This business shortcut transforms fear of failure into to-do lists

When I’ve started Serverly, it was hard for me to find a method to validate the product, because I knew we couldn’t just create a small MVP, and launch it on the market. We are talking about software creating other software, thus the simple MVP was definitely not enough. Since the platform was created to be used by the developers, I needed a company that, besides the validation process, had an entire Software Department, so that they could really understand my product’s needs.

Serverly is a platform as a service where ‘devs’ can create complex, robust, and scalable APIs. Mainly, Serverly lets the developers build APIs on top of a relational database while using our web interface. The developers can configure a storage system, authentication and authorization, multiple environments, custom endpoints, multi-language, and workflows. Moreover, Serverly exposes a fully customizable dashboard where the administrators can manage their data. For now.

But before the validation process, I had multiple fears and challenges that needed to be solved. I knew how the developers are, as I’ve been one myself. It was clear to me that a product that will be used by the developers needs to be as close to perfect as possible. There goes one of my initial main fears creating this product.

Challenge developer ideas through multivalent expertise

One of the challenges that we needed to solve was convincing developers to adopt Serverly in their technology stack. I know how grumpy the developers can sometimes get when it comes to integrating something new. We also needed a quick way for them to realize the main advantages of using Serverly: reliable deployment, fast implementation, and ease of configuration. 

Nurture courage as a product of the validation process

At the beginning of the validation process, I admit I was skeptical about the Sprint concept. That's because I knew the complexity of the project, and five days seemed like too little time. But, by the time the first half of the first day was over, we had received so much feedback from the team that a lot of questions popped into my mind. 

My first impression was: ‘Wow, I didn’t think about this ’till now’. 

I think the most insightful day was the second one. The second day is when all the experts came together. One step of the process involves writing down the most important features and characteristics of Serverly. I liked the efficiency of a voting procedure that could highlight the most important feature for each member, including myself. 

The team was comprised of six experts from Linnify: 

• two Designers, 
• two Technical Persons, 
• one Marketer, 
• one Facilitator,
• myself and Greg (the other Co-Founder) worked with them the whole week; (I, as CEO of the product, and Greg, as CTO) as Decision Makers

It was really nice to see how other people see our product. 

Four days of validation work later, filled with feature implementation decisions, we finally came to see a real prototype. 

Craft ideas into reality by prototyping 

Linnify’s team created two prototypes: a landing page and a demo web app. 

The landing page’s main purpose was to gain trust from the developers but to also verify how the users convert when meeting the product. The most important part for me was the demo app. As you can imagine, we couldn’t use all the features that we initially wanted in the demo prototype. That’s why the team decided to take a step toward anticipating the demo by creating use-cases. That’s the moment when the developers imagine and verify the multiple features had in mind before creating the demo app - a working system using Serverly.

They created a flow where the developer could choose what type of platform they want to build: a social network, a streaming platform, or e-commerce. Then, the developer had to complete multiple steps, each step representing the main functionality that we wanted to develop. Every step contained only a small part of the functionality, but it was enough for the developer to understand what Serverly can do. 

With this approach, the developers could see much clearly almost all the most important features the Serverly had, and thus understand much quicker what were the main advantages.

Feedback creates the reality of your ideas

When day five came, the feedback was incredible. Linnify’s team did an amazing job with the prototyping. They even hid the navigation bar so that all the developers who had tested the demo app didn’t even realize that they were in the prototype stage. They thought that was an actual application deployed on app.serverly.com. 

I didn’t think that someone could do such a good prototype that even developers could consider it the actual application.

During the interviews, we received a lot of feedback and gained clarity about what functionalities were the most attractive for developers. Thus, we were able to decide what features we needed for our first version of the application. 

Simply put, we got validated and we understood exactly the expert reasoning behind it.

Building a new product and going to market can be challenging, time-consuming, and needs investment. Through such a journey we prepare to make fast decisions and manage risk. Building and launching several products has taught us the relevance of validation ahead of making any major investment. Gathering feedback from the market and users can save effort, resources, and money.Bring your idea to the market now.