So rather than just talk about this to death, let me use the example that we use throughout the lectures
and this is just the team that actually did this in five days not three weeks.
There was a team at Columbia University called Jersey Square, and they were a rental service
for professional sports jerseys and in five days they did 169 interviews and had 190 people
share their website and they actually sold 2 of their products five days from a raw idea into a business.
So on day one, these were their initial hypotheses coming into the class.
They thought that their customer segments was going to be professional sports game attendees.
Notice they were beginning with a series of hypotheses about their customer archetype.
And they thought their value proposition was going to provide a cheaper way
to officially license sports jerseys to a game, eliminate the risk of owning a player
whose jersey is traded, and to provide alternatives to purchasing counterfeit jerseys.
And their sales channel were going to be websites or stadium shops or ticket websites or direct mail.
And how they were going to create demand was through search ads,
social media, and stadium promotions.
And their revenue stream was going to be through an annual subscription model.
So when they took a look at this day one canvas, the teaching team first said
"We don't even believe that there's market here. What's the total available market then?
Is this like a hobby or a business? And how do you know and did you do any real customer discovery?
And our skepticism really in fact infuriated these guys who they thought they were the main experts
because they were wearing a lot of jerseys.
And teaching team, this is your job.
You want to irritate them into action. We did this on purpose. Not by accident.
We wanted these people to come back on the first day with enormous proof
that this was even worth spending their time, and they did it.
They went out to Yankee Stadium in New York and found the most people in the densest area
they could who actually were potential customers and they spoke to 60-somewhat
customers just to prove to us what idiots the teaching team was by design.
They didn't understand that that was part of our game.
It's to get them to raise theirs.
Now when they came back again, they showed us.
Hey, look! There might be a real business here and it's even bigger than we thought
because it includes females and so one of the things we pointed out to them is it looked like
they had multiple customer segments.
And this is just a teaching team tactic but when you have multiple customer segments
you have to have multiple value props and you probably have multiple revenue models
if not multiple other things.
Just for logistics and just for you to be able to teach, we beat them up and said
you need to put these in multiple colors because it will force you to actually start thinking about
how each segment relates to each other.
And so they got out of the building and again talked to different users or potential users
in different locations and now you could see they actually took our advice and segmented the canvas
into two separate colors because they thought there were two unique customer segments.
And now you could see the customer segment sports jersey owners match the value prop
for sports jersey owners and match the revenue model and it's fairly easy to track their thinking.
Now the thinking by now in this third-day duration it's a big idea for facilitators and coaches.
It's no longer their opinion. They now have 100-plus customers telling them this.
And life is getting kind of interesting because they now know more collectively than you do.
It's actually no longer your opinion versus theirs which it was on day one.
It's actually they're now bringing new data.
Now it can be that they're just misinterpreting the data or they might be calling
on the wrong people in the wrong places.
That's your job as the facilitator and coach.
It's to say, Well, wait a minute. That's the wrong segment.
Or gee, have you looked at your activities or your resources because you might have a great
theory on the right hand side but this thing won't pencil out if you just do the numbers.
And so we push them a bit on day three and they actually went out
and started looking at the left hand side of the canvas because we'd beat their stuffing out of them
saying yeah, yeah, yeah this might be nice but there's no way.
You know you're going to end up spending more doing this than you could bring in.
And so they went out and actually talked to the left side of the canvas and they actually found out that,
oh yeah, you were right. It's not FedEx we want to use because that's too expensive.
But we also found out how much we could actually charge.
We had people raise their hands and say we could do that.
And the other thing we push is that by the second or third day or second or third week
we want them to have launched their website or have their app up and running.
And these guys did exactly that. Literally on the third day, they had a working website.
And within nine hours, they had 81 visitors.
Even though it was all their relatives and friends, it didn't matter.
They now have traffic to a site and they actually received an order from the first customer
who wasn't even a relative, which was actually again another sign
of a teaching team standing up and cheering.
So we literally all stood up and applauded and then we reminded them that the record inside of a class
was a purchase order for half a million dollars so they still had $499,000 to go
but it was a good start and of course it makes the other teams who were barely able to get
talking to customers understand what the scale of the game is and that you really need to be
playing this seriously here.
And again, for facilitators and coaches, your goal is to keep the pressure on.
You've got to keep it on. Be polite. Be respectful.
But just remind them that the pressure you're putting on them is about 1/100
of what it's really going to be like in a real start up.
And just understand, you're not trying to be mean.
But part of your activity, if you remember, is to figure out
how these teams operate in pressure and it might just be that a good number of them
aren't suited for this stage of the company.
What a cheap way to find out. This is a simulation of a startup.
And your job is to make sure they understand that this is just a fraction of the 24/7
sleepless nights that they're going to be spending for the next couple of years.
So you could see after five days, just five days, after talking to 160 customers
you could see how the business model evolved dramatically from something that
looked like this on day one to something that looked like this on day five.
On day one, a series of untested hypothesis, a faith-based enterprise.
On day five, the faith has turned into facts and this startup is on the road
to actually building something that customers might want.