Validating Concept
Welcome to Week 4
By now you should have pre validated your idea and got some feedback from your target audience.
Use this week and take that feedback you got and fully complete your designs.
This means you should have every page fully designed. This should be your complete application and you should know exactly what it looks like from here.
You need to have your entire application designed this week so we can start development next week.
If you are working with a designer, move their ASS!
If you are designing this yourself, move your ASS!
Once you have the designs completed, be sure to go back out to those who provided you feedback and share your updates and new additions if there were any.
You should also share these designs and features in the same places you did your pre-validation. Remember, these are your future users.
Please read the following article. It does a great job of explaining a few intricacies that you should be paying attention to as you go about designing your SaaS.
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How to Design a SaaS Application: A Step-by-Step Guide
Hiring a Developer
For hiring developers we like to use Upwork. In this video I will walk you through exactly how to go about hiring developers.
Tuckers Video on hiring developer
Onboarding a Developer
Setting expectations for your developer upfront is crucial. If you don’t have these set then you will not be getting the most out of them.
I have taken our onboarding docs for our agency and repurposed them for you here. Simple copy this, create your own notion and share with your new hires.
Keep in mind you should just use this as a template. You should customize this to fit your specific needs as you may work differently.
1. Trello Management
Trello is where the entire project is manage and all information pertaining to the project goes.
Adding Development Links
When creating bubble, flutterflow, githubs, or any other application associated with the development. Please ensure you share all these links in the “Development Links” in the description section as shown below.
Managing Backlog Tasks
Upon completion of the UI Designs, Backlog Tasks will be made for you that will encompass all tasks needed in order to complete the project.
Your Job
- Add any cards you feel are necessary to complete project.
- If new features are to be added or requested by client, ensure those cards are added to the backlog
- Ensure that all backlog tasks are there for project completion
Managing Active Sprints
Upon completion of the UI Designs, Backlog Tasks will be made for you that will encompass all tasks needed in order to complete the project.
Your Job
- Ensure all cards/tasks you are actively working on are in the active sprint column
- Add a description and any related links to applications/apis required or used to complete that tasks
- Provide ongoing updates each day of what you did to further progress that card/task towards completion. All updates should be written as comments
- Updates MUST include a written description of what you have done and what is left.
- There also needs to be a visual on any cards associated with UI. A screenshot will do.
- For showcasing functionality, please record a loom video and post directly in the card.
Getting Approval
Once you have completed a task, page, or function to the exact designs/workflow provided by our designer, please ping me for review and or revisions. If we request a revision, please make your corrections and ask again when corrected.
If they are approved, move to the approved column and mark it as done.
2. Communication With Project Managers - Slack
Slack is where most of our communication will task place. This is where you and your PM will go back in forth for day to day communications.
Please ask questions, provide updates, and keep all internal communication in Slack.
The designer of the figma file will also be in your slack channel to help answer questions. They usually have a very good understanding of the project.
3. General Expectations
Note: Not following expectations will be grounds for termination of our contract.
- Excellent Communication - Daily, even if it is a good morning message. Please give a sign of life each day.
- Honesty in timelines, development experience, and capability
- Updating cards in Trello daily - There should not be a day where we don’t see an update.
- Notice for absence - for travel, sick, personal.
- Logging hours properly
- Please log your hours each day and provide a detailed description of what was done.
4. Full Time Employment / More Projects
If you display the qualities we are looking for, there are opportunities for full time employment as well as providing you with multiple projects at once.
We are always looking for developers with outstanding communication and talent to give a more permanent position to.
Your first project with us will be for us to see you display these qualities
Managing a Developer
This can be a nightmare if not done properly. The last thing you want is to have to fire your developer half way through a project and hire a new one.
This will cause significant delay.
Of course, not everything will be in our control, but lets do as much as we can to improve our chances of a successful project build in a timely manner.
Communication
This is where you are most likely to get burned. Communication is what really separates a good developer from a great one.
I personally like to make contact with them at least once per day. Often times, they are in a complete opposite time zone as me so this will either be in the morning or at night.
As far as meetings go, I have 1 once per week on Monday to go over everything about the project, discuss problems that come up, delays, progress, etc..
If you are not that tech savvy, you should have these meetings more often maybe twice a week just to make sure everything is moving along as it should and you understand where everything is at.
Tuckers Video on Managing developers
Project Management Tool
This will be dependent on your personal preferences but I will share what we do when it comes to tools we use.
At our agency we use Trello. It is very simple for everyone to use and is your standard Kanban style PM board. We have just found it is the easiest to use.
But here are some other options you can use.
Tracking Hours
This is another tricky thing to tackle and is important to stay on top of so you aren’t getting taken advantage of.
Upwork provides a tool that automatically handles this for you. You just have to make sure you do not have manual hour logging turned on.
If you are using time tracker it will help mitigate the risk of being over charged. This takes random screenshots of their screen 6 times per hour so you can get a good idea of if they are actually working when they say they are.
You can also try 3rd party tools like Toggl.
Building a Waitlist
Lets discuss how we can build our waitlist.
As always, there are dozens of ways you can go about building your waitlist page and collecting emails.
We often use Webflow (another no-code tool) and connect submissions to Airtable using Make.
Webflow is a bit more complex to learn so in our example we use bubble. It will function the same.
At the end of the day a user has no idea what a website is built on, all they know is if it works and what the UI looks like.
If you are hiring a developer they can build this for you in webflow if you would like to do it exactly how we do. But it doesn't really matter what you use to build it, just that it serves its purpose.
If you are doing the development yourself, I recommend using bubble as you are familiar with it and don’t have to learn more stuff.
You need to design and publish your apps waitlist. This is going to be a landing page with a form to collect names and emails for your application.
You also need to get this connected to a custom DNS.
I would recommend using the domain you would like to use for your app.
Here is how to implement custom domains.
I typically purchase my domains from Go Daddy.
When you have your waitlist landing page published. Please go fill out the submission form in discord.
Cant wait to see your pages and join your waitlists 😉
TASKS TO COMPLETE THIS WEEK
COMPLETE WEEK 1 FORM SUBMISSION IN DISCORD
IDENTIFY THE PROBLEM YOU ARE SOLVING
COMPLETE HORMOZI OFFERS TRAINING LESSONS 1-8
COMPLETE FUTURE DEV MODULE 1-2 (IF APPLICABLE)
WATCH ALL ASSOCIATED VIDEOS
READ THROUGH THIS WEEKS GUIDE
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