In a fiercely competitive space with overlapping business plans, most product teams have to iterate their products several times to find the right version that works with their users. Raising financing and creating powerpoint business plans before finding a product that works is extremely dangerous to the success of any startup today. With product development costs falling, we are creating an much better way for entreprenuers to get their idea off the ground, test their products and then create a business with the strong foundation of market validation. We call it product incubation.
Our product incubation model is aimed at startup founders who are looking to bootstrap or have raised a small round of seed/angel financing. We have a very streamlined process of going through NDAs, discussing the concept, validating a good mutual fit and getting started with the development effort.
Founder/s and BL sign a mutual NDA
Founder/s and BL discuss the core concept on phone/in person
BL confirms open questions, level of interest/fit, and discusses a potential plan
Founder/s and BL sign an agreement with milestone-based planning
Ongoing development engagement begins with a UI-first approach
Daily updates and weekly meetings to track and drive progress
We have a strong vested interest in the success of every product we incubate. More importantly, we typically partner with only those startups that we truly believe are targeting a large market opportunity. Our engagement model consists of a combination of cash and equity, that ensures our strong committment in the 1.0 development effort which is always full of twists and turns.
We are strong believers in defining any product by starting with the user interface and getting the interface and interaction design finalized before starting to write backend code. We have a unique user interface definition methodology using Microsoft Excel that defined the product specifiction to a granular level of detail ensuring the founders, designers and developers get on the same page in the shortest period of time. This methodology also scales very well as the product evolves through iterations. Here is a sample Excel based UI for your reference.
We are adept at all cutting edge web development technologies and frameworks and ensure an optimal technology and architecture fit for every product we build. Here is a quick summary of our most commonly used languages/technologies/frameworks:
"BetterLabs presents a fantastic model for startups like ours to focus on creating the early version of the product, validate with our customers and then interate to 1.0 and raise financing with a proven and market validated productbuilt solid products, but they keep a keen eye to long-term value, code standards, and business acumen"