How to convert a “Brilliant Idea” into a Fully Functional Startup with AWS?
I love startups. After having been to so many stages of a startup I also know how chaotic it is to bring an idea to life. There is no guarantee that your product will succeed, that you will have enough clients to survive the next months and every little decision has big consequences which will directly alter the direction of the whole project.
A quick search in Google will show you 84.000.000 in 0.46 seconds how you can make your startup successful but you and I know that out of those 84.000.000 results if we take the copied content, hypes and news only a handful of them are really useful. Then rather let us resort back to masters and see what they say about the secret behind successful startups.
One of the people I respect, not only for the book or the methodology that he came up with but because of having failed multiple times, hard and having the courage to get up and continue no matter what is Eric Ries. You will recognize him from his book Lean Startup.
I am not going to get into what he does, what is lean startup (You should already know it by now) I am going to talk about the stages of lean startup and how AWS helps resolve this missing piece.
Lean startup relies on Build-Measure-Learn. You start with an MVP, measure the impact and either it succeeds or not you learn from it. Then you persevere or pivot depending on the actual condition.
As easy as it seems in the paper( and on powerpoint) It is really hard to achieve or really stick to this. In a chaotic startup environment where you have a tiny team with members all of which are working 20 hours a day trying to make a startup succeed, it leaves an unbelievable short time to stop and spend time working on how can you build, measure and learn. Most of us then either re-invent the wheel and create a couple of custom solutions which end up costing us more time and money than we expected or we spend valuable time on studying other startups who succeeded before us (burbn anyone?) and try to find a system that works for us and implement it, which may end up either working for us or become a pain in the future. Well, this is where Amazon Web Services come into play.
AWS is the missing part
Instead of reinventing the wheel with our custom solutions let’s see how we can use Amazon Web Services and how it really helps to implement the strategies of Lean Startup:
Build MVP:
This is where your idea converts to reality. Instead of spending months building the full-blown product with all the features, you create one product with the main feature your product will have and simply test it.
Instead of first creating a car wheel, which does nothing by itself, you create a skateboard which your clients can test and you can see the results immediately.
While doing this last thing you want to do is spend time or/and money on building this. Remember you will have tens of MVPs until you find the perfect idea that matches your clients’ needs. Well AWS helps you with that.
With AWS we get to use all the services running all kinds of expensive hardware for a fraction of a price. We do not have to deal with hardware complexities, nor we need to pay for the maintenance.
All done in a week instead of 3 months using AWS technologies.
Continuous Deployment:
This is something you would need a proper sysadmin with proper CI /CD background yet it is way more simple on AWS. Continuous Deployment is embedded into AWS infrastructure. AWS’s CI/CD service with Code Pipeline, Code Commit, Code Commit and Code Deploy gives us the ability to build, test, deploy software with a couple of clicks and without the need of any IT personal.
Split Testing:
With the CI/CD Pipeline setup, we are automatically given A/B testing opportunities. With this, the code is split between servers and we can do a gradual deployment. So why does it matter?
This gives us the ability to really test and get insights on a group of users before we push the changes to all of the users. Say you have added a button in color RED and you want to test how it compares against the existing BLUEbutton. Using different methods (Route53 routing, Load balancer %) we can test the code and get insights on the usability of the features without affecting the rest of the users.
Actionable Metrics
Actionable metrics lead to informed business decisions and visibility and decisions on what metric to take into consideration are the key to really understand and make decisions. For me personally taking decisions in all about putting correct and correctly collected metrics with different origins into the same dashboard and getting an overall sense of relations between them.
AWS comes packed with ways to get data. Cloud trail logs everything, Cloudwatch visualizes your important metrics. What if you have any external data? No problems! you can use S3, Athena Quicksight all together to create and update values that matter to your startup.
Not limited to that if you are a startup that creates and processes millions of data, AWS also gives you the ability to create your Datalake with AWS Lake Formation. With just a couple of clicks, you can start processing your data and start making decisions that are backed by data, rather than guessing.
Measure:
Measurement is a critical part of any business. Not only measuring but measuring what really matters as John Doeer has written is the compass that will guide a startup find the true necessity of their clients which will cause a chain effect to move towards what is needed vs what you think is needed.
I know you all are thinking about Google Analytics, Clicks and Purchase orders. I also do but let’s get out of there and think for a minute. What if there was a platform that would merge all the data for me and do the necessary relations so I don’t have to go back and forth to different apps and write the results in an excel sheet?
Let’s assume you are out for selling your intelligent T-Shirt:
With Amazon this is easy. You fire up your e-commerce site and let AWS do the work
- Get the generated data from your e-commerce site, google analytics and other platforms you use via AWS Firehose
- Analyze the data with a couple of codes via lambda and store them in your database
- Use lambda to get the insights
You can even go further and use Amazon Sage Maker here again to forecast the sales you will make nearing the reInvent!
Pivot or Persevere:
Then you come up with great insight!. You were able to detect what your customers really wanted using the dashboard you have created using Firehose, Kinesis, and Lambda. People are constantly searching for blue colored T-shirts rather than red ones. You chose to focus on creating variations of blue colored t-shirts rather than spending money and time on creating variations of red t-shirts
Learn:
Along with all these in a matter of a couple of weeks, you have started from zero and created your MVP. You have taken data-backed decisions using Quick sight, you have forecasted the Blue t-shirt that will sell more and you have even done a Blue t-shirt variations A/B testing and know which variation is most liked and purchased.
You have learned a lot on the way. Yes! there are still challenges on the way waiting for you and maybe you will still stay up late at night figuring out the best decisions, but you are now backed with necessary data, decision making processes and tools to make your startup successful.
Personally, for me, Amazon Web Services is the missing part of the Lean Startup. AWS is the go-to platform for startup owners which will help you Build MVPs, Measure and Learn, finding the perfect product that will make a change in this world.
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