Making a Product: Transcripto

How to make a product? What are the steps of product design, development and launch? How to calculate costs, and do you need a logo? We won't answer these questions, and we won't tell you how to do this right. Instead, we'll walk you through the entire development process, from idea discussion to implementation, with all the pitfalls we encountered along the way.

We recorded the whole process how co-authors of mkdev Kirill Shirinkin and Leonid Suschev do calls and discussions, designing and coding the web application from scratch. Then we cut out the excess, added some memes and released in the form of short episodes.

Episode 1: Where do ideas come from

When an idea comes up, you shouldn't start implementing it right away. Discuss it with friends and colleagues (or at least someone) first. So you will immediately receive critical feedback, options for improving the idea, or even a business partner.

Episode 2: How to plan the development

There's a lot of useful apps making the development process easier. Use them. First of all you need to detrmine the product features, analize your core audience and make a plan. In this episode we show how this discussion looked in our case.

Episode 3: Does a startup need a logo

You don't have to spend a lot of your time on creating a logo. Instead you could delegate the task to artificial intelligence. Here we show what can be achieved using a neural network by Art. Lebedev Studio. Also Leonid Suschev discusses whether a logo is needed at all, and if low-effort logo is enough?

Episode 4: Prototyping in 90 minutes

Prototyping is more like a proof of concept task. The goal is to build the first more or less working version as soon as possible and see how it works. To do this, you should use the tools that are easiest for you to work with. It doesn't matter if in the process you write a bunch of shitcode, you'll fix it later...

Episode 5: How to design real quick

The easiest way to design a site of acceptable (from a visual point of view) quality is to pull on successful ideas from other projects and correctly weave them into your development. This will save you a lot of time and money. The main thing is not to slip into direct copypasting and plagiarism, and do not forget about the convenience for users!

Epsiode 6: How shitcode turns into a product

When the prototype and the design are ready, you can start assembling a final product. At this stage, a lot of modern tools also help, which reduce the work of the programmer to basically assembling of a constructor. But it is important to distinguish when this approach is applicable, and when it is worth going the other way. Even if writing your own code is incomparably more difficult.

Episode 7: How much a startup costs

An experienced developer will ask the cost questions very early on and try to calculate all costs in advance. The latest when to do this still okay is after the prototype has been developed. It is better to estimate in advance how much all the services used will cost and how much money the monthly maintenance of the project will require.

Episode 8: How and when to announce the launch

It's worth preparing the stage and audience for your product release in advance. Especially when it comes to commercial projects. Otherwise, you will face the fact that by releasing a product, you will not attract a single customer, because no one knows about you. However, there are also pitfalls here. And it’s very likely you’ll make a lot of mistakes anyway.

Episode 9: How to deploy properly

There are roughly two and a half billion ways to organize the delivery of your product to users. You must have a very good understanding of the whole process in order to manage it effectively and not to spend extra money. Infrastructure design is worth spending your time, or even trusting professionals. Here we show a general approach to solving this issue.

Episode 10: What to spend your money on when you get rich

No matter how successful was the inintal release of the product, it is not the end of development, but just one of the stages. In order for the project to continue to live and grow, you need to start working with customers, their reviews, and plan to develop new features or revise existing ones.