The 30 Day Startup: How to Create a Successful Tech Startup in 6 Weeks for Less than $50K

According to Jessie Hagen of U.S. Bank, 82% of new businesses fail due to cash flow issues, and nearly 79% fail due to starting out with too little capital. However, big-time investment doesn’t guarantee success.

In The Lean Startup (2011), Eric Ries argues that the main reason startups fail is because they spend far too long trying to build the perfect product only to launch, almost out of money, with a “perfect” product... that nobody wants.

This is where a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) offers an invaluable safety net. An MVP is created when you build a very basic version of your product to enable you to test your assumptions as cheaply and quickly as possible. If the MVP is successful and sparks enthusiastic feedback, you can persevere and look to build a fuller version of your product

The overarching goal of an MVP is to test whether there is enough demand to justify spending time and money on building the full version of the product. The test can be as simple as charging people to use your MVP – if people are happy to pay for the MVP version, they will be even happier with your full version.

“It’s critical to understand that an MVP is not the product with fewer features. Rather it is the simplest thing that you can show to customers to get the most learning at that point in time.” – Steve Blank, Founder of multiple startups

“An MVP is a process that you repeat over and over again: identify your riskiest assumption, find the smallest possible experiment to test that assumption, and use the results of the experiment to course correct.”

A great business idea isn’t enough. You need to quickly and cheaply test your assumptions to establish whether your product meets the needs of a market and fills this niche well enough for people to pay for it. The early days of a startup should involve constraint testing, tweaking and learning with the ultimate goal of discovering product/market f

The answer is to test the waters with an MVP. Take your product idea and shave it down until it is just one dedicated tool that you can build in a few weeks – a tool that solves a specific problem. Build just that product, promote it, and gather feedback. Then you’ll have real data to decide on your next course of action. This is the same path that