Software Startup – Getting Started (Idea to ‘Funding ready’)

Learn how to get started turning your idea into a software product and startup business!

Save thousands of dollars by taking the important steps and doing them properly to lay the foundations for your successful startup.

What you will learn:

• The research and analysis you need to do into your potential market and competitors.

• The big decisions you need to make such as your partnership and funding strategies.

• Getting your business up and running.

• How to create the documents you need in order to communicate your idea to others such as investors and customers.

• How to create the documents you need in order to get your software designed, built, tested and launched.

This course covers the first two modules of the S5 Methodology.

In the ‘Sound Preparation’ module, you will cover:

• Current employment – What you can, cannot, should and must do if you are currently employed

• Market research – How to research the market you are planning to enter so you are better placed to start your market fit

• Competitive analysis – How to find out about your potential competitors to help make business and product decisions

• SWOT analysis – Succinct instructions and a worksheet for identifying and using your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats

• Partners – Should you go it alone or work with one or more partners? This topic discusses this important decision in depth

• Investment – Do you need investment (or other form of funding)? This topic helps you decide and shows you how to get started with this

• Elevator pitch – An elevator pitch is so important to get right yet so many don’t. This topic shows you the formula for creating a great pitch

• Business basics – There’s a lot to do setting up your business. This topic takes you through the main steps, showing you what, why and how

• Getting legal advice – You will most likely need legal advice for various things. This topic explains this and how to prepare for getting that advice

• Plan of action – Creating a plan of action is so important yet rarely done. Use the template to create yours so you can stay on top of everything you need to do

In the ‘Structured Documentation’ module, you will cover:

• Brain dump – Have fun creating a brain dump of all your thoughts, ideas and questions. Then use this to start structuring your business and software documentation

• Document register – You will create many documents which maximise your chances of success – as well as keeping costs down. Keep track of these with a document register

• Question register – There will be a lot of unanswered questions and unmade decisions initially. That’s OK – especially if you track them properly with a question register

• Solution overview – Although easy to write, this is a very important document, used for many purposes to communicate your idea with investors, customers, partners, developers and more

• Users & organisations – Your software will almost certainly have users and may have the concept of organisations. Lay firm foundations by defining these properly

• Concepts document – Not often written, this document gives you a glossary and explains all the concepts of your product, saving on miscommunications and inefficiencies that will arise without it

• User stories – A really easy way of defining what your software needs to do. This topic shows you how to do this properly so your software contains everything you need

• Milestones – There will be more than one version of your software as it evolves. Keep track of these and communicate properly with all stakeholders

• Platforms – Web-only? Mobile-only? Both? It is critical to decide where you will start and the details of this. This important topic shows you how

• Notifications – Write a very short description about the lesson here so that your visitors know what they are going to learn in this lesson

• Functional & non-functional requirements – This is the culmination of all the work done up to now to create your comprehensive functional requirements document using the extensive templates provided

The course contains 18 template documents and worksheets that will accelerate your progress and make sure you end up with complete, high-quality documentation.

Who this course is for:

• Prospective software startup founders
• Early-stage software startup founders