Introduction

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“I heard you’ve got a new business, congrats! What’s it called?”

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This happens to almost any new business owner as people are curious to hear about the brand name after hearing about what your business does.

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Whenever someone asks you about the name of your new business, a cool and out of the box name can make a lasting impression. Additionally, coming up with a brand name is one of the most important decisions for a founder. That’s not all, the brand name also helps guide the company’s promotion and branding strategy.

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Here are some qualities that should be in a brand name:

• Catchy, to grab attention instantly
• Memorable, Easy to remember
• Short, shorter names are easy to pronounce and remember.
• A minor reflection of your products or services (optional)
• Most importantly, Unique

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These qualities make a good impact as always and should be followed whenever someone is starting a new venture.

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That might be hectic for a while as it takes some steps and brainstorming and if you’re already filled with a lot of other stuff in your brain then maybe the moment you’re planning with brainstorming, your brain is at rest mode. So, let’s make a churn and burn, easy way to come up with a great, catchy, memorable & short brand name.

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Because coming up with a solid brand name is difficult when you have tons of other things to get done, here is a step-by-step process to coming up with a product or brand name that leaves a lasting impression on your customers.

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Before that, if you’re into a new business, best of luck from our team!

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Table of Contents

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• Introduction
• How to Come Up With Unique Business Name Ideas?
• Scenario / Example:
• Important Notice:
• Synonyms – Related Words
• Acronym
• Mashup
• Misspell
• Symbol (+ Word)
• Removing/Adding extra letters
• Words from Dictionary
• Relevant-Relatives words Combination
• Hybrid – Half Business Related Word + Half General Word
• Repeat First few Letters in Inverse
• Prefix and Suffix
• Other Methods:
• Here are the Names We Got Using Above Methods:
• How Well Known Companies come up with a Brand Name?
• Tools to Auto-Generate Name Ideas
• Wrapping up

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How to Come Up With Unique Business Name Ideas?

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There are going to be a few methods and ways with tools that can help in this case.

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Scenario / Example:

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Let’s consider two businesses – a mobile app development services company, and socks manufacturing business. Let’s walk through one process to come up with business name ideas both of these businesses.

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Important Notice:

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I will restrict myself to a few terms that I will select to go along with, to make things simple and get the point across. However, I suggest you select at least 10 terms or words that reflect and define your business and its value proposition for a good result.

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I will attempt to make names based on my selected words and terms only, instead of moving in a random direction. Once you have a list of brand name ideas, then you can play around and creatively find one what works best.

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And last but not least, I will be only giving a few brand names as an example to each method whereas there can be many. Hope it goes well. Let’s get started!

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Synonyms – Related Words

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How does it work?

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Here we find synonyms for the business, but what word should we use as a starting point?

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Let’s define words or terms that are very relevant to the two businesses.

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Application & Development

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and

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Socks & Feet

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These are my starting terms and words. Let’s look for synonyms related to these terms. You can google ”application or development synonyms” or go to Thesaurus.com, paste the word and see if you get something useful.

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With a quick search on Google, here are some words that I found and make sense to me:

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• Evolution (Development)

• Buildup (Development)
• Headway (Development)
• Praxis (Application)

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and

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• Hosiery (socks)
• Anklet (socks)
• Heel (socks)

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I can combine my original and synonym words from here to come up with the first layer of ideas.

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Service:

• Praxis
• Headway
• PraxisHeadway
• AppEvolution
• AppBuildup

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Product:

• HosierySocks
• AnkleSock
• SocksFeet
• SocksHeel
• FeetHeel

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Acronym

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How does it work?

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Suppose we want to explore acronym of our terms that define our businesses, the Mobile App Development Services Company and the American Socks Manufacturing Company. You can come up with any words that describe what your business does. Or, you could use other inspirations like names, locations, etc.

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Service:

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• MADCAS – Mobile App Development Company and Services
• CAD – Company of App Development

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Product:

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• SMC – Socks Manufacturing Company.
• ASMC – American Socks Manufacturing Company

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‍Real Life Examples:

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• IKEA
• DKNY
• AOL
• BBC

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Easy, right?

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Mashup

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How does it work?

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This is also easy as straightforward, all you need are two words that capture the essence of your company, and mix them, wholly or half. I have App Development and Socks for Winter.

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Service:

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• Develapp
• AppDev
• AppD
• DApp

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Product:

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• Sowin’
• Socker
• Wiso
• WintS
• WinSocks

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Real Life Examples:

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• Compaq
• Groupon

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Misspell

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How does it work?

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We make a list of terms relevant to our company and add an artistic misspelling. A downside is that people used to consider this a spelling mistake, but with Foundr, Quora, Flickr and others, trends are now changing. Misspelling within limits and to some extent might help make a generic word memorable. Let’s go with App Development and Socks for Winter and see what we come up with.

