Ms Kendra Nnachi, a Start-ups Programme Manager at Facebook on Tuesday urged software developers to validate their ideas before launching to enhance their success rate.
Nnachi made this known during the 2019 Developers Conference Agenda held in Lagos and organised by Nigeria Internet Registration Association (NIRA).
She said that building solutions without validating the idea to see if consumers were willing to pay for such a service would lead to the failure of such a start-up.
“As developers, we identify problems in the market, think up potential solutions and jump right into building a product.
“Sadly, we often skip the most important part of building a start-up which is customer validation.
“The hardest part of building a start-up is knowing what to build in the first place. Customer validation exercises can be time-consuming but bypassing this critical learning process can be dangerous.
“Start-ups fail if their solution does not solve a real customer problem,’’ Nnachi said.
She said that asides validating ones idea, it was necessary to build a team to bring in additional perspective.
“Working with a team increases the quality of solutions developed and also challenges one as an entrepreneur to do more.
“Code quality standards are also kept high as code review process go through one or more team members,’’ she said.
Nnachi said that developers need to understand their solutions first and also know that no idea is good or unique.
She also noted that for start-ups to be successful, they should be prepared to fail severally before achieving their goal.
