Stitch and Test
I was recently asked to jump on an airplane and go to Warsaw to give a workshop and spend time with some entrepreneurs in the Hugething pre-accelerator run by SpeedUp Venture Capital Group and Aviva. My workshop, ‘Your Concentrated Hustle’, was all about having the right focus.
It’s incredibly important for early stage entrepreneurs and later stage ones, to focus on what really makes a difference to their businesses. Focusing on what moves the needle, on what is pointing them towards their North Star metric, that one thing that is driving success within their company.
I spoke about the importance of hustle and how it differentiates founders, concentrating and finding that niche to focus on, and gave some tips and tricks on how to hack conferences to make the most of them.
One section of my presentation was about “Stitch and Test”. Something that I’ve noticed time and time again with early stage teams is that they tend to jump straight in and start building a product. They’re basically saying they know what their future customers want and they’re going to build it for them. No. Just stop it.
I’ve come up with a new term to describe something for early stage entrepreneurs, Stitch and Test and what I mean by this is ‘Stop Writing Code’.
Honestly, idea stage founders put Sublime Text away. You can have the most beautiful product in the world, which will probably cost you a lot of money and resources to build, but if the market isn’t there, your $B startup dream isn’t going anywhere.
It’s so so important to thoroughly validate your ideas with potential customers or users, and get people to pay you something for it or to simply use it in the case of most B2C companies. If you can’t get traction at this stage, it’s probably not going to work out for you!
I’m going to share with you some ways you ‘Stitch and Test’ to figure out demand for your product or service, whilst on a shoestring budget.
The idea behind Stitch and Test is to use existing products, tools and services to prove that someone, and hopefully lots of people want your offering — all before you write a single line of code.
Especially for non-technical people — this is a great way to get an MVP together to showcase and demo and actually get paying clients on board.
Easily throw up and design a landing page with Instapage or Unbounce or a similar service. Find some nice pictures from a site like Unsplash.com (royalty free images), get your value proposition and get it in front of potential customers and/or and get feedback.
Place a Typeform on your landing page for super interactive, convertible forms and start to collect information on your customers. Don’t build a chatbot from scratch — use something like Chatfuel to get something up and running and see if there is some demand there for it. Collect visitors phone numbers on your landing page and build your MVP using Whatsapp or even FB messenger. Use Zapier to tie all the data together between the different apps seamlessly and automatically!
Most of these services are free to use, especially from the start. Stitch them together and see if you can build a critical mass of interest and people wanting to use your service. If you get the critical mass, build the product. If you don’t, pivot and keep looking for product market fit.
