(Re)start fresh!

—Nov 5th, 2024

You Want to Create a New Company? Now? At 45?

Of course, I do, and I would argue that this time is as good as any other. True, the market is not at its best, but it will never be ideal anyway. In short, we’re ready for the next chapter in our lives.

What Do We Want to Build?

We want to continue building exceptional products with our partners! Whether it’s the next big thing, a simple mobile app, or a browser extension—we are here to invest all our knowledge and experience into it. Instead of focusing solely on numbers, our plan is to maintain a small, yet strong and experienced team of experts.

Our Guiding Principles

To commit to this vision, we have established a few guidelines to follow:

  1. We design experiences
  2. We solve problems
  3. We are risk & budget aware
  4. We make mistakes

1. We Design Experiences

While we do everything else too, above all, we design experiences. What we mean is that user experience (UX) is at the core of every product we build. Building UI and various functionalities comes later. Every product you use has a purpose in your life, whether it is work, education, or entertainment-related. In one way or another, you are experiencing product use.

A well-designed experience is technology-agnostic—it doesn’t depend on technology but rather uses it to enhance a user’s life. Take the example of a telephone: in the past, it was fixed to a wall with a long (but often not long enough) cord that affected your privacy and forced you to stand next to it. If you were out, it would ring endlessly with no trace of who called or when. Today, you carry a cell phone in your pocket and can communicate with anyone, anywhere—bringing both advantages and drawbacks.

Despite these changes, the core experience remains the same:

  1. You think of someone you need to communicate with.
  2. You go to the phone.
  3. You dial the number (previously memorized).
  4. The person answers, and you have a conversation.
  5. You hang up.

Compare this with cell phone communication; while the technology has changed dramatically, the essential experience is the same:

  1. You think of someone you need to communicate with.
  2. You retrieve your phone from your pocket.
  3. You select the contact from a list.
  4. The person answers, and you talk.
  5. You hang up.

Technology evolves, but the core experience and its emotional impact remain unchanged. This is why we prefer not to label our experience designers as UI/UX designers, as the two terms are not synonymous.

We will expand on this topic in one of our upcoming articles.

2. We Solve Problems

When building products, stakeholders and team members often focus on developing features. Many products stall at the idea stage and falter because “We can’t release X without features Y and Z.” Budgets are exhausted, time passes, and the product becomes obsolete.

Instead, we prefer to understand what the actual problem is that you’re trying to solve. This approach allows us to propose cost-effective, metrics-driven solutions. Many books discuss this, including Lean Startup and Inspired—and the logic is sound. However, real-world implementation of Lean methodologies often fails due to skipped steps or because someone asserts, “Because I said so!”

We can help you overcome these challenges and implement proper processes that bring your product into the hands of your customers.

3. We Are Risk & Budget Aware

Entrepreneurship is inherently risky and often costly. If you have a product idea, we can guide you from ideation to the go-to-market phase. We will do everything in our power to avoid breaking the bank. Through careful planning and initial testing, we will transform your product idea into an MVP (Minimal Viable Product) with a prioritized set of nice-to-haves that may come later. This approach allows you to test your basic idea early, gain traction, and secure funding from early customers to finance the rest of your product journey.

Instead of spending $100,000 to test your idea, you could spend $10,000, then reinvest when you see some ROI, ultimately completing your product vision. By using actionable metrics, you can know with great certainty what your customers need you to build next.

4. We Make Mistakes

And that’s OK. You make them too, but we’ll ensure that mistakes are not costly. For each product idea, we’ll help you define, test, and accurately measure initial hypotheses. If the hypothesis is wrong, that’s fine! We’ve learned a lot and are now ready to pivot, assisting with every iteration until we create the product your customers actually want to purchase and use.

Final words

These are our initial guiding principles, but we’ll update this list as our company evolves.

—Studio Prodwerk