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Service:

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• AppDew
• Develup
• Aqp
• Appy
• AppDo
• UppDev

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Product:

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• Sockr
• Wintr
• Socka
• Sockz

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eal Life Examples:

• Flickr
• Foundr
• Tumblr
• Reddit

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Symbol (+ Word)

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How does it work?

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There are hundreds of symbols and not just in mathematics alone; symbols can be found in different fields and subjects. You can simply google symbols lists with names or something like that, and you will get many. I liked a few so mentioning them below. Same as above, we’ve got the same words relevant to the business terms.

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Service:

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• DeltaMobi
• DevArc
• AppPhi

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Product:

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• NablaPhi
• SocksLine
• SocksRay

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Removing/Adding extra letters

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How does it work?

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Again, we know our words and what we have to do is add or remove any extra letter from our words. It somehow resembles the above method of misspell but a slight difference is, in removing and adding additional letter should not make a name with the feeling that it is misspelled, but a letter is added or removed, in simple words we’re not allowed to give wrong spelling to the exact words but we can remove or add letters. Our terms here are Mobile Application Development Company and Winter Socks Manufacturing Company.

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Service:

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• Appa (A is added)
• Mobileapp (lication is removed)
• Mobilee (E is added)

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Product:

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• SocksMan ( ufacturing is removed)
• Cosocks (mpany is removed)
• Manco (ufacturing is removed, C and O from company are added)
• Wocks (W is added from Winter and S is removed from socks)
• WinTocks (ter is removed from winter and S from socks)

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Words from Dictionary

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How does it work?

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We just need to read a lot of words from the dictionary and see if we can come up with any name for our business. There are a lot of words there and we have to select a word that slightly relevant or reflect our company. I’m only choosing words starting from B, C and D. Here the words will be general and not moving around our selected words but as I’m strictly bond to show examples around our chosen words, so I am listing both versions. But I will prefer to go with general words without using selected terms.

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Service:

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• Devbawbee / Bawbee (Scottish a coin of low value)
• BingleDev / Bingle (Austral. informal a collision)
• AppEdge / Bleeding Edge (the very forefront of technological development)
• DevColporteur / Colporteur (a person who peddles books, newspapers, or other writings, especially bibles and religious tracts)

Product:

• ConcinnitySocks / Concinnity (elegance or neatness of literary or artistic style)
• CouthySocks / Couthy (Scottish (of a person) warm and friendly; (of a place) cosy and comfortable)
• CrottleSocks / Crottle ( a lichen used in Scotland to make a brownish dye for wool)
• CudbearSocks / Cudbear (a purple or violet powder used for dyeing, made from lichen)
• DeasilSocks / Deasil (clockwise or in the direction of the sun’s course)

Real Life Examples:

• Apple
• Twitter
• Majestic
• Canon

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Relevant-Relatives words Combination

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How does it work?

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Our business is about Mobile App Dev and Socks for Winter, so who develop an app? Developer,  What it relates to? Tech, What it does? Run on Mobile and why we use socks? To stay warm, What it is made up of? Thread, Who wears it? Human, When we wear it? In winter.

Service:

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• TechRun
• RunTech
• MobDev
• DevRun

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Product:

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• WarmThread
• WinterHuman
• WarmWinter
• WinterWarm
• WinterThread

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Hybrid – Half Business Related Word + Half General Word

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How does it work?

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Alright, this is a straightforward way because what you need is one word relevant to your business and one general word. I personally use adjectives or a noun as a general word but you can try anything. My two business-related words are App and Socks and let me add general words with them to see how it comes up.

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Service:

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• AppDream
• AppJunction
• AppLope
• AppDash
• AppWin
• AppGo
• AppZone
• AppShed

Product:

• SocksDude
• DeepSocks
• SocksGenie
• SockLevel
• SocksTouch
• SocksMine

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Real Life Examples:

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• PayPal (pal means friend)
• GoDaddy
• IPhone

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Repeat First few Letters in Inverse

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How does it work?

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In this method, we’ll select the first two or three letters of our defined terms and then add those first letters with our selected first letters but in inverse format. Our words are Application, Development, Socks and Winter. Now, let’s try this.

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Service:

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• AppA (Ap are first two words and added in inverse from right to left)
• DevveD (Dev are first three letters and added in inverse from right to left)

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Product:

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• SooS (So are first two letters)
• Soccos (Socs are first three letters)
• Winniw (Win are first three letters)

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‍Real Life Examples:

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• OPPO

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Prefix and Suffix

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‍How does it work?

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This is also a very simple method which involves prefix and suffix. Come up with words and find prefix and suffix list then try adding into your selected words and see what sounds better. Let’s do it with App and Socks.

