ClearPurpose

One of the key elements of the Lean Startup movement is quickly getting a “minimal viable product” (or MVP) into the hands of customers and learning whether or not your hypotheses about customers, problems, and your value proposition are correct. The MVP is really just the first in a number of iterations as you learn and adjust on the road to a successful market launch.

The most important hypotheses for a startup business are those dealing with the customer and the value proposition. Do you understand the customers and their needs, and does your product or service (and the way you are delivering it) meet those needs in a compelling way? While the customer discovery process can give you some level of confidence, you won’t really know until you put a product in the hands of a customer.

The minimal viable product is the fastest, cheapest form of your product that clearly communicates the core of your value proposition. This isn’t the product that you’ve dreamed of. It’s not beautiful. It doesn’t have all the features that you’ve imagined. In fact, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman famously said “If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you launched too late.”

Read the full article linked here to learn more about MVPs, Validated Learning, and SDG Games’ MVP.

For the past several weeks we’ve been walking down the startup strategy path for SDG Games, a new business concept that has grown out of my desire to learn more about Biblical geography. The initial business concept was captured in a startup strategy strawman. We identified and then further developed an initial target customer persona. We captured our value proposition and validated a level of problem-solution fit. Now, we are far enough into the journey to develop an initial hypothesis for a business strategy.

What is a business strategy and how do you develop one?

Read the full article to find out how I approached it for SDG Games.

Over the past few articles we have developed a better understanding of our target customer. While SDG Games products likely will appeal to a very broad audience of Christian families, we’ve decided to focus first on the busy homeschooling Christian mom who wants to integrate faith, learning, and fun for her family. In this article, we explore whether we have a value proposition that fits that mom’s desires. In other words, do we have Problem-Solution Fit?

Read the full story here.

A couple of weeks ago I shared with you the Customer Profile I’d developed for the initial target customer persona for SDG Games. Kelly Jo is a (fictional) homeschooling mom with a couple of kids. I developed some hypotheses about the jobs, pains, and gains for this persona. How could I test these hypotheses?

Steve Blank says that the number one goal of customer discovery is “turning the founders’ initial hypotheses about their market and customers into facts.” And the phrase he’s famous for saying in how to do customer discovery is “get out of the building.” Customer discovery is all about spending time with potential customers to deeply understand how they live and work so that your offers truly fit their needs.

For customer discovery to test my hypotheses for SDG Games, I pursued three approaches: an online survey, interviews, and participating in Facebook groups.

Read the full article here to see how each approach worked and what I learned.

One of the most important early decisions that a startup can make is who they are setting out to serve. A startup generally is built upon a key hypothesis that someone needs something. Clearly identifying that “someone” sets the stage for testing that hypothesis and eventually being very focused in marketing to the right audience.

Since a key focus for SDG Games is that our games be educational, perhaps our initial target market should be Christian Homeschooling Families. By my estimate, there’s somewhere in the range of 200,000 to 1 million Christian homeschooling households. That’s a big enough market to go after, but a focused enough market to deeply understand and target.

Identifying the target market is good, but to deeply understand the needs of this market, we need to take our thinking down to the level of the individual decision maker and how she will value what we have to offer. We start by creating a persona for our target buyer and then identify the jobs, gains, and pains that drive her decision making. We put it all together in a Customer Profile.

Of course, all of these are hypotheses which will be tested. More about that in my next article in this series.

Read the full article here.

Modern startups recognize that the path from initial concept to successful launch is not a straight line. In fact, it involves almost literally going in circles.

The lean startup methodology replaces the lengthy business plan phase with a period of rapid iteration and learning. For any given hypothesis, the team builds a test, runs an experiment, evaluates the results, modifies the hypothesis, and then repeats the whole process over again until they know what is true. This is called the “build-measure-learn” loop. 

While this lean startup methodology is best understood in terms of product development, I believe that it also applies to strategy.

When I work with startups, I encourage them, very early in their life, to develop what I call the Startup Strategy Strawman. 

The Startup Strategy Strawman captures the key initial hypotheses behind the startup concept, with the expectation and hope that flaws will be found and the overall strategy significantly strengthened before actual business launch.

For this SDG Games startup business idea, the Startup Strategy Strawman is:

• Problem: When most Christians read the Bible, they don’t know much about the geography being discussed, and so they lose important context in the stories that God has provided “for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for instruction in righteousness” (2 Timothy 3:16).
• Solution: Develop games that Christians of all ages will enjoy playing that will engrain in their minds an understanding of Biblical geography so that they will naturally envision the places and journeys involved as they read God’s Word.
• Cash Flow: We will sell these games for a profit to Christian families.

In the spirit of lean startup and strawman proposals, please let me know your reaction to these hypotheses!

You can read the full article here.