There are no guarantees on the upside; even if you do everything possible to reduce the chance of failure, the venture still might not succeed. However, it is possible to eliminate mistakes that have certain failure written all over them.
Now it is time to build on that foundation and seek out Success Strategies for step two.