Sprint and Customer Development

In my entrepreneurship class at Case Western Reserve University we have been building startups. Currently, we are close to developing our prototypes. Something we recently learned in class to assist us with developing our prototypes in just one week is the Sprint process. Sprint is a book written by a few people from Google Ventures that provides you with an organized problem-solving process that spans over just five days. The primary focus of the book is to help people create a prototype for their businesses.

We don’t have time to sit through the five day process because of our schedules, so we read the book as a guide on how to generally crank a prototype out. It’s very useful regardless of your actual capability to put one week aside to go through the process. My startup team is focusing on making an app and a website, so our prototype might involve handwritten slides to represent webpages, or even just a simple website because there a lot of tools available to make that happen in a similar amount of time.

The real question is whether or not the Sprint process will actually be of use to us since we cannot do the full week all at once. I believe that it is probable that my team will benefit from the information that the process provides. This is because Sprint clearly states the steps that lead up to a prototype. All we’ll have to do is choose which steps are most important for our startup specifically, and then allocate more time to those steps than the rest. We don’t, however, want to move right past verifying our value proposition. If we do that we could end up producing a prototype nobody is even interested in which will make it hard to find customers interested in testing it. For this reason, we must start establishing a certain amount of people interested in our value proposition that will test our prototype from the beginning of the development process. All in all, the book will be a useful guide to creating a prototype in an organized manner.

Another useful tool for developing your startup efficiently is having an organized customer development process. Customer development is different from traditional product development because it is a process where you make sure you actually get out and validate your value proposition/ problem statement. In other words, it’s important to emphasize the problem your startup solves for customers and how it solves that problem. Customer development really focuses on making sure the problem and solution are valuable to customers prior to any major startup development. One trick to maximize your startup’s potential is to prevent your team from progressing past the value proposition until you know that there are a sufficient amount of potential customers interested in paying for your solution.

Obviously, verifying whether or not your startup is solving the right problem will require the team to get out of the office. A mistake many startup teams make very often is that they’ll think their idea is amazing without even asking anyone. You need to build a network of customers that will be waiting for you to develop your idea and try it out for themselves. If your idea is as good as you think it is, polite and friendly interviews with the right potential customers will get your idea some validation. It also unlikely that your value proposition will be the same it was when you came up with it the first time. If it is the same you’re going to fail, because that means you couldn’t find any conflicting opinions and there always are.

My startup team will get out of “the office” (using a laptop on our beds) and just start asking people what they think of our idea. We will have to get some casual interviews with people we might already know, but after that stage, we will expand our search and start seeking out strangers that are familiar with our field of interest. Established companies like Google might be able to get away with people sitting in the office because they are so successful, but startups don’t have that luxury. If you want to be the next Google, get out of your chair and start some conversations.