It’s easy to get caught up in the race to launch, but at some point, you’ll need to think of how you will cope with the operational side of things after your doors are open for business.

Briefly, you’ll need:

• Customer service systems to handle queries, complaints, feature requests, bug reports (VAs are great for this purpose)
• Accounting systems
• Continued marketing and monitoring of your app’s impression on the world
• Continued development
• Server upkeep (I like the
  free basicstate for server monitoring )

Any one of these could do with a post - or book - to themselves. I just wish to point out here that switching into operational mode takes a bit of an effort if you’ve only really thought of your startup as a ‘project’. In order to be successful, one should really always consider the startup a business, even if your business model isn’t precisely defined and there are still plenty of things that need pinning down.

A startup needs to be more than just a good idea: you’ll read all over the place that success is all about execution, and I agree. But in the long term, it’s more than that - you need to always be thinking about return on investment (ROI).

ROI means different things to different startups. For those on a shoestring, it should mean that you are always thinking about how your efforts and the funds you have invested will return cash. Everything you do needs to be efficient and targeted to bringing in the dollars, either in the short term or the long term.

Preparing for the operational phase and post-launch development should begin at the start of the project, even if it is simply getting into the mindset that you are starting a business. I’m not advocating a rigid process that plans out every detail in advance, but I think it behooves you to understand what you’ll be getting into.