Congratulations! You’ve got an idea for a product. You are ready to take action and bring your product to life, or maybe you already have.
But you can’t do it alone. You need a team that believes in and understands your vision to help. You could hire, but money is tight right now, and the talent pool is tricky. In the early stages, you must act quickly. Ry Walker, founder of Astronomer, said it best — “risk taking is reward taking.” As a founder, if you adopt this mindset early on, you’ll have greater chances of success in the long-run.
Bringing your product to life doesn’t require a full in-house team. Hiring an agency is an excellent way to access the skillsets of a full product team without the W-2’s.
Discover why your product may require outside help if you want to quickly go to market, build your “dream house” and fill critical talent gaps.
If you don’t, someone else will.
While you’re struggling to get your product off the ground, someone else is building your future competitor. Timing is critical for success. The longer you delay your product launch, the more likely a competitor is to enter your market and solve the same problem as your product — better and faster. You need to show up better than the rest, now.
Prioritize your go-to-market plan. Tell your story before you build new features. Investors will relate to your story and understand the problem you’re trying to solve.
You’re too close to the product.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the responsibilities you’re facing right now, you’re not alone. Founders are under constant pressure. You’re trying to build, hire and raise all at once and with limited resources.
As a result, your team may be too deep in the product to objectively evaluate with the standards of an investor or user.
Here’s how you can get a fresh perspective:
- Seek out and listen to your naysayers. Confirmation bias, which you’ll find often within your team, is the enemy of product-market fit. You’ll learn more from those questioning your product or product vision than those cheering you on.
- Get outside help. A fractional product team can alleviate the barriers that are preventing you from product development so you can scale faster with limited runway.
Imagine you’re building your dream house. The construction team expects you to know what you’re building. They need blueprints to break ground. And you don’t want the construction team building and designing the house (that would be horrendous). So you need an architect to work with you, understand your vision and develop blueprints for the construction team.
At Innovatemap, we think of ourselves as your product architects. We know how to turn your vision, no matter what stage, into blueprints for your construction team (engineers).
You have critical talent gaps.
You’re bootstrapping, we get it. But for your product to break through the noise, you have to be better than the rest. So you can’t compromise on critical traits of your product (like product design, product marketing, brand or product management) to avoid hiring the right people. It may seem like the right idea now as your resources are limited. But one year from now when you’re raising and you have to convince a team of VC’s why your product is worth their investment, your product needs to be sound.
To fill critical talent gaps:
- Decide which roles you need full-time. As a founder, you’ll need someone that excels where you fall short. If you’re a non-tech founder with a plethora of industry expertise, look for a partner with tech experience. If you’re an engineer that’s really deep in features, find a sales and marketing expert.
- Hire an agency. Filling gaps on your team doesn’t require W-2’s. Hiring an outcome-driven agency gives you:
- Outcome-oriented workflows
- Strategic partnership (a “sounding board” of qualified experts)
- Dedicated space to strategically align with the help of experts to guide the conversation
- Access to more skillsets than what your hiring budget allows. An agency gives you access to product managers, UX designers, product marketers, research experts and brand strategists.
Hiring a digital product agency doesn’t mean knowing exactly what you need or having it all figured out. Actually, it’s quite the opposite. We align on your vision and pair it with our product expertise to create what is most marketable, valuable and usable. We’ll help you build what the market wants and make sure it scales with you.
Find out how we help you define, design and deliver your product to market.
