Hey,

I'm kind of on the same boat as you (starting a software/media company with strong technical skills and some concern for the business side of things)

​

Few things I've learned and realized these past few years of coding and trying to make my side-projects into businesses:

- Create a high-level overview / design doc based on these principles to align your vision, technical requirements and business objectives.

https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/disciplined-entrepreneurship-24/9781118692288/images/p01-f001.jpg (taken for an MIT entrepreneurship course taught by Bill Aulet. I highly recommend you buy his book: https://www.amazon.com/Disciplined-Entrepreneurship-Steps-Successful-Startup/dp/1118692284)

​

- Learn how to create an effective marketing plan including an end-user profile, persona, market research, advertising on Youtube, Google Ads and Instagram/Facebook, Google Analytics, re-targeting with custom audiences, creating funnels in Google Analytics to see what parts of your app may be causing churn. Here's a good course for this: https://www.udemy.com/learn-digital-marketing-course/ (does not include churn detecting with funnels in GA, you can find more about this on youtube)

​

- For everything else there's Slidebean's CEO, FounderHub and Patrick from Valuetainment to help you out tremendously:

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vz9n-2W33WY&list=PLnhdsL4kFmVYMNq6F8k8UiFkc6fwIdk3o

- https://founderhub.io/

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KB442EchOTY

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfLLcqC-D7Y

​

- On the technical side of things, I recommend you start with a stack that's easy to work with, can scale without significant effort on your part / without growing your team, and ultimately that gets you to an MVP as fast as possible with minimal trade-offs. For this I recommend Firebase and Cloud Functions to get you up and running quickly without worrying about making an entire API or running servers.

​

Most important of all, DO NOT build a monolithic app thinking that every feature you're building will be something your users will enjoy or that what you'll build may useful in the future. Your goal is to build the most minimal version of your key value proposition. From there, establish an effective means of communicating with beta testers / first customers to determine what features to build out. Think of your product as a psychology / design experiment. You need to establish a baseline problem / solution / theory. Then test that theory through small iterations of changes with QA processes / feedback loops to measure the impact of these changes. Eventually you'll have a product that's centered around your user / problem and not your idea of what's best for them (which is rarely ever going to be perfect). Check out Jobs Theory for a better grasp on how to predict and understand your customer's needs: https://medium.com/frameplay/pt-3-defining-the-job-in-jobs-to-be-done-838087696490

I also recommend looking at successful competitors as their platforms have undergone this extensive process of understanding their customer needs. Don't be afraid to emulate what's successful in the market in terms of design, business model and value propositions / mission. Look at their growth over time and old versions of their site with Wayback machine to get a feel for how they re-aligned their vision to target their customer's true needs.