Software Developer's Guide for Early-Stage Startups

In the early stages of a software company, as I mentioned in the Founder’s Priorities guide, the goal is to fail fast and fail forward.

In business, there is a choice between speed, quality, and price.

Startups have to move fast, especially early on, and there isn’t an unlimited budget. So naturally, quality is going to suffer.

In the beginning, since the company’s priority is speed and cost effectiveness, as a developer, you have to make decisions on how to deliver the product to users in a way that works well enough to solve their problem and get accurate feedback for the stage of development you’re in.

There are 3 main stages of product development.

I’ll be going through each of these stages to provide helpful tips for both non-technical founders and developers to keep in mind.

Initially, you’re building for short term effectiveness rather than long-term scaleability and quality which is most evident in Stage 1: Prototyping.

Your goal in this stage is to build a demo to put in front of users as fast as possible.

For my software, I built a basic front-end in Webflow, connecting the Webflow CMS to Notion with Whalesync to use Notion as a backend. It took me 2 days and was enough to not only demo but be used and paid for by my first customer.

Speed beats polish.

Your only job is to create something good enough to start conversations.

After the prototype has validated interest from potential customers, it’s time to build something users can actually use.

For my first product, it took me about 8 weeks to finish the MVP. It was my first time building front-end and back-end functionality, so progress was slow, but I wanted to learn.

With my development skills today, I’d be able to finish it in a week and with greater quality. This is why having an experienced developer is so important.

After it was complete, I transitioned Aebly Studio over from using the prototype to using the MVP and had a paying user day 1.

Now that the MVP is live, the real work begins.

Startups move quickly. Your job as a developer is to match that speed with small shortcuts, user empathy, and relentless iteration.

This wraps up our third guide following the prioritization manifesto. Our hope is that now you have a better understanding of how to properly think through what to prioritize in the early stages of building a software.