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Service:

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• Appify (-ify is suffix)
• Appism (-ism is suffix)
• UnApp (-un is prefix)
• TransApp (trans- is prefix)

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Product:

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• Socksly (-ly is suffix)
• Sockistic (-istic is suffix)
• Insocks (in- is prefix)
• UltraSocks (ultra- is prefix)

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Real Life Examples:

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• Weebly
• Grammarly

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Other Methods:

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• Ask employees, friends & relatives for a name suggestion
• Look for a place name on the map as Amazon, Adobe and Fuji did.
• Use your name, your kids, or your loved one’s name as Danone and Mercedes did.
• Use the most important memory by describing it in a single word
• Use what you believe by describing it in a single word
• Look for historical or mythical places, character names or objects and use them as your brand name as Asus, Nike, and Starbucks did.

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Here are the Names We Got Using Above Methods:

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Now I have a long list of name ideas and hopefully, I can select one I like from them. While I did not mix up any two methods and used only the defined terms, you’re free to mix and match different methods at once and play around with multiple terms. Let’s see once more what we’ve got so far.

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Service:

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• Praxis
• Headway
• PraxisHeadway
• AppEvolution
• AppBuildup
• MADCAS
• CAD
• AppDevel
• AppDeve
• AppD
• DApp
• AppDew
• AppDem
• Appo
• Appy
• AppoDo
• AppDo
• AppDi
• UppDev
• DeltaMobi
• DevArc
• AppPhi
• Appobile
• Pobile
• Appa
• Appile
• Mobileap
• Bileap
• Mobilee
• Devbawbee / Bawbee
• BingleDev / Bingle
• AppEdge / Bleeding Edge
• DevColporteur / Colporteur
• TechRun
• RunTech
• MobDev
• DevRun
• AppDream
• AppJunction
• AppLope
• AppDash
• AppWin
• AppGo
• AppZone
• AppShed
• AppA
• DevveD
• Appyfy
• Appism
• UnApp
• TransApp

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Product:

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• HosierySocks
• Sockankle
• SocksFeet
• SocksHeel
• FeetHeel
• SMC
• SMAC
• SoWin
• SockWi
• Wiso
• WintS
• WinSoc
• Sooks
• Soocks
• Sockr
• Sycks
• Wintr
• Socka
• Socky
• NablaPhi
• SocksLine
• SocksRay
• SocksMan
• Cosocks
• Macu
• Wocks
• WinTocks
• ConcinnitySocks / Concinnity
• CouthySocks / Couthy
• CrottleSocks / Crottle
• CudbearSocks / Cudbear
• DeasilSocks / Deasil
• WarmThread
• WinterHuman
• WarmWinter
• WinterWarm
• WinterThread
• SocksDude
• SocksDeep
• SocksGenie
• SockLevel
• SocksTouch
• SocksMine
• SooS
• Soccos
• Winniw
• Socksly
• Sockistic
• Insocks
• UltraSocks

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How Well Known Companies come up with a Brand Name?

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• ASUS (from the mythical winged horse Pegasus)
• Nike (the goddess of Victory).
• Samsonite (from the Bible character Samson)
• Starbucks (from Starbuck, the young chief mate of the Pequod, in Moby Dick)
• Audi (the Latin translation of the German name “Horch”)
• Altavista (Spanish for “high view”)
• Daewoo (“great house” in Korean).
• Acer (Latin for “sharp”, “able”)
• Volvo (Latin for “I roll”)
• Cisco from San Francisco, where the company was founded.
• Reebok is an alternate spelling of “rhebok”, an African antelope.
• Quora is a fake plural of the latin quorum (public assembly).
• 7-Eleven, it’s open from seven in the morning to eleven at the night, every day.
• Pixar is a combination of the word pixel and the initials of one of its founders, Alvy Ray Smith
• Mercedes (named after the daughter of one of the founders)
• Danone (named after the founder’s son’s childhood nickname)
• Adobe (after the Adobe Creek, running close to the founder’s house)
• Amazon (named after the largest river in the world, by volume of water)
• Fuji (named after the highest mountain in Japan
• Compaq (from “computer” and “pack”)
• Evernote (from “forever” and “note”)
• Groupon (from “group” and “coupon”)
• Lego (from the Danish “leg godt”, which means to “play well”).
• AOL (America Online)
• BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation)
• BENQ (Bringing Enjoyment and Quality to life)
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Tools to Auto-Generate Name Ideas

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Here is the list of some awesome tools that can help you in auto-generating brand name ideas for your business or startups that you’re going to start or maybe doing for someone else who asked you for the favor in suggesting him/her the name.

That’s fair enough, here the task is same to come up with some words relevant to your business and copy-paste words one by one and hit search option in the following tools below to see the magic.

