A 7 year old’s journey to build grit through lessons in design thinking and entrepreneurship…with some help from her mom. Think of it like Product Management 101, but with a 1st grader.
…
A recap.
If you are just joining Elena’s story, I recommend reading Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 to catch up on all the details.
In Part 3, Elena put her customer interview research from the park into Mural and dug for nuggets. From there, she pulled out some great insights.
In that exercise, she learned:
- It takes time to consolidate your research on a canvas like Mural, but it is worth the investment. Research doesn’t do much good sitting in a doc or a database somewhere.
- You need to hunt within your research to uncover the hidden insights. Moving things around on your Mural board gives you a different perspective of the same data.
Now what?
Remember the three requirements for a “good” problem according to David Bland?
A good problem to solve is:
- Desirable: Do customers want to solve this problem? And when Elena gets to solutions later on, do customers want to solve this problem in this way?
- Feasible: Can Elena feasibly make the yet to be identified solution (with help)?
- Viable: Does it make financial sense for Elena to make and sell the yet to be identified solution?
Elena is still on that first one — Desirability.
Desirability takes the longest because you have to double dip in that circle — first with the problem, then with the solution.
Desirability is also the most important of the three, which is why you always start there. If there is no desire to solve the problem and to solve it with your solution, then feasibility and viability don’t matter. Who cares about those two if no one is going to buy your product anyway?
These are the “desirability” questions Elena still needs to answer:
- Is the problem experienced by a large enough segment of real people (future customers)? Elena shouldn’t waste her time building a solution for a teeny tiny market.
- Does the solution she decides to create actually solve the problem?
- Does the solution solve the problem in a different, better way than other alternative solutions?
How many kids?
In Parts 1, 2, and 3, Elena proved her customer problem statement is real and experienced by at least some other kids.
But how many kids?
“Elena, how many kids do you think there are in America?”
“282,000. Or a billion.” she responds. That is quite a range for the TAM (total addressable market).
“How many kids do you think have nightmares?” I ask.
“Maybe 3,000,” she concludes. To a seven year old, 3,000 is a big number.
All joking aside, off the cuff guesses should be a last resort. The real data is out there somewhere, and if it isn’t (as is sometimes the case in real life), Elena needs to make some informed estimates based on whatever data is available.
“How might we find out the real number of kids who have nightmares,” I ask.
“Siri will know!” Elena exclaims. What a modern answer. I would have never thought to ask Siri. Of course she will know.
From Siri, Elena learns that there are 74.3 million children in the US. There are 24.8 million 0–5 year olds and 24.3 million 6–11 year olds.
Siri also finds a handful of scientific studies on kids’ nightmares. Elena tries to read some of the findings, but struggles with the unfamiliar structure of the language. She is capable of reading each individual word, but she doesn’t know what most of them mean in context. Faced with that overwhelming lack of understanding, she quickly jumps to “I give up.”
There are so many moments to practice grit in this journey!
It turns out nightmares are very common. For 7 year olds in particular, 87% have bad dreams sometimes or often. Studies also show that peak nightmare prevalence occurs for kids between 6–10 years old.
Bingo! That sounds like a great starting point for a target market.
Now for some back of the napkin math. Everything doesn’t line up perfectly and the numbers aren’t exact, but this is good enough for now.
If Elena assumes that 87% of 6–11 year olds in the US have bad dreams sometimes or often, then that equals 21.1 million kids.
Will all 21 million kids buy whatever Elena ends up selling? Heck no. But 21 million kids is a big pool of potential customers to play in, so Elena should keep moving forward.
Onward, my girl!
Want to know what Elena does next?
Follow, like, subscribe or whatever the kids are saying nowadays to get the latest update on Elena’s journey → Medium | Instagram | Linkedin | Twitter
You can also join this email list for an early bird announcement of the launch of Elena’s yet to be determined solution. She is still a ways away from this, but it’s never too early to start building your Kickstarter list!
…
→ Read Part 5: Finding a North Star
