“All start-ups have a product, but only few have clients”. The reason is there’s a big difference between innovation and invention, and that’s value.
Value depends directly on users, consumers and customers. In other words, how people overcome the problems they find in a given context and the “value” they attach to it.
This is the core of entrepreneurship. In contrast to inventors, entrepreneurs focus on creating, capturing and delivering value. That’s where innovation stems from, and that’s why testing your business ideas is essential from its earliest stages.
Understanding the difference between invention and innovation is critical when acquiring a competitive, differential value. Products are NOT innovative by themselves. They become innovative when they effectively solve a need or a problem.
One of the biggest mistakes companies make is assuming they just know. They know about business, they know users and their needs. But they often ignore the context that urges users to develop strategies and find their way around.
The testing phase validates the fundamentals of the solution and helps answering key questions such as “will the people buy my product?”, “are we delivering value?” or “does my solution actually solve any problem?
Before embracing into this voyage of self-discovery it’s important to be aware of the following 5 tips.
- All you know is you know nothing. Unlearn everything you know!
- Be quick or be dead.
- No regrets. It’s just an experiment
- Play and enjoy the process. Your clients will feel it
- Ask WHY, as many times as you possibly can. Kids ask WHY a lot. WHY is a magic word providing loads of valuable information about your product, your service or your brand.
If entrepreneurship is about creating, capturing and delivering value, testing your business ideas should focus on the problem, the solution and how it’s delivered.
How well do you know your target audience? What are their pain points? Are they a real problem? How do they deal with it? And more importantly, is your solution providing a value to them?
Answering these questions is the first step to know exactly where you’re standing. Ignoring this can be compared to trying to sell sand in the desert. Deep research is mandatory to get quality data and develop your business, service or product according to your customers’ needs.
Experimenting is hard and takes time at first. But it’s a matter of getting used to it, and especially, to avoid making huge adjustments affecting your starting presentation.
Haste makes waste. And taking the easy way is a common mistake: avoid fitting the feedback you get to your desired results.
If you want to know your target customers, you need to know everything about them.
Focus on the problem
- Speak to at least 50 potential clientswho might -even remotely- need you.
- Identify and approach skeptical or critical prospects, and try to get as many details as you can. Even if they already have a solution to the problem you’re attacking, you will get valuable information on its downsides. When well used, such information can be the lead to an innovating solution.
- Problem discovery interviews. Despite taking time, one-to-one conversation is one of the most effective ways to obtain quality data about the problems users face, and learn whether the problem is worth solving in the first place. Problems need to be high enough on a customer’s priority list for them to be interested in your product.
- Focus groups. Good qualitative and quantitative data can come out of focus groups. However, planning them is critical. A battery of questions and a lot of empathy is necessary to get to the core (i.e., the information you’re looking for).
- Online surveys. Surveys are the most frequently used thermometer when it comes to measuring customer satisfaction. They might not always provide accurate, unerring results, but they do give significant statistical hints. Unfortunately, some don’t like taking the time to complete them, and some others don’t even open commercial emails. SurveyMonkeyis the most popular tool, yet Google Forms remains a very good option.
The key relies on having a solid list of leads, subscribers and volunteers. - Online data. Analyzing the available options, competitors and their strategies is quite inspiring but might not be enough. Standing out also depends on understanding what people are searching for and what the trending keywords Of course, metrics are very important to spot the paths of desire, understanding users’ behavior and detecting where, and why they do not go on.
Platforms like JungleScout are an awesome way to find what people are actually buying. Youtube’s Find my Audience provides useful data on your viewers and their preferences. Metrics like the percentage watched per view, or the average view duration are worth keeping an eye on, looking towards content optimization.
A product’s MVP is the first thing that should be tested before moving on to production.
Ask yourself what are the minimum functions your product needs to become the solution you want it to be.
3D prototypes are a good way to show your product around, test its reception and think of potential improvements. 3D printing is growing worldwide , making it easier – and safer- to develop a product with little risk and safer advertising investment. Find more about the potential of 3D ads and videos in this post. If you don’t know any 3D printing labs, try Fablabs, it covers many cities around the world.
