Your product is more than the tech

New founders often misunderstand product development. They equate the website to their product.

A startup’s product is very rarely the technology itself. It’s an entire process for accomplishing something and then optimizing it using tech.

Most of your value is in your processes

They either don’t realize or don’t value the systems and processes that exist outside the software. In Supplybunny, that’d be things like supplier onboarding, or customer service, or advertising.

Supplybunny’s product ultimately isn’t the platform – it’s tail-end sales. The platform is a tool to accomplish that more effectively and efficiently than others.

The real work lies in figuring out what to do, the steps to do it as efficiently as possible, and only then building the tech to make it even more so.

That’s what Do Things That Don’t Scale means, and it is doubly true for marketplaces.

Minimum viable processes

The real work of building a startup, particularly a marketplace, lies in figuring out what to do and in what order, i.e. the process.

That’s what Do Things That Don’t Scale means – first figure out the process manually, and only then automate away as much as possible to scale.

Developing your processes must also follow the familiar principles of building software.

You need to build your processes.

You need to measure your processes.

You need to learn and iterate on your processes.

You need to release updates to your processes early and often.

The intermediate steps of your processes need to be usable.