1. NameMesh.com
2. LeanDomainSearch.com
3. Shopify’s business name generator
4. Namelix.com
5. Oberlo’s business name generator
6. Wordoid.com
7. Dotomator.com
8. NameStation.com
9. DomainHole.com
10. Bustaname.com
11. Domainr.com
12. Impossibility.org

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Wrapping up

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See, That’s easy to do so. You’ve just got an idea of how to do the brainstorming thing to generate some cool names. But what it will make the best part? If you use your creativity and I’m sure you’re more creative than me (wink wink).

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I’m just hoping that you’re at the stage where you are no more worried about business name ideas and how to come up with a cool brand name. Get it like mud in hands and avoid sands. Hope it helps and you’ve enjoyed the guide throughout.

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Know a friend who’s looking for a brand name idea for his startup or business? Share with them and also let us know in the comments section which two names from service and product you like the most and share your thoughts and feedback.

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Happy, Happy Business 🙂

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Introduction

LinkedIn now has over 310 million professionals using the platform every month.

This ever-expanding audience is something no growing startup can afford to miss out on, and building a solid LinkedIn presence should be on the to-do list of every startup founder.

However, LinkedIn is now a complex ecosystem that takes time to navigate – posts, articles, groups, LinkedIn Pulse, connections, messages, company pages, the list of things to keep track of keeps growing. Where should you start and how should you prioritize? This is the same question that we faced at AppRocket.

Research shows that the number of followers of a page directly increase the brand trust, brand attitude and brand purchase propensity, so we realized that it would be important to ‘seed’ the number of followers of our LinkedIn company page before other users would start considering it as a serious contender for startup services.

As a result of the simple hack that we did to gain approximately 400 followers for our company page within two days, we have now seen a gradual but steady increase in the number of followers of our company page.

Summary: Invite people from your personal connections to follow your company.

Step 1: Build a network on LinkedIn

This is fairly obvious and a critical first step. Push everyone in your company to build a strong LinkedIn profile and build a network of connections.
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You can add approximately 50-100 connections per day before LinkedIn will start rate-limiting your requests, so use your available bandwidth to expand your network.

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Connect with colleagues from school, university, your workplace and past employers, as well as friends of friends and family. We started off with roughly 1800 connections, but if you have a 5-people team you can easily cross that number within a week.

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Step 2: Identify what you’ll say

To reach out to your network, you should ensure that you are not spamming them and keep a professional approach.

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Follow LinkedIn’s professional community policies or violate them at risk of getting banned altogether from the platform.

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Ideally, your message would get your point across while also providing something in return so as to not be entirely promotional and self-serving. Here’s the message we used:

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"Hi!
Thank you very much for being connected. Can you please follow my company at linkedin.com/company/approcketllc - and I will do likewise.
I would really appreciate your helping my company grow!
Best"

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We offered our network to mutually increase our company’s following, since our network was primarily startup founders and small businesses. If you have worked at a large enterprise or your LinkedIn connections have a different demographic, you should change your messaging accordingly.

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Step 3: Send messages to your network

This is a fairly straightforward but tedious task. In the Network tab, click on the Connections on the left sidebar. This will open up an exhaustive list of all of your connections, sorted by the order in which you added them. Send a message to each of the connections to whom the offer in your message will add value. While this is time-consuming and tedious, it is definitely worth the effort.

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You can look into automating this process, but I would not recommend it. First, because of the obvious violation of LinkedIn’s terms of service, and second, because automation may not be able to bypass anti-spam checks that may be implemented. The whole automation exercise may not be worth the effort and might end up doing more harm than good.

If you’re still insistent, you could use some web scraping tools or macro recorder software like Pulover’s macro creator to get the task done. You have been warned.

Step 4: Watch the followers roll in

Here’s what we experienced within 48 hours of going through this exercise:

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While this is not a standalone growth strategy (it’s more of a one-time hack) and to continue increasing your presence on LinkedIn, you will need to build a consistent content posting and engagement strategy, it’s a great way to quickly add legitimacy to your company and use that initial boost to keep your trajectory growing.

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Since we started this exercise, over the following 2-3 weeks we have seen approximately 100 new followers organically follow our company website. Having sent messages to roughly 800 relevant connections, our conversion rate for this exercise was almost 50%.

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How have you worked on your LinkedIn presence? I’d love to know! Please shoot me a message at qasim@approcket.co or comment below.

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Introduction

You have an idea in mind. You want to build it. What form should it take?

How can you make an app or a product the most intuitive for people to use? Good design is not just intuitive but also memorable – it does not blend into the background, yet using it should come naturally.

Leaving a (good) lasting impression on users is important.

This is the noob’s guide to the product design process. If you have no idea of how to design a product, (but have a fairly good idea of the problem you want to solve) start here.

