Startup development stages

Each startup is a great way to pursue the opportunity. It can turn your life into a strategy game experience where your project is your hero or base that you should develop. You can flourish and succeed or get defeated and fail. This outcome depends on many factors: your strategy, market changes, competitors' activity, etc. It might be great if there is a “save” button that you could hit before each significant step or decision. But the fact of its absence is not the reason not to give it a try and this has been proven multiple times by thousands of successful startup founders all over the world.

Obviously, in order to see the opportunity for the startup, there should be an idea of how to make the existing experience better or propose something totally new to the market and customers. Sometimes the idea may come spontaneously or vice versa: it could be a result of specific market research that leads to realizing what your target niche needs.

Pre-Seed Stage (Idea)

This is the earliest stage of the startup ever. At this stage, it might be just a flash thought you got during a walk and understood how to solve some problem on the market and convert it into an opportunity to build a project for this. It could be something less clear and encouraging, such as a recent article, song on the radio, casual talk, or anything else, that leads you to believe that you can deliver value to the market and even earn on it. Your idea is a seed you are going to grow into a project. In order to get your idea prepared for investments of all kinds (mental, time, physical, financial, etc.) you need to validate its potential first. There are different methodologies of doing market & audience research. Many of them are worth being applied for young projects. It is very good if at the end of this stage a startup founder designs a roadmap with milestones and key points, such as Alpha, Beta Testings, MVP release, Upgrade(s).

Seed Stage

Stage of hard work, active development, and fundamental decisions to make. During this stage engineering for the Main Viable Product is done with all accompanying works. This is the moment when one of the most important decisions needs to be made: select the right contractor for the development of MVP. Another point to consider during this stage: some projects functionality and target audience allow active testing that involves different types of users as alpha/beta-testers, such as relatives, friends, colleagues, or professional QA specialists.

Early Stage

This is the stage of execution and early growth. A startup has an established repeatable sales model and the go-to-market strategy is ready, so it’s time to rock’n’roll and gain some production experience. First users, new feedback, first bugs, learning, improving steps, and many other exciting things send your ‘player into a substitution in a derby match against biggest rivals for the first time ever.

Release relation explained:
Depending on numerous factors the first public release can take place during the Seed or Early stages.

Growth Stage

The next period is a long-term test drive for the project. At this stage, the startup founders have to master the scaling of the product and its teams. A good idea would be to pay attention to the statistics of the project and make decisions based on the analytical reports. Modern stats services allow to track an incredible amount of valuable data and act in a way to improve it. This aspect is worth mastering for any startup founder.

Expansion Stage

If all the previous stages have proven to be relatively successful, the stats and calculations look promising and the project is gaining demand, it is ready for market expansion. A lot of interesting meetings to attend, decisions to make, tons of details to consider, but the most important thing is that the ‘yacht’ keeps sailing, growing, and expanding. A perfect time to discover new markets!

Maturity stage

This stage of the startup project is very often mentioned in relation to the founder’s exit from the project. There are at least 2 reasons for that: it is the best time to sell your part of the project; the modern world is changing so quickly, that exit could often be the only way to earn something on the project that is going to its dawn. Besides the exit opportunity, there are a lot of software projects that keep existing and showing good revenues.

In a conclusion, it would be reasonable to mention that each startup is unique and some well-known theoretical aspects may work in a different way or not work at all. A good way is to consider these stages as a high-level road map for your project and refer to them to build a detailed approach of how your idea will be delivered to the market. Also, it could be handy to understand at which stage your project is if this article’s subject is completely new for you.