Most Innovations Fail and What to Do With It — Your Startup’s Road to Success!
Most innovations fail for one key reason: the premises are wrong i.e. even if you thought the customers would appreciate the value in your offer, reality is that they don’t. (How dare they?)
So the first and foremost thing to do is to validate that your innovation would ❶ really attract customers who would then ❷ continue using it. But stop! Don’t jump into the “let’s build it” mindset. You want to validate that your customers might be interested right now, before building almost anything. Chicken or egg?
Think how would you market your innovation, and start doing it nimbly, get your first prospect customer, then 10. Find them among your network — you must know people who would benefit from your innovation, do you?
Tell them about your idea. Even better, set up a landing page for your innovation, where you describe it briefly and provide a way for your first customers to sign up. “The product is not ready yet, be the first to know when it will be available.” Use a service like launchrock.com.
Then drive 100 of your contacts to the page. Simply email them telling that you are building a product such-and-such and ask them to sign up on the page.
If you want to increase the number of subscriptions (the conversion rate) do some in-house ethnographic research. Interview some of your contacts who are potential users of your innovation and ask them to tell you about the most important problems they have in that domain. Listen to their words, and use the same words in the copy of your landing page. These will resonate the most.
How many people sign up? 1 in 100? 10 in 100? If you have at least a few (if not, there’s something wrong in your idea!), start offering a barebone product or service. Can you do it?
Usually startuppers’ first reaction is “no way, I must offer the final version, polished and all”.
Well, think again. An early adopter might be very willing to accept a half-baked product. A version in which you provide the service manually, with no infrastructure at all.
Can you provide your core service through an email? Or a phone call?
With a barebone service you start interacting early on with (few) customers. You discover what they are really interested in, what are the features they use most, which features are they requesting all the time, which others they don’t use at all. What a great piece of learning!
You discover how to tweak your service to increase the appeal to customers. Keep going and tweaking till you have a business proposition that appeals to your customers for real, not just because you thought they might like it. You’re getting closer to product-market fit! (you might need to tweak also the target market in the process)
Now it’s time to explore how to grow your customer base. Start asking your customers to recruit other people for you. Because they love your service, don’t they?
And start thinking like a growth hacker (the new breed of marketers with zero budget). Build a growth engine inside your service. E.g. offer additional services to your customers if they help recruit new users. Same as Dropbox with their offer of 500Mb for every new customer you bring in.
After you do it, how many more customers do you get? Are they referring new customers? Did the initial 10 customers grow to 50? or 100? Or did the thing stall? If it grew, congratulations, you achieved product-market fit for good! NOW it’s time to think how you’ll build your product!
If it stalled, why didn’t your customers help develop the community? Is your service really as valuable for them as you think? Is there anything you can change so that there are more signups, more customers stick, and more customers refer other customers?
You might need to rethink your service and/or the target market. Is there another market for which your offer could be valuable? Did you uncover some other needs that you didn’t think of? Do you have a new value proposition? How can you test it? Go on and do it!
And remember, this process looks difficult and scary because nothing is fixed and certain, but it’s how all successful businesses started, in the digital space as well as in the physical space (this is how Virgin Airlines started!)
Suggested readings
- Growth Hacker Marketing by Ryan Holiday
- Pretotyping by Alberto Savoia
and if you have time to read longer
- The 50th Law by 50 cent and Robert Greene (on being fearless)
Good luck!
I’m Leonardo Zangrando.
I’m passionate about unlocking potential in people and organisations.
I help transform organisations and increase their entrepreneurial abilities.
I help people fulfil their true potential and become what they can BE.
Follow me on Twitter and meet me #IRL at Launch22 incubator in London.
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