(1/3) - How to create a product : Step-by-step guide

I'm often asked how to create a product, where to start, what should I do? where to go? What are the major steps to take? how to find an idea? how to implement it? How to sell it? How to deploy it? How to design it?

So many questions, so many obstacles to overcome, it's scary, and for fear of failing, we often don't even try...

First off, it's okay, give it a try, take your chance, and at worst, you'll have learned millions of things; at best, you'll have met someone's need and helped them in their daily life.

So in this little series of articles, we'll see how to do it, what steps to take, and what I would advise based on my entrepreneurial experience.

Sounds simple like that? no? Let's look at it step by step.

Okay, the crux of the matter, finding an idea. The simplest technique I could give you is this: Talk to your loved ones! ... yes! it's that simple, but ask if your friends and family, in their professional or personal daily lives, if something bothers them, in your daily life, and if something is bothersome and time-consuming enough, it's something you could easily fix with an IT solution!

Let's take an example, I created ForVoyez, an online image description generation solution to avoid having to manually type image descriptions in all the blogs and sites I manage. Here, the issue was saving time on the personal side, And if I can save time, then it's possible to help others save time too!

-> Got your first idea?! Great!

Let's move on to the next step.

Here, you don't necessarily need fancy tools, regular communication methods and a good browser will do. At most, you can do your competitor research with Perplexity, an AI web search tool that's really nice for this kind of thing ;)!

Yes indeed, a good idea isn't necessarily enough. First, you need to check if it already exists, if you're not reinventing the wheel. If you want to recreate a tablet, thinking that a bigger phone would be really nice, first, it's likely to be technically challenging, and then the competition is likely to be fierce and not very profitable!

If you don't have many competitors, congratulations, you've found a niche market! (that's the cool thing to find ;)!)

Discuss it with the person or people concerned, they'll give you new ideas and ways to refine your need. This is all about application design, talk about it, draw things, shapes, ideas, functionalities. Here, we'll define what really matters, the key features.

Once the idea is refined and the needs are validated, we can move on to the next step.

Here, make your drawings directly on paper, or draw.io, the idea is to do like in video games, "blocking", we'll make "wireframes", shapes and ideas of how the application will work later, not in terms of design, but in terms of interactions.

Here we'll use Draw.io, Figma, or paper, whatever works for you.

This kind of drawing works perfectly fine ;)!

It's also possible to go from this to blocking in Draw.io with the "code" version of Excalidraw. You throw your white paper photo at ChatGPT or Claude, for example, and ask them to reproduce it in Excalidraw format in JSON. This will give you a cleaner web version. (Find these steps here: Complete Guide to Creating an Application Mockup with AI)

Now, at this point, you have defined what the app will roughly look like, the very important features. (The famous MVP)

We can then move on to the next step! :D