8 Questions every founder must ask oneself
If you are a founder of a startup or a fairly established tech company, you need to ask yourself the following questions:
1. Are you satisfied with the speed at which the features and functionality are rolled out in production and in the hands of your customers/prospects?
2. Do you believe you have selected the right tech stack to support your customer base now and in the next 2-5 years?
3. Can your team make changes to the apps and deploy them frequently?
4. Are you happy with User Experience (UX), design, performance, and code quality?
5. With the number of changes and the evolution, is your app code easily maintainable?
6. Are the apps you have today aligned with what you envisaged initially?
7. Do you think the security measures taken are adequate and minimize the risks of your Business coming to a standstill?
…and most importantly,
8. How quickly do you realize that your path needs a fundamental change? Will such a change break you instead of making you? How can your tech partner salvage and reuse or minimize the cost of rework and allow you a lease of life to fulfill your vision?
Founders need to spread more thin, resulting in a lack of focus on business!: As founders of tech companies, we have faced these challenges in the past and have realized how painful it is to deal with the situation when you are entirely torn between trying to build a Business around innovative idea(s), winning customers, building the team, organizing infrastructure, managing cash flows and raise funding on one hand and on the other, developing and managing your product and continuously evolve it. Innovation and quality invariably take the beating in trying to juggle on these fronts simultaneously. You can only imagine the stresses the founders are subjected to when you experience it. We will never forget our sleepless nights trying to walk the tightrope. The key here is to carry out a quick health check of your products and the tech stack. With many years of experience knowing exactly what works and what does not, D10X experts can quickly pinpoint the risks and will provide you the mitigation steps.
Ability to re-invent quickly: The process of startup success is not mainly just incremental changes on what you build initially and embark on a journey. At some point (in most cases, many times), there is a realization that returning to the drawing board is essential. A new road must be undertaken from the core application or product perspective.
After speaking to many founders, we realized the above two aspects are responsible for why 95% of tech startups fail. Hence, the key question we contemplated is, what can make the founder’s life a little easier and dramatically improve the venture’s chances of success? This gave birth to Discovery10X (D10X)! – the company driven by the purpose of helping the startup founders manage their tech solutions, bringing their ideas to reality in the quickest and ‘Agile’ way – implemented most sensibly.
The fundamental principle here is to fail fast so you can improve on it quickly. The cost of fixing any bug increases exponentially as it lives longer in the system.
It is, therefore, time that you reflect on these 8 questions. If you are still determining the above, do not wait any longer because who knows? You could be sitting on a time bomb!
So, how do we address the risks?
As part of our Technical Due Diligence service, we audit the following areas (and more):
So don’t let your venture fall in the 95%. Act today, sign up for a Tech Evaluation by D10X, and ensure your product and the venture have a bright tomorrow!