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Table of Contents

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• Introduction
• Product Design Process – Step by Step Guide
• Initial Conception
• Customer Interviews
• Wireframing and Prototyping of Mock-Ups
• User Testing with Wireframes
• Final UI Designs and High-Fidelity Mockups
• Which Is But to Say…

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Product Design Process – Step by Step Guide

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The entire design exercise, however, should only come secondary to market needs and opportunities. Once you have scoped out your market opportunity, defined user needs, and combined that feedback, you should have a rough idea in mind of what possible forms the final product may take.

Using this as a framework, you should dive deeper into what the product looks like and why. While this document focuses primarily on user-facing software, the core principles can be applied to any generic product.

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Initial Conception

This phase primarily focuses on concretizing user needs and putting down a defined form for the product. Does a website make the most sense? If perhaps the use case is geared towards on-the-go utility then is a mobile app a better fit? These are questions that need to be answered.

Your answer does not have to be absolutely correct at this stage, but it should be a well-thought-out starting point from where to iterate and improve your understanding of what you should build.

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Customer Interviews

It’s always a good idea to do multiple sets of user interviews, and at least two.

With a product in mind (or on a piece of paper), go out and start interviewing people who you think might use your application (your target persona – more on that here).

Make sure that the initial set of interview questions is verifying your product hypothesis and customer need. At this stage, it might be helpful to show customers competitor apps or use other what-if scenarios, to more clearly build the story around your product and help you understand whether you should really build what you’re building.

At AppRocket, we use Google Forms for customer interviews, which allow you to easily view all of your form responses in a spreadsheet.

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Wireframing and Prototyping of Mock-Ups

Based on preliminary interviews with your target user personas, you have a clearer idea of what your customer needs are and what the product should look like.

It’s time to start putting pen to paper and creating a rough prototype of what the app should look like. This is basically a set of screens that show the functionality of your app, and can be made digitally or even drawn with pencil and paper.

Essentially, an initial (or low-fidelity) prototype should focus on the overall structure and flow of the application, in particular:

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• Mapping user flows and journeys
• Navigation
• Page structure and layouts
• Content information and hierarchy

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This should be kept deliberately rough (with all the features & functionality depicted) for quick feedback and rapid iteration.

Easily available wireframing tools like Balsamiq Mockups or Sketch allow you to put together wireframes quickly, and Invision makes the process of sharing your work and getting feedback a lot easier. Many people draw things out on paper with paper prototypes.

However, I personally feel that paper prototypes are very slow and not worth the time and effort people gradually begin investing in paper prototypes.

If you’re working with teammates on this stage, you should be able to answer what is where and why, with findings gleaned from your customer interviews incorporated into the low-fidelity mockup.

I cannot emphasize this enough, the goal once again is to create a rough outline, a low-fidelity mockup of your product that clearly shows what the main user interactions and flows are, and to use this as the basis for creating a high-fidelity design and then the final product.

What Is the Difference Between Wireframe, Mockup and Prototype?

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User Testing with Wireframes

Here, paper prototypes have an advantage over digital prototypes made by e.g. Balsamiq Mockups, but then you can always print your digital prototypes.

The people providing feedback on your product should ideally be the people using it and if that’s not possible, then a small sample set of people from the same demographic.

Put your wireframes into an intuitive and easy-to-use form and share them with your users. Be there when they have a look. Note down the aspects of the product the testers understand, and what they don’t.

Make sure your design and product teams are both present in these sessions if possible, as it will give them food for thought on how to address any shortcomings that come up.

Every user testing session should be focused, with concrete questions you would like to answer. If you are making a food delivery app, does this app help testers seamlessly get food delivered to where they want to? Are the processes happening behind the scenes optimized towards this?

Ask specific, directed questions around different use cases of the app, and observe whether the task is easy or hard e.g.

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• If you were to change your profile picture, how would you do it?
• If you wanted to add a post, what would you have to do?

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And then add follow-on questions built around that particular use case e.g. how to rollback a user action or unlike something you previously liked. Note down:

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• Any points of friction or confusion (“I was expecting do to something else”, or “I don’t know why you’ve done X this way”)
• Any general comments on the UI (“this feature was nice”, or “I couldn’t find this button”)
• Feature requests (“I would really like to also be able to do this”, or “If you could also add this that would be really cool”)

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Now using these findings, it’s your job to determine what feedback is actually worth listening to and what feedback is just noise. At the end of the day, people’s opinions are just their opinions. Incorporate relevant feedback into your wireframes.

Repeat this process until you’ve honed down what you want.

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Final UI Designs and High-Fidelity Mockups

At last, you’re almost there and the final product is within sight. Now it’s over to the designer, to convert the low-fidelity mockups into high-fidelity pixel-precise UI designs. Following standard design patterns here is a double-edged sword – it can lead to brilliance, or crash spectacularly.

A general rule of thumb is to follow accepted norms unless there’s a very strong reason not to. Design patterns are ingrained in most people’s psyche and easy and intuitive to understand.

