Get out there!

Last week I introduced the Sprint. A five day, compact but still very effective process for startups to lift themselves closer to a real product and business. The five days are based on a lot of brainstorming and working out ideas with the team being together for mostly all of the time, aiming to be able to present a prototype on Friday.

We continued to discuss the sprint last week and while it was more about just the idea itself, development of solution and the value of it, coming closer to the sprints “weekend” was more about trying to figure out what customers would think about the product and how things will look like in the real world. Because as I will tell you again later, it’s all worthless unless you get out there and get some honest and real opinions.

What i especially liked and think might very likely be beneficial for our startup is the concept of a storyboard. I have never tried something comparable in my, to be honest very short, entrepreneurial life. The storyboard depicts all of a customers interactions with a product starting with the first time he notices or gets in touch with it, up to the moment of a purchase or subscription. It allows you to break down the process a customer goes through into every step you can think of, and maybe also don’t think of at first. Based on that you can analyze where your business has strengths you should emphasize or weaknesses you should work on.

As I really like this concept, there is no question I would like to try it with our startup team, especially because I think there are some gaps in our “story”. We might have the idea and also worked out a lot of it, but I believe there is still some room to fill and weaknesses to improve from. For example we haven’t visualized a first interaction of our customers with our business yet.

Another thing we discussed was customer development, trying to get away from the traditional approach of finding customers after creating your product but rather coming to an approach where you design and tweak a product based on customers you developed. The most important parts of this process are the discovery and validation of the customer. By constantly questioning your approach to customers, you may result in pivoting a few times but in the end it will pay off as you do not focus on how awesome the product might somehow look but on what customers are really looking for.

As I mentioned above it’s all about getting out there. What does this mean? All the nice stuff about customers and your product is useless if you do not get some real input from independent people you ask for their opinion. This is something our startup should definitely do, when ready for it, by asking people who are roughly in the group we are targeting for their honest opinion. But don’t just ask them random questions. Present them the prototype, give them a feeling for the product and then make the best out of their input.

That should be enough for now, see you next week!