The ex-consultant’s approach to building a start-up

Don’t jump to product too quickly, over-invest in validating your hypothesis

1. (Develop hypothesis) Define problem & solution
2. (Refine hypothesis) Market research (understand competitive offerings, survey/interview consumers). Note: you can read about my process refining the hypothesis & testing the sub-assumptions here.
3. (Integrate hypothesis) Build basic prototype.
4. (Test hypothesis) Test prototype with real users. This is where I am at today, I want 100 real users to borrow something using my service, and each time I am learning a lot.
5. (Develop product) Build core product
6. (Brand product) Define value proposition for select market segments & build brand identity
7. (Ship product) Go-to-market
8. (Refine product) Grow, scale, succeed

It was important to think in these terms and remind myself of the huge gap between hypothesis & product.

- A hypothesis goes through numerous iterations of #2-4. At some point, a decision is made on whether or not the idea has proven product/ market fit (e.g., reviewing data across the surveys, interviews, prototype feedback, there should be some clustering of user need for the hypothesized solution).

- A product is built once product/market fit has been defined. It can be an extension of or a pivot away from the prototype.

I have a hypothesis. It doesn’t have a name, and its website is hosted on the Heroku domain. Its prototype is essentially a simple form backed by me the concierge; I process and handle requests manually with the barest minimum of automation (here’s to doing things that don’t scale!). But, it has been cheap.

This is important in two ways.

1. If I were a super-developer, I could build, in <1 week, a prototype that looked so professional and cool, people would use it simply to use it. But realistically, developing the product means shelling out a significant sum of $$. I can afford to do that once, so I need to be sure I have a product that the market wants.*
2. Branding is even harder. Find a color scheme, a cute word, a catchphrase, a jingle, that succinctly points users to your value proposition in ~one second. With just a hypothesis, I’m not even sure what my value proposition is, so how can I build a brand? I believe the benefit of giving people something easy to remember today, is not worth the potential cost of getting it wrong and confusing users with a brand shift tomorrow (albeit risk for me is lower as I don’t have an established name).

EDIT: As of May 2014, I started to brand a little, now I can say I’m working on www.ProjectBorrow.com. If you’re curious as to why the branding emerged, read this blarticle.

*Assumes worst case: no technical person joins me by the time I’m ready to build, and no funding. And also, based on what I’ve heard, I will realistically want to only use more premium outsourcing options.

This blarticle was written in the context of building a product that helps people borrow occasional-use items (e.g., sleeping bags, electric drills) from their friends & neighbors. Check out the prototype here.