What Crypto Founders Should Know About Basic Roadmaps

As a startup founder, you must have a bold vision of what you want to achieve with your innovative product or business, and a solid plan to turn it into a reality. To increase your chances of success, your execution plan of this vision should be understandable, easily communicated, and convincingly “sold” to important stakeholders like new team members, potential customers, partners or investors. The “what” and “when” of your vision is effectively contained in your “roadmap”, an important complementary document to the white paper, your pitch deck, website and other supporting docs.

Usually early-stage crypto startups leverage roadmaps as the basis of communicating the roll out timeline of their tech platform and development work they will do for building the project’s MVP (minimum viable product) and future product development stages and features. Once you’ve passed the early stages and have your MVP, roadmaps can also provide a general overview and plan for growing the venture encapsulating functional areas and business goals in addition to the tech/product plans. Regardless of your stage and the approach you take to building your roadmap, it is a crucial part of communicating your vision to a very important stakeholder — potential investors. It tells them about what you plan to create and achieve in the future that is worthy of their investment.

Definition of a Roadmap

A roadmap is quite simply a visualization of a strategic plan including goals, development strategy, and ways and means to achieve them. For crypto founders, this document shows the project development path for the next six months to a year typically, or even for the next two or three years. The further into the future the timeframe, typically the less specific and detail oriented you are able to be. A roadmap contains basic information about the goals and objectives, stages of work, their priority, the main deadlines for the implementation of tasks, and the specific result expectations for the future.

Types of Roadmaps

There are a few basic kinds of roadmaps commonly seen across the tech sector. The roadmap you pick depends on your stage of growth, the audience, and the goals you are trying to achieve:

• Product roadmap focuses on goals at the heart of product strategy. It is often developed by the key product owner or lead developer. It aims to build a crystal clear plan with expectations or predicted results of product development efforts
• Technology roadmap. The document conveys a strategy at the heart of complex technical challenge/s you are solving. It can cover an IT or a blockchain systems roadmap, development roadmap, or a tech strategy map.
• Agile roadmap is a flexible program of specific actions necessary to enforce all the benefits of your product or service. The document contains the team’s milestones, MVP’s release date, and the latest product versions. The agile roadmap can be changed quickly and efficiently depending on external factors and the competitive environment.
• The innovation roadmap reveals how the team will realize a competitive advantage and innovate a business process such as incorporating blockchain or distributed ledger components. The document (often used for legacy products/businesses) contains a structured list of initiatives that will help to introduce and develop innovations in the company’s product and cultural changes that go with innovation.
• Marketing/Go-to-market roadmap gives a general overview of the roll out and launch objectives for a new startup or a new product, including results expected and timeframes i.e. number of users, launch in a new country. Can encompass sales, marketing, product operations or personnel/resources needed for a successful launch.
• Company strategic/business roadmap conveys the vision from the perspective of the overall business including product and other key functional goals like sales, marketing etc. These are usually developed and maintained by founders/senior management focused on critical business goals and the long term.

Roadmap for Investor Audiences

No matter if your roadmap is more specific to the product development plans, or is created to convey the company business/strategic objectives also, here are some points to consider if your roadmap has investor audiences and fundraising in mind:

• important goals laid out for the product/company requiring raising investor funding;
• prototype or MVP development goals and expected stages;
• functionality updates/features expected to be built into the product moving forward;
• key product go-to-market dates for beta or public release, user rollout and timing;
• key marketing, sales, community building or geographic expansion objectives to achieve;
• key operational, legal objectives or key partnerships for later stage companies;
• future funding expectation timing and any user growth# benchmarks to achieve

Focus on building your roadmap structure smartly and effectively with key milestones investors want to see to augment what is in other docs. This will increase the perception that you have a handle on how to execute on your vision and hence are worthy of getting funded.

A good roadmap can be your key to obtaining long-term investment support, and we know how to help you with that. milestoneBased provides a DAO-based funding platform for startup-investor collaboration on milestones, roadmaps and funding, and has a grant program as well.

If you are at the early stage and have a great team and idea, and working on your MVP, then milestoneBased is ready to help you with your roadmap and get funding also. The ongoing grant program awards $20,000 USD grants on a quarterly basis to up to three top startups that apply. https://milestonebased.com/grant

About milestoneBased:

milestoneBased is on a mission to fix a legacy system of VC capital inefficiency by revolutionizing collaboration on milestone management between crypto investors and startups. We are the first company to leverage a blockchain DAO and escrow smart contract capabilities, in an automated governance and milestone/roadmap achievement management platform. Early-stage investors achieve greater capital and process efficiency, improved security and transparency, and data-driven insights, for a faster path to liquidity and monetization of deployed funds. Startup teams get access to an investor community and become milestone focused and motivated for strengthened performance. www.milestonebased.com

Telegram group: https://t.me/milestoneBased

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MilestoneBased

$MILE token: www.pancakeswap.finance

DEXTools live pricing: https://www.dextools.io/app/bnb/pair-explorer/0xc53539f1aacae3a570799b84211fbffa1872e47e