In the last few years, I have been opportune to work with many founders and product leads—most of them on consultancy and advisory, a few as an outsourcing software development partner.
The most successful projects I have consulted for are products owned by product marketers. This inspired me to make a move from software engineering to product management.
Having seen the need for proper product marketing when bringing a new solution to market, we started offering product strategy advisory to every startup that hired us to build their MVP.
Was this advisory good for these startups?
Absolutely, they love us for the business insight we bring even though they only paid for development.
Was it good for Sprinthub?
No, it wasn’t. Why? Because we marketed Sprinthub as a software development house, which made it hard to convince founders to pay for insight after the initial engagement.
You might be wondering why we need founders to pay for advisory. Well, it’s because we need to allocate time for research before sharing our insight, and we cannot do that on a tight budget that is meant for the development of an MVP.
We want to help founders succeed because it the only way we can succeed, but we also have to do it in a mutually profitable way, so we have created a new business model, and here’s how we did it.
From our inception, we have been thinking of Sprinthub as a company that builds software for high-growth startups, thereby placing an artificial limitation on our ability to serve our clients in a mutually profitable way.
But if we think of Sprinthub as a company that knows how to build software for high-growth startups, then there are more ways we can help our clients when they approach us with an idea for a product.
Let’s say you have a low budget? A lot of time? And you can learn how to take an idea and build a successful MVP?
We can share resources with you to learn while we provide feedback and connect you to a pool of entrepreneurs, software developers, and designers that can partner with you.
We could even introduce you to a technical cofounder who will go the long haul with you.
And if you have a moderate budget, not much time, and have access to junior developers that are affordable but inexperienced?
We can facilitate a product discovery for you, define your problem, create a vision statement, map your customer journey, document your product requirement, set up the development environment and workflow for your developers, and provide project oversight for a stipulated amount of time.
Also, you might have a large budget and a looming deadline?
Then we can facilitate a 1 to 3 days product discovery, create a scope for the MVP, a go-to-market strategy, provide a team to build the MVP, provide a comprehensive roadmap, resources, and offer technical and marketing advisory, and show you how to build your own team and grow.
All these we can do for a fixed price, with no unknowns, no inaccurate estimation, no markups.
You’re building a software product, so you need to know how to manage software teams or find a CTO who can do it, which we can do for you as a CTO as service.
If anyone needs to scale, it’s you, not us. You’re running a startup, and we want to help you scale your business, not ours.
We will teach you all we know about scaling a software product and managing product teams, and we will be with you along the way.
We have bundled our deliverables and services into packages to enable you to understand exactly what you get when you partner with us.
If all you have is an idea for a product, We can help you properly define the problem you are trying to solve, understand your market and competition, and prepare a requirement document to enable developers to build an MVP.
We do this by facilitating a product discovery for you when you choose our Discover package with a commitment of $3,000.
- Problem statement
- Customer and market research
- Customer journey mapping
- Product vision statement
- Product requirement documentation (user stories and wireframes)
If you want to validate your idea after discovery, we can help you launch 🚀 your MVP.
Our new Validate package provides you with everything you need to create a go-to-market strategy, build a waiting list of early adopters, and launch an MVP in 8 weeks for $25,000. Here’s how we do it.
- We’ve created a custom agile development workflow that involves 3 full-stack developers, 1 UI/UX designer, 1 project manager, and 1 product marketer.
- We’ve already spent thousands of hours in the last 4 years building solutions, so we have reusable components for the common features in most web and mobile apps (Authentication, User profile, document upload, location tracking, biometrics collection, payment integrations, push notification, landing pages, etc.).
- Deployments are fully automated with pre-configured DevOps pipelines for both web and mobile apps. This means we don’t reserve any week for project setup or deployment; we build tangible features from project kickoff. Every code commit runs a new build and automatically deploys to a staging environment. Every day is deployment day.
- We use time and resource limitations to innovate. You have a product team of 6 people for only 8 weeks. What should they build? This limitation gives us clarity to what is most important to early adopters; any feature that cannot be built within that time does not make it to the MVP.
- We’ve partnered with experienced SAAS product marketers to provide user onboarding copywriting that will re-engage early adopters and win back inactive users.
Whatever happens, you launch in 8 weeks, no excuses, we even set a public countdown while we build your waiting list of early adopters for the launch. Here’s what you get when you validate your idea with us;
- MVP scope definition, development plan, and success metrics.
- Brand identity design/redesign
- Pre-launch website (to enable you to build a waiting list)
- Custom email setup for your team (1 to 5 users)
- 8 weeks MVP development (to gain first users, measure, and improve)
- App Store and Play Store publishing (for mobile app MVP)
- Mixpanel integration (to track user events)
- Post-launch website
- Email onboarding sequence
- Customer Support Knowledge Base integration
- Investor pitch deck (if you need to raise funds after launch)
After launch, we can engage us for the next 6 months with our Grow package that entails everything you need from marketing, technology, and operational oversite and advisory.
We won’t hire people, put a markup on their salaries, and make you sign a non-solicitation agreement. We will teach you how to find the best people for the best price. After that, you will get all the marketing and technology strategies you need to achieve product-market fit, straight from our own playbooks.
- 6 months CTO as a service
- 6 months CMO as a service
- 6 months product roadmap
- 6 months marketing plan
- 6 months customer support plan
- Software development process and workflow setup
- 5-step talent selection process
- 5-step talent onboarding process
- Visual design system
- Downloadable press kit
- SAAS financial modeling (Expenses, revenue, break-even, and profit analysis)
Launching a product and achieving product-market fit, is not a big bang. You need to get feedback from early adopters, improve your product and build your own team along the way.
We know it’s hard to figure it all out on your own after a successful product launch, that’s why we created the Grow package for founders that are targeting $100k to $1m ARR (annual recurring revenue) within the first year.
The “if you build it, they will come” mindset is a startup fallacy that only happens in movies. Successful startups build communities along with their product. You don’t need to invest time and money to build a full-fledged product without understanding the market.
Let’s help you Discover and understand your target market, Validate to test your assumptions, get feedback, Grow to dominate, and be profitable.
If you have any questions or think there’s something our new packages did not cover, shoot me an email at [email protected].