From napkin to execution: getting your ideas off the ground
Ari Gold is probably the last person you’d expect to doling out advice on how to build a business, but the reality check he delivers is something all entrepreneurs will face on their journey from idea to execution.
All businesses start as ideas; whether they are sketched on the back of a napkin, in a corporate boardroom, or even in the dorm rooms of Harvard, and until an execution plan is put in place, they are just ideas.
Having that eureka moment is exciting and you’re probably picking out the colour of your Ferrari after imagining all the money you’re going to make! Slow down there sailor! Before investing too heavily in your concept, you’ll want to do some upfront research and look at validating whether your idea is viable or not.
That sounds like a lot of work, can’t we just execute?
You could do that, but proper preparation prevents poor performance, so let’s do some investigation to work out if the idea has legs.
It should only take a couple of hours max and in the scheme of things will be a drop in the ocean compared to the hours you’ll pour into your viable venture.
Frameworks we can use
There are several books that I thoroughly recommend reading (and these are great for any business professional, not just entrepreneurs) that provide tools and frameworks for building lightweight business plans:
- Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers
- Value Proposition Design: How to Create Products and Services Customers Want
- The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses
I’ve written about using the Value Proposition Design canvas before, along with validating your ideas in the market. Generally there are two focus areas that should be explored.
Researching the market you’re targeting:
- Market size
- Competitors
- Value proposition
- Costs and revenue streams
- Marketing strategy
- Resources to make it happen
- Customer segments
Validating your idea in the market:
- Speak to potential customers
- Surveys
- Teaser pages
- Prototypes
- Beta launches/MVPs
Since the goal here is rapidly validating an idea, I’ve developed a set of questions that complement the business model canvas:
- What problems are my customers experiencing and do they exist at scale
- What solutions can be employed to solve the problems being experienced?
- How much does it cost to produce that solution?
- How much is my potential customer prepared to pay for that solution?
- Why would they choose my solution over someone else’s?
- How will I recruit customers to use my product?
- What keeps them using my product?

Dollar Shave Club: a practical example
Culminating in a billion dollar acquisition from Unilever, Dollar Shave Club challenged a very competitive market and built a high performing business that disrupted the fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) landscape and gave rise to a new group of entrepreneurs and their Direct to Consumer start ups.
Using the questions above, let’s look at how Dollar Shave Club might have explored their business opportunity.
What problems are my customers experiencing? Shaving with a blunt razor sucks, buying new blades monthly is expensive, buying blades requires going to the store, too many blade choices creates decision paralysis.
Does it happen at scale? Sure does! Most men and a proportion of women will use a razor of some sort at some point in time.
What solutions exist today? Laser, wax, disposable razors, salon shave, growing a beard. These solve the issue around shaving, but delivery and cost are still troublesome as you have to go to a store or salon and pay for premium products or services.
What’s our solution? Simply offering a price competitive offering in store won’t break through against the multitude of competitors. So how about a mail order subscription that sends you a fresh set of blades every month?
Not only will we solve a key pain point for customers (having to go to the supermarket) but it will also minimize operational costs by eliminating the retail presence, and provide superior customer service by taking advantage of the direct to consumer channel.
What about the costs of our solution? We will need to calculate the cost of manufacturing or developing the product, cost of packaging, cost of shipping, cost of staff and other infrastructure (ie a website with subscription portal). These can be napkin numbers today, but it’s important to know if you can produce your product for less than it can be sold for.
How much will someone pay for this? There are a few avenues here and it involves a bit more detail around your potential pricing and brand strategies (premium vs low cost), but for this example let’s assume price sensitivity is a driver for our target customer so we’re focusing on low purchase cost plus high value experience.
To compete, our product has to appear cheaper than going to the store and buying a new set of blades. It’s important to note that most consumers will only factor in the unit price of the blades here, but we should also consider the effort cost of getting in the car and going down to the supermarket.

