Startups

Monetizing your APIs is a complex challenge; creating your business, revenue, & pricing model, then translating into a technical implementation requires significant investment. Working with the Azure API Management team we provide guidance, videos and code to help accelerate your journey.

Microsoft recently shot a video interviewing endjin co-founder, Howard van Rooijen, and Director of Engineering, James Broome, about how Microsoft has helped endjin grow over the past decade. This posts the top 10 ways in which Microsoft helped - from providing access to valuable software and services, to opening up sales channels, to helping to navigate the minefield of UK Financial Services regulations around cloud adoption.

In this post we discuss the characteristics of a great FinTech startup, and the importance of the API Economy to innovation in Financial Services.

There is a lot of hype about the blockchain - usually wrapped up with talk about Bitcoin and crypto-currencies. In this article, we look at its impact on trust, and auditability in financial services, and why it may (or may not) be appropriate for your solutions.

Running a start-up or bootstrapping a new product within an established business can feel pretty chaotic. We talk about strategies for managing the time of a team, and ensuring that you become predictable.

In the early days of a start up, the organizational structure is defined rather loosely, and typically by function. The technical founder has her domain, the sales & marketing founder his, and they work closely together to achieve their initial goals. As an organization grows, it is not possible to maintain that level of detailed personal control. How does a growing business structure itself for innovation? Or a larger organization pivot and allow an innovation culture to develop?

We've put our MVP out into the market, and we can start refining the information we have about our product, its fit to the market, and the real drivers and buying behaviours of our clients. How do we iteratively improve the offering, and deliver more value?

In this article, we look at how we're going to tidy up our assumptions list, conduct some more low-cost experiments to satisfy ourselves we know exactly what we're getting into, then take the leap and build something that satisfies some core part of the value proposition, and persuade some customers to buy it.

Do you really want to be a founder? Or do you want to get some start-up experience on the inside, but at lower risk. We look at what it means to be involved in start-up and how to get hired as employee #1 (or #2, or #3)

Business model design is all about sharing the value from the product. How do we ensure all the stakeholders get what they need out of it?

Although you do not want to lose focus on the beachhead market, it is always good to consider the TAM for follow-on markets. If we do this thing, where might we take it next?

Ultimately (however long you can put it off for by taking investment), you don't have a business if people aren't paying you more money than it costs to develop, acquire the customer, deliver it to them, and support them for their whole lifetime with the product. We look at how you can get to paying customers.

The article is all about the very start of new product development: determining whether there is a market, and how the offering will fit that market's needs. We're trying to get a very quick, but comprehensive sketch of the whole product, and the market it is intended to address.

Evolving a proposition or product by increasing the fidelity is a better approach than incrementing feature by feature.

This is the start of a series on bootstrapping your new product development. We explore principles and tools that can be used in any environment, through the whole product lifecycle from inception to end-of-life.