Material design guidelines, for example, are highly popular and for a reason – they work. Incorporating them into your application immediately brings a familiarity to the product, and helps onboard users easily. Apps that have their own design theme such as the X-plore file manager (which is one of the oldest mobile file managers still running) often have a much steeper on-boarding curve. Something to avoid.

This is approximately the point where high-fidelity wireframes should be made before the final ‘paint’. These are very close to the final design of the product, but still primarily focused on the interactions and user experience. The idea is to depict a user experience as close to the finished product as possible, to iterate on further and improve.

However, these are often time-consuming and may be skipped if the final UI design can be iterated on and brought to perfection.

However, these are often time-consuming and may be skipped if the final UI design can be iterated on and brought to perfection.

Post high-fi wireframes, the design team needs to bring the whole product together with the final splash of color, the animations and interactions, and the icons and artwork, and build the product in final form visually for the development team to bring to life. Final pixel-perfect designs are to be delivered at this point.

If you’re working with an independent or offshore design team, make sure that at this point they deliver to you at this stage:

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• Initial high-fidelity wireframes (if that’s a step of the design process you want to include)
• Full and final UI design documents (a lot of designers use Sketch these days, but Sketch is Mac-only and you will probably need the flexibility. Require Adobe Photoshop Documents (PSDs)
• All the assets & design elements used in the design including any icons and any artwork or other UI elements, in PNG format (this is a process called ‘slicing’ – slicing the image into its components so that the development team can pick and place them at the appropriate points throughout the app. If you don’t get this done, you will have to export the images yourself, which will require that you have the time and the requisite software (Adobe Photoshop / Sketch / whatever).

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Which Is But to Say…

Designing a product is more complex than the standard ‘just as someone to put together what looks good’. Of course, you can do that, but for your product to actually be any good, there is a clearcut path to success, at least from usability.

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The Lean Startup methodology advocates developing a no-frills minimum viable product (MVP) and launching it as quickly and efficiently as possible. However, ‘minimally-viable product’ has lost its meaning.

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Which, of course, involves more time and effort than the average notion of designing a product. However, if you can incorporate the above process even partially into your design process, you should be able to come up with a much more robustly-designed product.

Want your Product to be designed by Professionals? Get in touch with us at AppRocket!

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Or, the No-Product Framework

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In recent years, there has been a marked shift among founders reverting to the old practice of launching full-fledged, bloated ‘MVPs‘. A trend among startup founders we work with is to once again launch products after months of extensive research and product development, sinking resources without much by way of actual product demand validation.

The Lean Startup methodology advocates developing a no-frills minimum viable product (MVP) and launching it as quickly and efficiently as possible. However, ‘minimally-viable product’ has lost its meaning.

I’d like to propose a somewhat radical idea in line with the philosophy of testing out a startup hypothesis with minimal wastage of resources. Yes, you read that title correctly. Just launch. Without a product.

In this article, I would like to propose a structure for framing problems in such a way that product hypotheses can be tested without a conventional product. I can assure you that it works – I’ve done it myself.

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Table of Contents

• Or, the No-Product Framework
• What launching without a product actually means
• Why you should be launching without a product
• How do you launch without an MVP?
• How should one consider whether to launch without an MVP or not?
• When does it make sense to launch without a product?
• When does this approach not make sense?
• The drawbacks of this approach

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What launching without a product actually means

The concept is fairly simple – it means testing a business hypothesis and giving users its core value proposition without the aid of an app.

Fundamentally, it focuses on identifying the single main value proposition and replicating manually the process that the product would follow to deliver this value. As customers grow, the emphasis is on using no-code tools and integrations to automate the process as quickly as possible.

This No-Product Framework allows you to test what you are building and evaluate your product more easily, without sinking time and money into building even a barebones MVP.

The problem with Minimum Viable Products and Minimum Viable Services is that people tend to think of the ‘Product’ or ‘Service’ as the end goal, not the first basic beta prototype.

Another technique, the Riskiest Assumption Test, aims to reduce this psychological feature bloat by emphasizing testing out just the single most critical assumption first. The issue is that often this leads founders once again to building a product, albeit with a limited feature set.

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Why you should be launching without a product

As I briefly touched upon earlier, this is the most agile & flexible hypothesis testing method, period. It is the simplest and most flexible and efficient path to get a startup up and running building the right product.

The No-Product framework allows gaining maximum customer and market insight with a minimum spend. It allows founders to incur the least possible amount of technical debt, with much more informed and focused development effort when product development actually starts.

Any results and insights gained from a No-Product launch will be much cleaner and more de-noised than usually obtained via a typical MVP, which inevitably boxes customer feedback into focusing on the product itself as opposed to the value proposition at the core of your business hypothesis.

In addition, the No-Product approach guarantees a very rapid, lean and incremental product development process. I will take the liberty to call it the most rapid, fastest, leanest product process out there.