A set of Gillette Mach 3 blades are around A$16.50 for a pack of 5 at Woolworths. So the Dollar Shave Club product needs to be less than or equal to the existing products or there’s little incentive for the consumer to switch brands.
As buying new blades is an infrequent event (once every month), consumers might be open to receiving their product in the mail rather than buying from a physical store.
When it came to picking a business model, Dollar Shave Club doubled down. Not only did they make use of the existing razor and blade model that was already dominant in this market, but they then paired it with a subscription model to guarantee continued revenue streams from a consumer.
Why would they pick dollar shave club over going to the super market? In the FMCG space, there are a few drivers: price sensitivity, brand loyalty (mixed opinions on this), perception of quality, availability.
The value proposition to win over customers was simple: Use our high quality product, save money, get it direct to your doorstep. Customers were able to identify with this and it hit all of their key problem statements.
How will I recruit customers? There are many sales strategies that can be deployed to get traction with your target market and part of your customer research should include understanding the best way to reach them. For example: younger buyers in the 18–25 market, social media campaigns are a great way to connect with that audience, whereas the 45–60 market generally respond better to traditional media campaigns.
Dollar Shave Club’s biggest hurdle to overcome was being an unknown brand competing against established brands that were synonymous with quality and marketability.
If Tiger Woods and Rodger Federer are using this razor, it must be good!
CEO Michael Dubin solved this with a very engaging gorilla marketing campaign. Rather than spending heavily in traditional media advertising, he made a humorous YouTube ad that explained his product, took a few jabs at his competitors, and had an unorthodox message delivery that got people talking about it.
What keeps them using my product? Shaving is a fairly utilitarian exercise. We buy razors to accomplish a chore, do the chore, then move on with the rest of our day.
The benefit to the utilitarian nature of shaving is that dramatically improving the buying experience can create value for a customer. Rather than just supplying a razor in plastic packaging in a mailing bag, Dollar Shave Club worked heavily on the pre and post-sales experience, as well as stepping up the packaging.
The website has a great first time experience for new customers, and existing customers can log in to their profiles to track their subscription or add or remove products from their orders.

Dollar Shave Club’s feather in the cap is their mail order packaging. When customers receive their package in the mail they get a neat box with a collection of items needed to experience a great shave as well as a nice message printed into the lid that reinforces the brand’s value proposition.
How to test the concept
The market research is done, and the concept stacks up on paper. Fantastic, we’re going launch, the money will be rolling in and that Ferrari is in our reach!
Not so fast! We’re still unproven and we’re not about to race off and commission a factory to build razors or open a huge distribution center to start handling the millions of orders based on educated guesses alone. We need to test that our concept has merit with actual customers.
Right now you’re thinking: this sounds expensive, and I’m a startup with limited cash, I can’t invest in testing.
Testing will divert some money from your other budgets, but it will also save a lot of cash in the long run by helping avoid costly missteps.
How can it be done cost effectively? The first step is to stitch together a prototype and test it with some of your customers. They could be family, friends, or even a small group of people that suggested the problem to start with.
In the case of Dollar Shave Club, their value proposition was a set of quality blades coming in the mail every month. As there are plenty of razors on the market, research and development on a new level of blade quality probably isn’t nearly as important as getting the subscription and delivery part of the offer right.
Turns out, this is pretty easy to test. Go to the supermarket, buy some razors from known brands, put them in a box, send them to the test audience. Then ask for feedback on the process.
Anyone can buy a razor from the supermarket, so the key points to experiment with here will be the subscription purchase experience, speed from dispatch to letterbox, the type of packaging, and the unboxing experience. A simple A/B test would be great here:
- One experiment could look at a really low value offering using flat mail, a basic cardboard sleeve, and the items sent with limited or no welcoming message.
- A second experiment could look at a high value experience with express post, elaborate packaging, and a welcome pack.
After discovering which mail out and packaging options work best, and that the concept of mail order shaving kits is a viable sales strategy, the ability to scale up safely is more assured.
This is the point where you can start investing in the manufacture of your own blades to reduce costs, introduce wider support infrastructure to meet consumer demand, or improve on the core customer experience by exploring new product mixes.
Wrapping up
Throughout this process we have gone from sketching out an idea on a sheet of paper, to researching the needs of the customer, analysing the market and competitors, and then developing a strategy to get the product into the market and tested.

When everyone has an idea for “next Facebook”, the difference between your idea and a viable business is a solid execution. Several hours invested early on testing the viability of a concept will form a great foundation for your business.
Confident you can pull this off? Here’s your way to prove it.
