Startup Guide: How startups and established companies can create profitable digital products

Joca Torres
3 min readJun 3, 2020

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This quarantine is giving me some extra time to work on my personal projects. One of them was to translate my first book into English.

Back in 2012, I launched my first book, “Startup Guide: How startups and established companies can create profitable digital products” which was reviewed in 2016. Lots of interesting content.

Startup Guide: How startups and established companies can create profitable digital products

The book is divided into 5 parts:

  • Definitions and requirements: in this part we define the terms “startup” and “software product”. Next, let’s wonder why having a startup, and what kind of return, besides the financial one, a startup can provide. Let’s see what it takes to have a startup, what we can outsource, and what needs to be done by ourselves. In addition, we will discuss how much time we should devote to the startup, and we will have a discussion about partnerships.
  • Ideas and problems: we will discuss ideas and problems, as this is the motivation for us to make the product. But after all, does the customer know what he wants, or not? What problem should we solve? What to do when we have many opportunities? Which one to pursue? I will show an example of how, out of 5 ideas, I ended up choosing ContaCal as my product.
  • Hands-on - Making the digital product: it is time to really get down to business, so let’s build and experiment. First, we will see why we need to build the product fast. Then, what is this MVP that everyone talks about, and what tools are available to build your product quickly?
  • Hands-on - Managing your digital product: we are going to “take the bull by the horns”, that is, let’s look at how to send the product in front of the customers, gather feedback and figure out what to do with that feedback.
  • Startup Guide for non-startups: how established companies can take advantage of the tips presented here to create and manage their software products, in case it is a new one that generates new revenue for a company, a website, an app or even a system that will not be sold as a product, but will support the company’s core business.
  • Interviews: we will look at how other startups made their products, and how they found the problem they solved with their products. Why did they choose this problem to solve? How was the process of developing the product? What would they do differently knowing what they know now? When they launched their products, how did they attract their first customers, when did they become profitable? What experiments were done on the way to find profitability? The startups that will tell their cases are Cobre Grátis, byMK / Fashion.me, Caelum, which will tell us about Alura, its online course startup, Sieve, Locaweb, which will tell us how it did its web products, Eventials, Aurum, an incredible story about a company that had a non-web product and need to create an online version of its product, and ContaAzul.
  • Final considerations: here I give a list of recommended books for those who want to work with a software product, innovation and startups and, in the last chapter, a one-paragraph synthesis of the concepts seen in the book

To celebrate this launch, the book is with more than 65% discount, just use the link below:

https://leanpub.com/startupguide/c/launch

Enjoy! \o/

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Joca Torres
Joca Torres

Written by Joca Torres

Workshops, coaching, and advisory services on product management and digital transformation. Also an open water swimmer and ukulelist.

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