Unlocking niche business models
Can non-techies launch tech driven solutions for real problems?
Back in 2018 after a failed side project at my agency, I spent some time evaluating high growth ventures and their relationships with the market they serve. This led to a new belief; as technology becomes more accessible, it’s important that the ventures of the future be conceived and launched by domain experts leveraging technology.
For a long time, the media has celebrated techies for starting inspiring companies and challenging incumbents in the market. While this is good, and worth celebrating, there is another group of venture rebels often overlooked in this story of disruptors.
A case for non-techies
It will seem like only tech savvy people are allowed to venture, while everyone else can apply to work at the startup eventually.
Companies like Box, Lyft, Runkeeper, Kickstater, Kissmetrics, Tinder, Pinterest, Slideshare (Acquired by Linkedin), Snapchat were started by non-technical people. This isn’t to say a technical co-founder isn’t necessary, balanced separation of concerns is important to grow a healthy business.
At seed stage, proving the viability of the idea is more important than a search for co-founder or outsourcing to an agency. If learning to code is a barrier to starting, how do we lower this bar?
Google ventures gave us frameworks like the design sprint to enable collaboration in product design. The design sprint has since been extended beyond software businesses to include marketing, event planning and others.
Most tech products start out small, a test case called the MVP, which means minimum viable product — smallest thing that you can build that delivers customer value. This concept is alien to non-techies, reason why the first thing a domain expert outside tech thinks will bring his idea to life is hiring a programmer. this misnomer has been disabused within the tech community but not outside where it’s needed.
For example, a medical doctor understands the pain points in his industry better than any UX designer who has no operational knowledge of that industry. Same hold true for every other industry, sadly domain experts do not speak ‘geek’ and UX specialist are often outside their reach.
One way to solve this challenge is to surface more UX specialist, but I see more challenges with that and believe it doesn’t solve the challenge head-on.
What’s the challenge?
Domain experts lack the mental model to leverage technology and kickstart their product vision. The tools to make this easy are increasing and a new category of technology called nocode is leading the charge, but the knowledge gap isn’t closing fast enough.
This was the thought behind starting the MVPskool in 2018, a tech education community for domain experts who want to venture with tech. The mission of MVPskool is clear, empower non-techies to design market relevant solutions with technology. The desired outcome is to discover niche business models that can be amplified by technology.
Good ideas need to meet with good resources to make things happen — Mitchell Elegbe
There will be many failed starts, and many pivots.
Minimum viable products help answer hard questions, getting into the hands of customers shouldn’t be equally difficult.
Every idea is valid, but must be proven in the market. Transforming from an idea to a viable business will take more than code. Team dynamics, storytelling, PR, branding, and customer success are sub components necessary for an idea to take off in the market.
Having a great idea for a product is important, but having a great idea for product distribution is even more important — Reid Hoffman
MVPSkool is igniting tomorrows solutions by educating the founders today. Two of my early inspirations for the MVPskool are Board of Innovation and HyperIsland. The goal is to de-risk STARTING for non-techies — reducing cost to launch, time to launch and optimising for profitability.
To allow a lot more experimentation to happen at the lower levels in Africa, we need to look at a lot less sophisticated approaches — Victor Asemota
Out of this community of non-techies, new ventures will rise to solve real problems.
