The importance of identifying and testing your assumptions before launching your Startup
We work with startups in a super early stage, at this point you need to be truly open minded to decide if your idea is worth pursuing or not. Nobody wants to spend time and money for nothing, and unfortunately not all ideas work.
Before we decide investing on an idea, we always work first with the founders to test it as much as we can. The goal here is to focus exclusively on ideas that solve real problems providing solutions the customers really need or want.
And how can we do this? Easy, testing everything and being willing to change your business model and value proposition as much as it’s needed to give your customers what they want.
It is usual that entrepreneurs fall in love with their idea and reject anything that goes against it, but this is not the right way to succeed. At this stage you need to be humble, we are sorry to say this but the fact that you have a problem doesn’t mean other people have it as well.
So you need to forget about what you think and try to see your product through your customer’s eyes to learn as much as you can from them and make good choices.
To start testing, you need to define what you want to know, a great tool to do this is the Lean Canvas.
The Lean Canvas is essentially a tool that helps you define every single part of your business. When you go through it you will find that you are making a lot of assumptions about the business and this is what you need to test in the first place.
So we recommend you create a worksheet and note all the hypothesis you can. After that, go and test them as fast and cheap possible, the most usual way to do this is trough user interviews.
There are many different kinds of interviews, doesn’t matter which one you chose, your goal here is to know EVERYTHING about how your customers feel, what they are struggling with, how they are trying to solve their problems…
But wait! don’t expect people give you all the answers… It’s surprising but most people don’t know themselves and can’t even tell you what they want, but at least they will give you powerful insights. So gather all the information and interpret it afterwards to extract the facts you need.
If you want to be successful at this point, you need to get dirty with customer research. Yes, it is the moment to get out of the office, forget about embarrassment, have a lot of nerve and dig deep into those folks’ minds if you really want to build a successful startup.
After this process you will be a step closer to building something great, but don’t relax! Once you have all the new knowledge you have to start creating your first MVP and continue testing your user’s reactions over and over again.
