You don’t need to build a huge digital solution — simply combine existing digital services
It’s a beginner mistake to want to build a completely new complex big thing as solution to serve people’s specific needs you identified, like a new product, a complete new online shop, a new app, a new game. The experienced, the pro, rather works with existing digital services and combines them in a smart way.
You simply do a mashup. And to be a bit more technical here: it’s an API mashup.
“API” sounds a bit complicated, it’s the abbreviation of “application programming interface”, and what it does is that it lets you combine different digital services with each other. It works like embedding Google Maps into your website.
This is how:
Pick one specific digital service, like Facebook, Instagram or Periscope. You can see a list of digital services with an open API here. You may write many digital services on post-its (for my workshops I have written many digital services on small cards). (If you don’t know the specific digital service, like “Khan Academy”, write down the general digital service, like “online education”.)
Now you pick another digital service and see what happens if you combine them. If it doesn’t get you anywhere pick another one until it does.
Here some examples:
What if you take “Craigslist” and put it together with “Google Maps” — you’ll see housing offers on a map. Hurray! Let’s give it a name: housing-offers-map.
Or take “Groupon” and add “Facebook Places” and “Foursquare” — you’ll get hyper-personalised offers based on your social behaviour. Call it “offers for you”.
Or take an “alarm clock app”, add “Google Calendar” and a “weather app” — your alarm clock wakes you 20 min. earlier when its frozen outside and you would need to get the ice off your car. Call this “winter alarm clock”.
Two more examples: You take “eye tracking” and add “Evernote” — while looking through an online shop, for example, the things your eyes focused on the longest are noted in Evernote. So in Evernote you will see the things you are most interested in. Call this “things I’m most interested in identifier”.
And take “Midomi”, add “Lyric Finder”, add “phone projector”, and add “Periscope” — you are at a concert of an unknown band, the band sings and no ones singing along, now your phone recognises the song, shows the lyrics on the display, you project them behind the playing band, everyone in the room now sings along while you livestream it so everyone on the web thinks that this is a cool band. Call it “making bands famous”.
You see, it’s so easy combining digital services. (For more examples of API mashups check here.)
This is how you do it for your company:
Pick a human need you want to serve. For example, for Mercedes that might be “mobility”, for Spotify that might be “a great music experience”, for Instagram it might be “organising and sharing memories”, for Nike it might be “having a great experience doing sport”.
Or you might identify needs within those wide areas, for example, within “mobility” you might identify a need like, “less commute time between home and work”, “safety in public transport at late evening”, “working from home”, “less expensive car by earning money with it while not using it yourself”, “seamlessness between different ways of transportation”, “updating the car”, “small car on weekdays, large car on weekends”.
Now with this need in mind you pick a digital service and see whether that helps serving that need, if not pick another one. If one digital service works for your need, great, now add another to combine the two serving your need — if it doesn’t work pick another second one until it works.
And there you have it, your API mashup based on a human need!
A side note: Usually you would use the API mashup tool at the end, after you “defined your business by the outcome” and used the “Customer Activity Cycle model” to identify people’s needs in your defined business area. The API mashup helps serve those needs.
Now reading about a tool doesn’t make you necessarily able to really do it — you need to experience it first hand. Therefore I also facilitate workshops with small groups, so give me a shout (sms to +45 2992 8967) and we’ll see how we match our busy calendars.