Test, test, test. Log all the insights you get. Keep your log as updated as you can, as this rapidly changing world continuously opens new ways for development and synergy.
Becoming the solution
- Show you care. Testing means nothing without communicating. Your main objective is to obtain qualitative feedback from those who might find in your product a solution to their problems.
- Be quick. When adjusting your product’s features, when communicating to those putting time on your product. Be quick or be dead. When people give feedback on something they consider to buy, they also expect being taken seriously. That has critical impact on the company’s image. The quicker the corrections, the better the impression.
- Keep an eye on them. Spot their interests and see different ways to approach them.
- Every market has specific characteristics. A common mistake is taking for granted that what works in one context will work in a different one.
- Build a Client Advisory Board with the most engaged ones. That’s a useful way to have a reliable test field, where the solutions you find to upraising problems can be easily scrutinized.
Creating specific Landing Pages is also a necessary step to give brands and products proper visibility. Platforms like Unbounce, Wix or WordPress are making it progressively easier to make changes with no coding, and therefore allow testing your business ideas live.
How are you delivering your value?
Once you know your audience, their likelihood to consider your product a solution to their pain-points, and the way they will apply that solution, it will be much easier to focus on targeting them efficiently.
You therefore need to understand the sales cycle, and identify the more successful distribution channels to know exactly where to aim.
This is where all of the above meet.
How to deliver your business value?
- Test your sales process. On users who tested your product in previous stages. On subscribers and Social Media followers. Aim at them to understand the key parts of your sales process as described above.
- Make the user’s journey meet the seller’s journey. You already know the steps they follow, and can now think of the best ways to reach them and promote your solution.
- Crowdfunding campaigns are a great way to fund your project by presenting it publicly while getting the necessary insights to take it as close as possible to their needs.
- Never underestimate the power of Social Media. Not only is it very useful to promote and communicate with your audience, but also detecting what stops those who bounce out or leave their cart abandoned.
- Collect feedback. Feedback is something we take for granted, yet it doesn’t come for free. Collecting feedback, putting it in the right order and finding the best ways to respond and adapt to it takes time and a lot of thinking. But magic happens when you find frequent inquiries and obstacles, and you adjust your website, content and campaigns accordingly.
- So you know your audience, their pain-points, how these become a problem, and how users search ways around it. There’s an ideal platform for every industry, and they all allow adjustments: Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and lately Youtube Ads, Reddit, or Quora, to name a few.
- Forums are not a thing of the past. Moreover, they offer a great billboard for innovation and allow quick brand awareness. Populate online forums and groups with your links and solutions, and you’ll be triggering conversation with and about you.
Crowdfunding campaigns and Social Media pair up quite well and provide large amounts of quality data. And platforms like Kickstarter include forums you should always keep an eye on and respond to in a timely manner.
Make sure your product presentation meets people’s concerns, so their perception of your product makes sense in their particular context, listen to your audience, and adjust accordingly.
Testing your business ideas isn’t a one-time thing; it is a continuous process. Great ideas are everywhere, but not all of them make it out there. Moreover, testing your business ideas is a must in order to see their potential success. Not testing them can lead to plain failure.
Zappos is a great example on success driven by testing a simple hypothesis: people will buy online the shoes they can’t find on local shops. Nick Swinmurn (CEO) created a concierge service: he created a basic website, went to physical shops, took pictures of shoes and shipped them. From there on, his MVP became rapidly scalable as local retailers found a platform to selling online. You can read the whole story here.
- Adjust your course as you find the best solutions to upraising problems.
- Learn from your customers by keeping a close eyeand good communication.
- Gathering interest and followers will let you see what really matters to them. A larger audience means more clients to learn from.
- Don’t assume you know, but if you do, make sure your assumptions can be tested. The less you know, the more you will ask, and that’s the best possible way to know people need to make things simple.
Remember Socrates: I only know I know nothing.
By keeping this in mind, your business will be stepping on solid ground and will be more likely to provide effective solutions, gather value and stand out.
