a-Qube’s Proof of Concept: Startup Idea Validation (SIV) — Part II
In the first part of this article we talked about a-Qube’s first Proof of Concept: Startup Idea Validation (SIV) — running for 5 hyper-intense months between July and November 2018, in Tallinn, Estonia. The workshops, as well as a-Qube itself, were designed to be a welcoming and challenging environment for entrepreneurs, students, freelancers, and innovators-of-any-kind — not only for them to test a-Qube’s framework, but also to turn their most innovative Business Ideas into fully developed Business Proposals.
Together with this dive into the memory, we wrote as well about the very own motivations behind launching the incubator in the first place, and we’ve have taken a closer look at the QUBE Idea Validation Framework, the “canvas” we used to guide participants throughout the idea implementation process.
In this second and final part, instead, let’s take a look at how such format and framework can provide a real-time market validation, participation-based incentives and finally lead to a democratic selection of the winning ideas.
The most accurate market validation is created along the process
According to many pieces of research, one of the biggest reasons for business failure is the lack of a market need for their product. Validation is not relevant only to potential entrepreneurs and future startuppers, but also to existing business-owners to prove the concept of the initial business idea.
Together with that, though, we know also how most of them keep their ideas only to themselves. They are simply afraid that if anyone hears about their business ideas, they will use it to create their company and will succeed. Perfectly reasonable, right?
Well, yes and no. In fact, here the conundrum: if you keep your ideas only for yourself, though, you cannot validate them. And if you don’t validate them, you are more likely to fail.
Now, we don’t want you to fail, so we had to do something about it.
Obviously, there are some great and “proved-to-be-effective” ways to validate your idea, from using Google Trends to get insights on what people are searching for on the internet, to putting together an online community of the target audience you believe your business idea has. These actions are relatively easy to undertake, however, are they really as effective as they’re claimed to be in majority of mainstream articles about market validation?
We already analyze these topics extensively in our previous series, though, therefore, let’s not dwell on them too long here. For the purpose of this article, it’s enough to say that most of these tools require the creators of the idea themselves to set up their own questions and find their own answers — without any actual, dynamic interaction with their prospective users.
We like to approach the validation from a slightly different, more community-driven angle, focusing on creating the value along the process. QUBE Idea Validation Framework breaks the prototyping process into 6 easily-executable tasks that already have the market validation functionality built-in.
In addition, bringing together people from different background and professions has immense value in testing your ideas in a real-time.
Play more than the hand you’re dealt
In centralized networks, value is accrued by middlemen, third-parties and service-providers, rather than distributed to the users taking actions within the network. Decentralized networks, on the other hand, put the users in the centre — relying on the community both for the maintenance and the value-creation within the network itself — and rewarding them with incentives and benefits based on the value of their contribution.
That’s how a-Qube was designed: as a fair, peer-to-peer network, where anyone with a valuable idea or contribution could enter and exit at any time they wish. And for doing so, we used a number of Gamification techniques. Technology is just a tool for gamification, and it wasn’t the strategy or the solution, hence, in the SIV workshops, we used some of these strategies to add an incentive layer to the whole implementation process.
This has led that participants could take actions that have a direct impact both on the idea implementation process, its valuation, and their own personal benefit — while acting both as individuals and team players.
To do so, we assigned participants a fixed amount of coloured poker chips (recalling QUB tokens) each one with a different value.
Moreover, after completing each implementation slot, participants were given 3 minutes of “thinking time” during which they could agree internally, within the team, on which amount of their QUB tokens to use as a predictive guess/bet on the value of the implementation itself.
Using incentives and strategies like those we:
- Encouraged a sense of common purpose and autonomy
- Provided a high-quality experience for participants and mentors
- Created a welcoming environment based on trust, collaboration, and cooperation
Just like our grandmas’ cake recipes, we’re going to keep our winner’s mathematical formula as a secret that we will pass on to the future generations. What we can tell you, though, is that the process was fully democratic taking into a final formula both the market validation and the accuracy of each team’s self-evaluation.
As of today, a-Qube is a few weeks away from releasing our MVP — a fully-functional platform for participants to start proposing their business ideas and contribute to other projects they believe in. If we’ve sparked your interest, feel free to sign up to get early access.