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How do you launch without an MVP?

The first step is to identify the 1-2 main hypotheses, the ones that test your main business (or growth) model.

Next, identify what goals the product would accomplish and exactly what value propositions it would provide. Develop an understanding of what processes and workflows the product must implement to accomplish these goals and provide this value proposition. Write these processes and workflows down.

At this stage, the aim is to manually implement these processes and gain a small pool of initial users to gain valuable feedback on the validity of the business hypotheses and product value.

Refine & reiterate the process simultaneously while quickly automating as much of it as possible, using no-code and other extremely quick time-to-market techniques. An excellent go-to set of process automation tools worth looking at are Airtable, Zapier, Hubspot, Mailchimp, Google Forms and Google Sheets. These should serve to automate a lot of manual work within a day or two of configuration.

Repeat in weekly/biweekly cycles, rapidly iterating on the product.

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How should one consider whether to launch without an MVP or not?

This approach is helpful for process-centric services and products that do not need highly-complicated consumer-facing functionality (although complicated functionality is generally a bad idea in itself).

What is the product? If the core business hypothesis is to solve a problem through a certain process, even if it means a process facilitated by fancy algorithms and apps, then the answer is most definitely yes.

Examples of successful products that could very easily use this approach include Uber (manually call up drivers distributed across a neighborhood and connect them to riders), DoorDash (manually call up a rider and restaurant to process an order), and most other big names whose core value proposition was not software.

How much technology is required to solve (not scale) the problem? If an app or minimum viable product is critical to proving your hypothesis, then a No-Product approach is not very helpful. Microsoft would be an obviously bad fit for an approach like this.

However, for most other businesses launching a product (should) make sense. Note the emphasis on solving the problem, not scaling. We tend to conflate solving a problem with creating a scalable solution to solve that problem. An app that connects pet owners to dog walkers in their area is not the solution to the problem of dog-walking, a dog walker is.

If the core value proposition is not software itself, then you should seriously consider launching without a product. This question is one of introspection, and honest reflection will usually point you to a No-Product approach.

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When does it make sense to launch without a product?

The right time for actual launch depends on a few factors. A very clear idea of the problem that will be solved is critical. A good understanding of exactly how the solution will solve the problem is also important.

A defined set of processes that will be used to solve the problem will help frame the solution hypothesis. Prior to launch the solution hypothesis should be framed as an experiment, with a concretely defined purpose.

In particular, the following questions should be asked:

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• What are the learning goals of this experiment?
• What is the hypothesis of this experiment?
• What are the tests to validate this hypothesis?
• What are the targets of this experiment?
• What are the results?
• How are the results being tracked?
• What does success look like?
• What does failure look like?

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Once you have satisfactory answers to the above considerations, it is generally the right time to launch operations and quickly test out your core hypothesis. It’s also helpful to have an understanding of how you would ramp up product development quickly once the initial experiment is live.

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When does this approach not make sense?

As highlighted earlier, situations where the product or app are critical to solving the problem are generally not good candidates for this approach.

Another consideration is if the founder knows exactly what to build based on extensive prior market feedback and user research. If funding is not a challenge and a formal launch with guns blazing is required instead of a staged and piloted launch, then it also makes sense to build out a more complete MVP that covers not just the core value proposition but also embellishes it with finishing touches.

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The drawbacks of this approach

If a founder incorrectly underestimates the importance of an actual product for their startup, they may find their results from this experiment skewed towards the lack of the product instead of towards validating their idea. The inherent benefit of a No-Product approach is a very short iteration cycle so hopefully, such a mismatch might be found early on, but this lack of fit might go unnoticed.

Another drawback is the high operational overhead that may arise from manually operating everything. This may detract from product development efforts and the team may find themselves bogged down in day-to-day operations instead of being able to focus on the bigger picture. The way to mitigate this is to ensure that the automation of manual processes starts early and is done as quickly as possible.

The final challenge with a No-Product approach is the danger of over-optimizing based on the small sample size of initial users, especially in the early days when it is difficult to find a representative and unbiased user pool. To overcome this challenge it you should continuously research your users to validate the target customer personas, keep reassessing product direction and whether progress is in line with the vision.

If you liked this, you should definitely subscribe for more cool stuff!

‍

‍

Or, the No-Product Framework

‍

In recent years, there has been a marked shift among founders reverting to the old practice of launching full-fledged, bloated ‘MVPs‘. A trend among startup founders we work with is to once again launch products after months of extensive research and product development, sinking resources without much by way of actual product demand validation.

The Lean Startup methodology advocates developing a no-frills minimum viable product (MVP) and launching it as quickly and efficiently as possible. However, ‘minimally-viable product’ has lost its meaning.

I’d like to propose a somewhat radical idea in line with the philosophy of testing out a startup hypothesis with minimal wastage of resources. Yes, you read that title correctly. Just launch. Without a product.

