Each document of this template is a piece of complete puzzle. The goal is to help you lay out an actionable plan for turning your idea to reality. It is meant to remove any friction you might have on the path to realizing your project. It is meant mostly for non-technical founders, even though technical ones can also benefit from having a well defined plan.
“Brain Dump” - meant for you to put all your thoughts into writing. We are huge believers that writing forces you to think and bring clarity to your ideas. With that in mind, I think it’s good to start with a loosely structured document, that forces you to describe your idea.
**“ICPs”** - ****this is aimed at helping you describe who your ideal client is. Who they are, what they do, what do they need help with and more. Answering these questions will force you to understand who you are selling to. We believe that when starting out it is important to be niche enough, such that you can pinpoint 10 people who love your product because of some specific feature, which if you didn’t have would make them quit using your product.
**“Features to Benefits”** - a lot of first time founders make the mistake of thinking they need to build a million features. As a result what usually happens is that you build a couple at best mediocre features which no one user likes. You then quit the idea. Instead focus on building fewer, robust, good looking features that solve your ICPs’ problem. Writing them out while describing them with the benefits in mind, forces you to think as the customer. If I build an easy to use, polished “Create issue” feature in my “Workflow management” software users would be more inclined to use your software because it’s so frictionless and solves a problem for them - storing their tasks in a single place.
”Landing Page” - helps you with laying out the base structure of your landing page. Once you have all the other documents filled in you should have an easier time coming up with the right words that speak to your ideal customer, thus allowing you for an easier time in marketing.
“Codebase Status” - you can use this as a starting point for your codebase wiki. With the help of this, whenever someone new comes into the project you can show them around easily. Listing tech stack, what and where code is, would make things easier for the future as well.
**“Competitors”** - another essential piece of the puzzle. Researching competition or adjacent businesses can bring more clarity to your idea. Knowing where their weak points are would allow you to position your product better. Again, instead of building a lot of mediocre features you would be able to build features that are missing or aren’t built well in existing products, which would make you more competitive.
**“Distribution Plan”** - an important part of everything. Nowadays software is for the most part a commodity. The one who wins is the one who executes the best. Having a solid plan on distributing your product to consumers would bring you one step closer. Knowing who you need to network with, where to advertise, what is a good incentive for your customers is quite powerful. After you know the answers to these questions you would be able to adjust the direction you’re headed to with ease. Like a chemist, combining different chemicals to find what makes the atomic bomb.
**“Project management”** - if you want to get something done you should have a solid plan on what you need to do of course. Easier said then done. Breaking all the big goals in small tasks is an easy, yet effective way to go about this. It would make you see what’s consuming most of your time, what would be easy or hard, and what you should focus your developers on. Using a task board to track progress as a non-technical founder is a really effective way to do so.
After you’ve written down everything feel free to email us at [email protected] with your results. If you have questions or any other concerns we would be happy to give you feedback.