What anyone be interested in using set of templates designed to help deliver a startup?

Question

I've been toying with the idea to create/collate a set of templates designed to deliver an idea to share with the Startup community. Basically creating a guide that moves through through the essential steps and provides example documents needed to deliver your idea; task breakdowns, Lean canvas, pitch deck, etc.

In my day job as at a digital agency I spend most of my time is spent trying to convince businesses the importance of methodologies and processes to deliver long-term projects rather than just focusing on the next set of features. Most of the time I find providing them with a foundation to customise and update works better than just telling them what they need to do.

So far I've been thinking of the following 'stages' (with a set of tasks and relevant documents ready to use for each). While it would focus on software-based startups, you could tweak it to your needs.

1. Ideation
2. Research
3. Validation
4. Business
5. Prototype
6. MVP

Andy Weston · Accepted Answer

@aberry273 Sure, glad to, I'm no expert but I feel the need for it.

Andy Weston · Answer

This would be great, I have heard so many people put up a landing page and then call it an MVP, so I hear you on explaining to people what theses actually are.

Marat Chukmarov · Answer

Hi, @aberry273, I'll try to justify my 'No'.  I'm firmly believe most people struggles with particularities of bringing ideas into the world before they... I'm all for comprehensive things like '4. Business. This is exhaustive list of laws/taxes/documentation/take templates/take a google calendar with all scheduled deadlines you'll need to work with'. But.

There're a couple points from my perspective: 
1. The more you'll try to cover, the more general/abstract thing will be. 
2. The more concise/complete you'll try to be, the more time will be needed to cover any of parts(Ideation/Research/etc), that you could drown in just recreating some sort of another project management tool. 
3. Is the target audience homogeneous and templates will uniformly cover their needs?

Just from personal experience,  big teams are slow to integrate new flows, small/solo's top priority should be action, not the structure. Actionable things would be something like:

Ideation: *user typed idea*----->"Hey, nice idea, but you missed needs/look at these guys who did the same/ it will be problematic because of laws/etc/etc/etc"
Prototype:"  Hey, take this figma"

https://www.startups.com/ ?

But, i'm just a tester, I'm better at asking, than making, maybe it was just unclear to me.

Alistair Berry · Answer

@much_applied Thanks for your response, I understand what you're saying, but I guess this is just a starting point not a complete guide.

1. I agree, however their are plenty of resources out there that cover similar broad concepts that apply across different startups, think of this as collating them together and in orders.
2. Yes, but again the line in the sand is for an MVP for a software startup.
3. The target audience is really software-based startups, I would expect if anyone were to use it they would customise the parts they need to suit their business. I recommended business in my day job always tweak the methodology we provide to suit their business processes.

"Just from personal experience,  big teams are slow to integrate new flows, small/solo's top priority should be action, not the structure. Actionable things would be something like:"

I partially agree with you, while I think actionable items should be a focus for a solo founder, what happens when a team mate joins them? In order to run a team you need good communication. It's a chicken egg scenario so this is trying to provide the basics to reduce some upfront administration work,

Alistair Berry · Answer

@andy_weston Glad to hear! If you don't mind I might message you when I have an early version ready to get some feedback?

What anyone be interested in using set of templates designed to help deliver a startup?

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