How We Help Your Startup Jumpstart
Every company was once a startup. And at Lemon, that period in our history is recent enough that we all remember it. We now understand the importance of all the different skills and processes and challenges that startups face, and what needs to be done to help surmount them. That’s why we created Jumpstart, a brand new service that helps startups make their visions into reality.
Jump-what, Jump-why?
There are a lot of great entrepreneurs and visionaries out there who aren’t necessarily natural masters of logistics, or management, or development. And that’s okay, because those skills can be taught.
But the first goal of any great idea is to get to startup phase, and you’re already there! The second goal is to move out of the idea phase and into being a startup with a market-ready MvP. With Lemon’s Jumpstart, we can help you do it, by providing guidance for early-stage startups to get their prototypes platforms built.
Why? Because, for a number of years, we’ve been getting questions from startups we work with on how to develop an MVP properly. And we’ve noticed that in the early phases, a lot of startups can bungle the process. Sometimes they try for too many features, or too broad a release, or too complex a product, or just argue too much internally on what to focus on. But a lot of these startups were great ideas that deserved to see the light of day.
Standing out in a competitive market
In business in the early 21st century, you can be sure of one thing: everything moves fast. That’s a big part of why we started Jumpstart. You need to be able to launch, launch quickly, launch well.
In the past, you might have been able to count on running your own little shop away from huge markets and international competition, but no longer. Good ideas often occur to more than one person at the same time, so you need to be able to get going with the best version of your idea that is out there! For instance, Spotify, now a global giant, launched right before a few other music streaming services, but was able to capture customers hearts and the global market by being quick, and having a great user interface. The stakes for getting your Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to be great are getting higher than ever. These days, it doesn’t need to be only viable, it has to be powerful. And getting from your original product idea to an actual, buildable product that can do this is a technical and procedural challenge. But that’s where Jumpstart comes in, because we work with you, through the steps, so you can get a handle on what you’re selling and to whom, and then get it on the market and sold.
What Jumpstart delivers for you
First, we get together and talk through the goals: What do you want to achieve, and what’s unique about it. We get everyone on the same page with our success alignment survey.
Then second, we work with you to compile a Feature List for your product and platform, and put it through the MOSCoW analysis (Must, Should, Could, Won’t). Once we have this, we can start getting ready for design and development, where Jumpstart really shines, and shows you how to shine, too.
Once we complete the Feature List and the MOSCoW analysis, Jumpstart’s multidisciplinary design and development team rolls out in parallel with you. We structure this third phase around a series of weekly “sprints,” each one built around a phase of the project. Starting with design, we draw up an original, rough concept sketch, which we then break into wire-frames that can be given to the development team. To make sure we’re focusing our attention on the most important aspects, the most service-crucial screens are given a complete UI mock-up to match your house style, and tested for technical feasibility.
All the while, communication is moving along with the development team, and providing them with the information needed to be building while design is happening, so as not to lose any precious time! All these development steps are coordinated and organized via these sprints, which you can monitor along with us, and all the communication is centralized through Jira, for ease and simplicity! And throughout the whole process, you’ll have your own personalized project manager to walk you through and answer your questions. It doesn’t get more hands-on than this!
Building the next era of scale-Ups
Building a company from the ground up has never been easy, but today, it’s a whole new kind of challenge. You’ve got to deal with changing technology, changing customer tastes, and evolving competition, all at the same time, and at a faster pace than ever. It can be easy to get lost in the intricacies of your own idea, and not see how to get from Ideation to Release quickly and effectively. But at Lemon, we understand this fully, and are ready to help you take your idea to success. You’ve made it to startup… now, let’s go!
Example case study: FollowApp
PT 1: The Information Architecture
The Information Architecture visualizes the platform structure before any screens have to be designed. This way development can already start parallel with the design of the screens.
PT 2: Wire-frames
Together with development, the design of wire-frames starts. With the wire-frames, the navigation of the information architecture gets designed as well as the flows for all the major tasks and functionalities of the platform.
PT 3: Component design
As soon as the first wire-frames are drawn, design of the major components can start. By only designing the components and not the entire screens, development can already start development of the screens by using this component library and the wire-frames.
PT 4: UI designed screens
Finally, a select few screens are fully UI designed. These are usually the most important screens of the platform and serve to guide development in the general style of the platform and tease the client about the final result.
Final result: example of newly added building
