Of course, you want to bring your product or service to the Fintech market quickly and efficiently. You make every effort to achieve that. But you might also make some grave mistakes.
As a decision maker of a growth startup, you need to make sure your teams do not lose a single month of time-to-market (and the product’s competitive advantage). Nor can you afford to spend extra as your investors count every dollar.
Below, I explain how to do just that and kill your startup. See where you might take the wrong turn and use these prompts to secure long-term success for your product.
The ruined future you might be building now
So, you are laying the foundation for future growth. Let’s travel to the near future and see how your startup will be doing if you make the wrong moves. Here are the highly possible consequences:
Missed opportunities: Lingering in the development phase can leave you trailing behind competitors, too far from catching market opportunities and securing growth. Being late to the game might cost you a substantial portion of your potential customer base.
Monetization challenges: A delayed product launch means a delayed (or missed) chance to monetize your innovation. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of fintechs in each state in the U.S. You know your competitors aren’t sitting there doing nothing, so timely entry can give you a competitive edge and maximize your revenue potential.
Overly long product development can also eat at the capital and investment you already have. You’ll have to pay for the hours your development team will spend on fixes, reengineering, or other work you might have avoided.
Product idea stolen: Seeing someone else capitalize on your unique idea can be heart-wrenching. Delayed development might allow competitors to swoop in and steal your concept, leaving you with the bitter taste of a missed chance.
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The recipe for a disaster
Now you know where your business might be headed. Below are sure ways to end up in stagnation and with an empty budget.
1. A lack of an efficient product development strategy
No one needs a clear and detailed product development strategy from the outset. To kill your product before it’s fully fledged, disregard factors like product complexity, regulatory requirements, and resource availability during the planning phase. Skipping a development strategy is a proven way to leave your team without guidance and ensure a development process interrupted by changing requirements, unforeseen challenges, unclear procedures and workflows, and a mismatch in expectations.
2. Weak focus on efficiency and automation
Your workflow can do without any optimization, trust me. The efficiency you have is just enough, and it’s no use thinking you could squeeze more out of your resources.
As for automation, it’s for amateurs who want to simplify processes wherever possible to accelerate their product's time-to-market. Avoid automation at all costs to spend more time on development, pay extra for manual work, and arrive late for the Fintech innovation release party.
3. Delaying user feedback gathering
Early user feedback is invaluable. It helps you gain insights into users’ preferences and pain points. So, to make sure your product sinks, ask users to share their opinion on your product as late as possible — or don’t do it at all.
4. Choosing speed over quality
This way, you kill two flies with one slap. First, you develop your product fast and then miss all the deadlines trying to fix a myriad of bugs, security vulnerabilities, and user experience inconsistencies. At the same time, you spread your budget thin on all these fixes, which might turn out more costly than you can afford.
5. Hiring onshore developers who lack expertise in Fintech
To stay on the cheap side, startup execs often choose either to hire less experienced talent onshore or to go for more budget-friendly options offshore. But the perfect way to overspend and compromise the quality of your product or service is hiring an onshore team who have hardly ever been around solution development in Fintech.
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Let’s finish on the bright side
I’ve shown you the most common ways to eliminate your product’s chances of success. Missed opportunities, monetization challenges, and the fear of losing ownership of your idea are all real risks from delays and overspending in development. From this article, you now have several ideas for securing your product’s bright future. But there’s more.
Find the rest of the key strategies for growing your startup and making your product shine in our new guide for growth startups. Download it now if you want your business to thrive in the competitive Fintech landscape.