- How do you create a product that people love?
How do you ensure that you don't go and build
and spend a ton of money and a lot of time
building something that nobody wants.
How do you make sure that your company doesn't fail?
Because the truth is, when you start this start-up game,
there's no guarantees.
I mean, honestly from day one, you're almost guaranteed
to fail because that's just the way it works.
So, what I want to share with you guys in this video
is three different ways to essentially validate your ideas
because so many entrepreneurs they start off
and they're like, okay well I've got this idea
but I don't even know where to start.
I'm going to walk you through my approach
and some of my beliefs around validating your start-up idea.
The number one belief that I have is that
I assume that I'm wrong about some part of the business.
And it might sound crazy, but if you think about it,
I start off by saying,
okay here's what I believe to be true.
There's a problem, there's a solution that could exist,
but I assume that I'm wrong about the solution.
And then what I try to do is I go out there
and I validate it.
So one of the big differences between me and a lot
of other people is that I start off with the assumption
that I'm wrong, and maybe you're like
well how can you do that?
Cause it's a little schizophrenic, think about it.
You've got a one part to be absolutely certain
that this is a good idea, to quit your job,
to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars,
to raise funding from other investors,
and on the same side I'm telling you
to assume that you're wrong.
Isn't that crazy?
But what I'm saying is it's not wrong
about the overall problem and the opportunity,
it's wrong about the solution.
And what you want to figure out is
what are other ways that I can test
and validate each step of this product or solution in a way
that's not going to cost me a bunch of time or money.
So the first one I'm going to share with you guys
is clickable prototypes.
I learned this from a strategy called Design Thinking.
It's a whole framework around being creative
and building product, taking from kind of
industrial product design.
And Design Thinking argues that you should create
paper prototypes.
So in the software world, the equivalent
is clickable prototypes.
And I use KeyNote, or you can use PowerPoint,
gosh forbid you have a Windows machine.
Just upgrade, do yourself a favor.
I know, okay, no more judgement.
Just create a clickable prototype,
and what's cool is you just, every essentially slide
becomes an interface in the product
and every button click just kind of links to another slide
that simulates the product.
That's a higher fidelity clickable prototype.
What I love about that, is you can create a PDF document,
share that on emails, have people review it,
click it, and give you feedback.
So it's real feedback based on something
they can put in their hands.
Most people, their validation is conversations.
And it's not even like a structured conversation,
maybe you've done this.
It's kind of conversations with friends saying
yea, that's a great idea, you should do it.
The biggest thing that you want to avoid
is spending six months of your life going down
a path because friends of yours said it was a good idea.
That is the fastest way to just lose moral, fail,
not build something awesome, and this is why, to me,
clickable prototypes is the first of the three strategies,
but it's probably one of the most important ones
to just get your thinking straight. Right?
Looking at these screens, looking at the flows,
think how a customer might perceive the product
and how they want to solve the problem
that you want to go out there and solve.
So clickable prototypes.
The second one is what I call
pre-selling the customers or using an EAP Strategy
or Early Adopters Program Strategy.
So, a lot of people talk about pre-selling your product,
getting people to give you money up front,
but, how do you do that?
And this strategy is a really simple way
because you go to potentially, my rule is 10
if it's B2B, or 100 if it's consumers,
and you say look, I'm working on this new idea,
it's early stage, but I think you'd be a great company,
you probably have this problem,
you can do some customer validation,
if they say they have the problem, and
here's the way it works, because you're part of the
EAP program, the Early Adopter Program,
we're going to give you a discount.
You still need to get money from them,
go through that learning experience, purchase orders,
receivables, legals, like go through that experience
of saying okay, getting them to part with some money,
but by doing that, it'll allow you to co-create the product
with your customers, it's invaluable.
So that's the second one, is pre-selling to customers
using the Early Adopter Program.
The third is doing what I call a MEVO,
or a Minimum Economical Viable Offer.
Now, here's what's different.
In the world of lean start-up and most people
totally took this out of context, it's not what Steve Blank
the author of "The Four Steps to the Epiphany" says
it's not what Eric Ries, one of my advisors
at my previous company Clarity and a good friend of mine.
A lot of entrepreneurs go straight to landing pages.
I'm going to build a landing page and put the offer
and see if people will subscribe to my new start-up.
That is the craziest thing ever.
Stop doing that, that doesn't tell you anything
because the truth is, is you're not going to do
any strategic marketing on that landing page,
you're probably going to tweet it out,
you're probably going to try to get some press,
and the people that are opting into it,
maybe they have the problem,
but giving you their email address is by no means
customer validation in my humble opinion.
What I want to argue instead is you create a MEVO.
It's saying, I'm going to create an offer,
a valuable offer in the minimum amount of features
that I feel that will get somebody to part with their money
and I'm going to create that landing page
and get them to sign up, even if the product
doesn't exist on the backend, it's what I used on my
company Flowtown.
And what you do is once they sign up,
if you have no product just say hey,
we're still early, we're releasing people
little bit by little, your credit card wasn't charged,
even though again, you accept the credit card,
you can use different tools for that (like Stripe)
and say, when we're ready we're going to let you know.
But that is true validation. So real quick,
I'm going to walk you through three of my top ways
and I kind of stacked them almost in this order.
The first one is creating a clickable prototype
using Keynote, or you can even use Balsamiq's a great tool.
The second one is doing pre-sells to customers
using the Early Adopter Program which is EAP,
it's just saying look, let's co-create this together
because you're involved, you're giving us feedback,
we're going to give it to you at a discount,
and again, if at any point you decide you don't want
to build the company anymore, you want to pivot away
from that core customer, you can do that,
give their money back, no big deal, no harm, no foul.
And then the third one is to really
offer something and get a credit card.
Get a transaction going, do a MEVO,
a Minimum Economical Viable or Valuable Offer.
Okay, that is different, it's not an MVP,
it's actually getting people to land on a landing page,
you give them the offer and they buy it.
That is true validation, if you know somebody
that needs to learn these lessons,
please share this video with them.
I've had this conversation with so many entrepreneurs
over the last few weeks and I want to make sure
that they understand that doing a landing page
and asking for emails is not customer validation
by any means whatsoever.
As per usual I want to ask you to like and leave questions
below in the comments, I want to challenge you
to live a bigger life and a bigger business
and I'll see you next Monday.