The Sweet Spot
One of the biggest challenges of teaching entrepreneurship is helping your students zero in on an appropriate idea. What follows is the framework I use with my students when vetting different business ideas during the ideation process.
But First…
Before diving into the framework, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that every school and community has different support mechanisms in place and what instructors are comfortable with will vary as well. What works in one school setting, may not be perfect for another. Consider the context of your community, and adjust accordingly.
Passionate
I’ve previously written about how to use the Problems, Passions, Tribes framework as a means to identify problems worth building a business around. Here, I recommend considering how passionate your students are about an idea when trying to determine if the idea is something the team should move forward with.
This is, in my opinion, the most important factor when selecting a business idea. If at least one member of the group isn’t totally psyched about it, they should keep brainstorming until their enthusiasm is palpable. The more that the students are passionate about the idea, the better.
Actionable
The business idea that your students decide to pursue must be actionable. Teaching entrepreneurship makes the most impact when students are actually able to DO something. If an idea is too big, or presents too great a technical challenge, your students will run the risk of getting stuck not knowing how to move forward. This is of course a delicate balance as we want our students to reach outside of their comfort zones and “build, measure, learn” their way to success, but some ideas are simply too big and will require too much time and money to execute upon. Your judgement in this area will evolve the longer you teach, but if your students are stuck between two ideas, guide them towards the one that they can do the most with, NOT the one that represents the greatest market opportunity.
I don’t mean to squash dreams, but Lean Methodology works equally well for a small business as it does for a Silicon Valley billion dollar unicorn. Your students will learn much more by actually bringing a business to market than they will by working on a pitch deck all year.
No Apps
I actually implement a “No Apps” rule in my class for non-developers (which so far has been all of my students). Having built simple iOS Apps myself, I know first hand how much is involved in the development process, not to mention: actually deploying an app to the app store, building it cross-platform, patching it for OS updates, continually debugging it, and keeping it secure. Yes, students can build wireframes for their solution demos, but building an MVP that offers usable feedback is another thing.
If your students are insistent upon building an App, give them one week to build a wireframe AND demo video that is at least equal in quality to the one I put together below as part of the iOS development course that has informed my opinion on this matter. Tell them to use this template: 2.5 — iOS App Template. If they don’t meet those objectives, it’s unlikely that they’ll have the motivation to figure out everything else that is involved in bringing an app to market. If they do meet those objectives, please email me as I might be an interested investor!
Scalable
Finally, your students’ business ideas should be scalable. This is somewhat counterintuitive when considering the “actionable” segment above. So consider this: your students could be super passionate about and be able to take action on starting a lemonade stand, but that would probably be too easy and not quite the point of teaching entrepreneurship. We should, in this class, seek to inspire our students to do things they never imagined they could and build a better tomorrow. In short, make sure your students pursue an idea that’s actually worth working on.
I realize that these last two points are somewhat contradictory, but I believe there is a sweet spot between the two that is ideal for this class. If your students can find that happy medium and be passionate about their idea, they will be far more likely to find success.
“This post was originally published on my blog at mmacfadden.com”