In this article, I would like to propose a structure for framing problems in such a way that product hypotheses can be tested without a conventional product. I can assure you that it works – I’ve done it myself.

‍

Table of Contents

• Or, the No-Product Framework
• Or, the No-Product Framework
• The drawbacks of this approach
• The drawbacks of this approach
• The drawbacks of this approach
• The drawbacks of this approach
• The drawbacks of this approach

‍

What launching without a product actually means

The concept is fairly simple – it means testing a business hypothesis and giving users its core value proposition without the aid of an app.

Fundamentally, it focuses on identifying the single main value proposition and replicating manually the process that the product would follow to deliver this value. As customers grow, the emphasis is on using no-code tools and integrations to automate the process as quickly as possible.

This No-Product Framework allows you to test what you are building and evaluate your product more easily, without sinking time and money into building even a barebones MVP.

The problem with Minimum Viable Products and Minimum Viable Services is that people tend to think of the ‘Product’ or ‘Service’ as the end goal, not the first basic beta prototype.

Another technique, the Riskiest Assumption Test, aims to reduce this psychological feature bloat by emphasizing testing out just the single most critical assumption first. The issue is that often this leads founders once again to building a product, albeit with a limited feature set.

‍

What launching without a product actually means

The concept is fairly simple – it means testing a business hypothesis and giving users its core value proposition without the aid of an app.

Fundamentally, it focuses on identifying the single main value proposition and replicating manually the process that the product would follow to deliver this value. As customers grow, the emphasis is on using no-code tools and integrations to automate the process as quickly as possible.

This No-Product Framework allows you to test what you are building and evaluate your product more easily, without sinking time and money into building even a barebones MVP.

The problem with Minimum Viable Products and Minimum Viable Services is that people tend to think of the ‘Product’ or ‘Service’ as the end goal, not the first basic beta prototype.

Another technique, the Riskiest Assumption Test, aims to reduce this psychological feature bloat by emphasizing testing out just the single most critical assumption first. The issue is that often this leads founders once again to building a product, albeit with a limited feature set.

‍

‍

‍

‍

Or, the No-Product Framework

‍

In recent years, there has been a marked shift among founders reverting to the old practice of launching full-fledged, bloated ‘MVPs‘. A trend among startup founders we work with is to once again launch products after months of extensive research and product development, sinking resources without much by way of actual product demand validation.

The Lean Startup methodology advocates developing a no-frills minimum viable product (MVP) and launching it as quickly and efficiently as possible. However, ‘minimally-viable product’ has lost its meaning.

I’d like to propose a somewhat radical idea in line with the philosophy of testing out a startup hypothesis with minimal wastage of resources. Yes, you read that title correctly. Just launch. Without a product.

In this article, I would like to propose a structure for framing problems in such a way that product hypotheses can be tested without a conventional product. I can assure you that it works – I’ve done it myself.

‍

Table of Contents

• Or, the No-Product Framework
• Or, the No-Product Framework
• The drawbacks of this approach
• The drawbacks of this approach
• The drawbacks of this approach
• The drawbacks of this approach
• The drawbacks of this approach

‍

What launching without a product actually means

The concept is fairly simple – it means testing a business hypothesis and giving users its core value proposition without the aid of an app.

Fundamentally, it focuses on identifying the single main value proposition and replicating manually the process that the product would follow to deliver this value. As customers grow, the emphasis is on using no-code tools and integrations to automate the process as quickly as possible.

This No-Product Framework allows you to test what you are building and evaluate your product more easily, without sinking time and money into building even a barebones MVP.

The problem with Minimum Viable Products and Minimum Viable Services is that people tend to think of the ‘Product’ or ‘Service’ as the end goal, not the first basic beta prototype.

Another technique, the Riskiest Assumption Test, aims to reduce this psychological feature bloat by emphasizing testing out just the single most critical assumption first. The issue is that often this leads founders once again to building a product, albeit with a limited feature set.

‍

What launching without a product actually means

The concept is fairly simple – it means testing a business hypothesis and giving users its core value proposition without the aid of an app.

Fundamentally, it focuses on identifying the single main value proposition and replicating manually the process that the product would follow to deliver this value. As customers grow, the emphasis is on using no-code tools and integrations to automate the process as quickly as possible.

This No-Product Framework allows you to test what you are building and evaluate your product more easily, without sinking time and money into building even a barebones MVP.

The problem with Minimum Viable Products and Minimum Viable Services is that people tend to think of the ‘Product’ or ‘Service’ as the end goal, not the first basic beta prototype.

Another technique, the Riskiest Assumption Test, aims to reduce this psychological feature bloat by emphasizing testing out just the single most critical assumption first. The issue is that often this leads founders once again to building a product, albeit with a limited feature set.

‍

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