Daniel Stanojkov

Every project starts with an idea. I believe one of the most important steps that we should take is the validation of the idea and whether or not it is worth investing our time into. Especially for SaaS businesses, how do you measure if there is an interest in the market and if there are people who are ready to pay for the solution you offer? You don t wanna start with the coding part and realize later that no one wants the MVP you ve built. Developing the initial version of your product can be quite expensive and sometimes can cost you hundreds and even thousands of hours. To avoid spending a lot of precious time, we should definitely look for a shorter and more efficient method. Customer Interviews, Surveys, Emails, DM s, Figma Prototypes are few of the options that are available. I really do like Figma Prototypes as they can give you a very similar experience compared to the original product, but they can also consume a lot of time to be built. How do you guys validate your business idea and what is the time you are willing to invest into this process?

I want to integrate credit card payments into one of the side projects that I'm currently building. What are the steps that I should take in order to open a merchant account with a bank? How long the approval process can take? Do I need to have a legally registered company as a requirement? How and to who I prove that I'm PCI compliant? I have an experience implementing payment gateways in software applications, but I never went through the process of applying and getting a merchant account for my personal projects. I would really appreciate if someone who went through this path can share their thoughts and experience.

After the validation step of an idea is completed. How do you proceed with building your product? Do you prefer to start all by yourself and when the product acquires enough customers and we have the means to expand, then we start thinking about building and scaling a team? Or, we should start by defining and organizing the team before any work is done? I know that there aren't any rules to this, especially it depends on the project size, budget, complexity, etc.. I just wanted to hear what do you guys think and how you approach building your products?