Think. Build. Test. Iterate. Ship
Spend an hour on your idea and the next four weeks building it.
You probably have an idea that you think will revolutionalize the world, right? Awesome. Congratulations. However, that’s just 1% of the work. Your idea is probably not the only solution in the market. Society by default will figure temporal solutions to their problems, you should be trying to simplify that process. The best advice is to start with the user’s problem and work backward to your solution.
People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole. — marketing professor Theodore Levitt.
What you want to do is give society a solution it needs but doesn’t know how to get for itself because if it does, it would have mass-produced it already. You also don’t want to spend too much time tinkering your idea because it’s all based on your assumption that society wants your solution.
So, let’s say you have your idea on paper, napkin, notepad or any other place of your choice. Next is to validate your idea and assumptions, and since you can’t show a piece of napkin to users, you have to build something. Regardless of your competence and skill set, you should build something simple to show people or just hire the services of a builder. For this context, I will be referring to a software engineer. Feel free to replace that for any non-technological startup.
The purpose at this point isn’t to build a complete and flawless product. It is to test and validate your assumptions of the market. You don’t have to build an application if you can’t, a landing page or even a google form is enough to start. At this point, you’re going to need to verify that users love what you want to build enough to pay for it and that the total addressable market is big enough to motivate you.
While testing, be ready to talk about the problem you’re solving. This is your first chance at marketing your product. People will be curious, ask lots of questions, give feedback if you have a working product. Your job is to listen and gather as much data as possible. You don’t have to implement everything, but you need to know all the possible options and alternatives. Again, people don’t always know what they want, so there’s that too.
If you have gotten to this point, congratulations you’ve done the tough part. Now, you’re ready to begin the tougher parts.
Our story:
For us at Aabo, the story is the same as above. I had this idea a long time ago, but I kept pushing it until Akomolafe brought it up. We talked extensively about the challenges of getting help in Lagos if one has an emergency. And yes, we know of 112. Okay, the truth is, we started talking about the difficulties of getting help if a person is harassed by the police (sars). It felt like an awesome challenge that needed to be solved and that’s how we started.
Within the first twenty-four hours, we got a name, a logo and I started building the test application. Aabo is actually Yoruba for safety and security. Our initial solution was really simple. A user reports an emergency and we send an SMS to the user’s predefined emergency contacts. We also talked about getting verifiable partners on board.
Four weeks later, we had built our first version of the product. The UI was a bit crappy, the UX was fairly okay, some features broke. I even had to clear the database once after getting real users to log their data. Bummer, I know. The core features however worked as expected and that was enough to show others.
If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late. — Reid Hoffman. LinkedIn
In this version, I implemented the very minimum necessary to sell our solution to the problem we are interested in solving. We got it to Google’s PlayStore. Apple AppStore wasn’t ready yet. I shared this with a few friends of mine, answered loads of questions and gathered as much feedback and data as possible. We might be up to something, but who knows. Time will tell. :)
Since you’ve read to this point, please follow us on Twitter. We promise not to bore you. Aabo
All of the above is still new to me as a first-time tech entrepreneur, but hey, I am open to learning and exploring. I will be documenting my experiences and trust it will be beneficial to someone else. Finally, shout out to Chuks, Feranmi, Akomolafe, Gesit. You guys are amazing and literally held my hands. Thank you.
