So after you fill out the business model canvas and you summarise all your hypotheses
and you have a good idea about all the different aspects of your business,
what you need to be doing is testing your ideas, and you do this through customer development and your product.
So to save your time and energy, you're building the simplest version of your product and you launch it fast.
So you learn from your customers, you understand what they want and what they need, and you modify your product.
And how do you do that? Well, there is a very simple way you talk to people.
And that sounds simple enough, doesn't it? However, the problem with that is that you you can bias people about your idea very easily.
And when you do that, you get false positives.
And that doesn't help you. It doesn't add value to your business.
And it actually may get you in trouble and it will get you in trouble.
Because when you want to make decisions, you will have bad data.
But how do we know that the data you're acquiring are not useful?
So these are a couple of signs that you can keep an eye on that will tell you that the data you're acquiring don't have any value to your business.
So when you get compliments or generic comments or ideas about more features on your project or common knowledge,
which is stuff you can just learn by using Google Research, these are a waste of your time and other people's time.
And you may wonder why conversations go wrong. Why are the data you're acquiring not useful?
So the problem with founders is that they fall in love with their idea and why they think that
they're being very scientific and very methodical when they're asking people about their idea.
What they're actually doing is facing for compliments.
I have this awesome idea for a business, but that I've been working on for months.
Do you like it? Well, if you put your idea.
Most people will lie to you. Why?
Well.
Because they might don't care or because they don't want to hurt your ego or because they don't want to keep talking about your idea for another hour.
So convincing people that your idea is great is not going to get you anywhere.
Unless they're holding a chequebook and they're ready to to give you money for your business.
Don't do that. So things that you don't need in order to acquire information about your data.
You don't need formal meetings.
You don't need to develop interview scripts or pay people to take surveys or spend hours and hours in talking to people and arranging meetings.
Instead. This is what you need to be doing. So know what information you need to know about your business.
What are your biggest risk, your biggest assumptions about your app for your business?
What is most likely to sink your business and what can you do to eliminate or reduce that risk?
What is it that you need to find out in order to get you to the next step safely?
The next step is big. The customers you have easy access to and have a casual conversation.
Don't talk about your idea because it's very tricky.
You will easily bias them instead and don't trying to convince them, of course, that your idea is great.
Instead, talk about their lives and ask about facts.
Ask about past actions, not future ones.
I asked them about how they're solving that problem today.
What are they using? Which project? Which features are they finding useful?
Why? What else they would like to do to see?
Is that working for them? Or are they looking for something more?
The truth is that if they are not using anything to solve that problem right now, it might not be important enough for them.
They might not care to solve it. And that means they're not going to buy your product.
Ask questions and listen more to what they say.
And remember, no idea survives its first encounter with a customer.
So you have an idea right now when you make your business, it might be a little bit different, but it might be a completely different idea.
And this is fine. You need to learn as you go.
You need to address a market need. Otherwise, you don't have a business.
So very quickly because are going to have another lecture on this.
The simplest pro product that you can build to test your critical hypothesis about your business is called the minimum
viable product or MVP is what you're trying to build and launch your business with before you start adding more features.
What if you have a crazy product idea and the manufacturing process is too expensive?
How can you test it? What can you do? Well, nowadays there are a lot of different sites that can help you with that.
Like crowdfunding or Kickstarter. And this is a crazy idea.
These are wobbly balls. And you might be wondering who was going to fire one lightbulb.
What is the point of having a bowl like this?
Well,
this lady had an idea and she uploaded a small video on this site and she was aiming to get $10,000 to fund the manufacturing process of this idea.
And as you see, she raised almost four times that amount,
which gave her the money to do what she was trying to do, but also clearly proved that there is a market.
There are customers. There are people to buy her product.