Concept Generation

In our last post, I gave an overview of how we synthesized our research into (eventually) something meaningful. We also did a few deep dives with local companies, integrating ourselves in a key problem that they had to understand their pain points more clearly. At the end of the deep-dives, we found that many of the insights that we had generated from our broader research was validated. We were left with a collection of behavioral trends and key pain points that small businesses experience. It was time to start generating venture ideas!

Doc Brown, the ultimate venture idea generator

Throughout the process, we had already been keeping an excel sheet with ideas that inevitably came to mind as we spoke with small businesses. All said and done, by this time the sheet contained ~70 business ideas, all attacking some facet of the daily struggle of owning and running a successful small business. So, the first thing we did was to take a pass through that document and see which ideas jumped out in the context of all of the research we had done. Beyond the obvious “I now see that this is a terrible idea” elimination criteria, there were a couple of filters that we used to get rid of ideas:

1. Some ideas were not a good fit for this group. For example, ideas that required a deep understanding of the financial industry and the related regulations seemed like a stretch, versus ideas that focused on topics that we are collectively better informed about.
2. Some ideas, in the context of the larger research we had done, now seemed to tackle a too-small set of issues. For example, a product that bring together all the data across social media marketing platforms is useless if the user does not understand how to interpret marketing data in the first place. Just an example — this is not the area we are focusing on :)
3. Finally, other ideas did not fit well with our new understanding of the small business owners’ psyche. For example, if a group of people do not trust online recommendations aggregators like Yelp, building something involving anonymized reviews or advice will likely not resonate.

We ended up with a handful of interesting ideas. However, we wanted to be even more innovative… so, we brainstormed!

This is why it’s important to pass every idea through the sanity check filter

We knew we wanted to brainstorm, however, we had already thought up the ideas that were top of mind and written them down. We used a few techniques to try to come up with even more ideas.

Time to do some math

One of the biggest techniques we used was addition, subtraction, multiplication, division. In this type of brainstorming session, you take a system or problem and apply one of the above techniques to see if anything interesting comes out of it. Take for example the system of making and delivering pizzas. There are many elements in this system — pizza ingredients, pizza chefs, customers, pizza delivery people, trucks, storefronts, etc. Let’s pick trucks as the example to focus on.

Addition: Let’s pretend that there are a HUGE number of pizza delivery trucks at our disposal. How would that change the system? Well, you could in that case deliver each pizza straight to the customer who ordered it, with no logistical mess around delivering to multiple people on the same route. Congratulations — you just invented drone pizza delivery.

Subtraction: Now imagine that there are only a few pizza delivery trucks. In fact, let’s say that there is only one truck. Now, you have to deliver all the pizza to everyone from the same truck. You could solve this by optimizing your routes really really well, and then selling the software to other delivery companies. You could also solve it by making pizzas on the fly in the truck as it was driving around and delivering — like a hybrid pizza food truck and delivery company. Often, these techniques generate more than one idea.

Multiplication: With multiplication, you add more elements and also change them in some way. For example, imagine that you had a HUGE number of trucks, and also they delivered types of food besides pizza. Maybe the fleet serves many restaurants. Now you’ve just invented a centralized delivery network that can optimize across many restaurants.

Division: With division, you deconstruct the product into elements and re-arrange them. Trucks have elements like: the wheels, the place where the pizza goes, the driver, etc. Now, what if you separated out the pizza and it’s no longer in the truck. How would people get their pizza? Well, they could order it from the truck and then go pick it up when it’s ready. Maybe the truck drives around and sells pizza to people for later that night. Now you’ve invented a door to door pizza salesman.

As you can see, it’s easy come up with some crazy, terrible, and funny ideas this way. But you can also come up with some really creative stuff that you may not have thought of naturally. It’s great for breaking your assumptions and coming up with things that are more innovative!

Tactically, this session involved even more time with us in a room with whiteboards. We wrote up our ideas on whiteboards, and made sure to record them on our gigantic idea excel sheet. This was useful later, during the stage when we pared down our ideas into the few that we would eventually prototype.

How’d we do?

At the end of the brainstorming sessions, we ended up with many good, or at least interesting, ideas. However, we still had way too many ideas to prototype them all — we needed to pare things down even further. Our next step was aggressively cut ideas. Stay tuned to hear how we decided which ideas to focus on!