My startup validation process
neilcocker.com
My startup validation process
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Re: My startup validation process
#2I'm spending time refining this, so would be genuinely interested in any feedback, or ways to improve.
It's absolutely not the finished article, and intended to be quick and deliver results.
Re: My startup validation process
#3I'm spending time refining this, so would be genuinely interested in any feedback, or ways to improve. It's absolutely not the finished article, and intended to be quick and deliver results.
Thanks for sharing, I enjoyed reading your article! Very actionable advice.
Re: My startup validation process
#4I'm spending time refining this, so would be genuinely interested in any feedback, or ways to improve. It's absolutely not the finished article, and intended to be quick and deliver results.
Neil would you be interested in turning this into some sort of service? I could help with that, shoot me an email (check profile).
Re: My startup validation process
#5I'm spending time refining this, so would be genuinely interested in any feedback, or ways to improve. It's absolutely not the finished article, and intended to be quick and deliver results.
These are definitely some validate starting points. I recommend giving some sort of chronological order to the process. With emphasis on spending quality time up front defining what problem space you are attempting to solve. Once that is defined, you might have a more clear idea about your potential target customer. From there you could actually build better traits about your customer. This process is typically known as building personas. This part of the process is helpful and helps you and your team focus on what are the real themes/problems needing to be solved.
I do agree that reading definitely helps but one book isn't enough. There are several books in this space that are helpful but probably deserve their own thread. Especially around strategy. Maybe worth building out a collective comprehensive recommendations list one day.
Surveys are great but wont capture the true understanding of your customer or the heavy user of what ever product you create. One needs spend some quality time (1hr initially) with these customers so you can build out a better persona which will help you hone and focus on creating the right solution. Then you can use future surveys after gaining trust to get valuable feedback. I do however understand this is a "fill the top of the funnel" approach which isn't bad.
However that said you make some really great points throughout your posting about falling in love with the problem which will allow you to create a great solution.
Re: My startup validation process
#6It's a good start! You might want to take a look into the books "Business Model Generation" and "Running Lean" (and follow-ups for both). The first one comes out of science and is the state of the art tool to reason about your business. The second roughly follows a similar approach but tries to be even more practical.
Both companies also provide digital tools and I'm thinking about building one, too. Hey, we can take this post as an early experiment and see if someone is interested!
Re: My startup validation process
#7I'm spending time refining this, so would be genuinely interested in any feedback, or ways to improve. It's absolutely not the finished article, and intended to be quick and deliver results.
These are definitely some validate starting points. I recommend giving some sort of chronological order to the process. With emphasis on spending quality time up front defining what problem space you are attempting to solve. Once that is defined, you might have a more clear idea about your potential target customer. From there you could actually build better traits about your customer. This process is typically known…
Thanks for the feedback. Some useful insight.
Yes, agreed that there's much more that can be done, but this is attempting to put a basic framework around the very early stages of validation (which should obviously be an ongoing process, anyway).
It's frustrating because obviously stuff like persona building should be in there, but at some point if you include everything it becomes too unwieldy to be a simplistic, quick process. I'd love to get to a point where this is both simple AND comprehensive. But I expect that's a bit of a holy grail.
Re: My startup validation process
#8Re: My startup validation process
#9It's a good start! You might want to take a look into the books "Business Model Generation" and "Running Lean" (and follow-ups for both). The first one comes out of science and is the state of the art tool to reason about your business. The second roughly follows a similar approach but tries to be even more practical. Both companies also provide digital tools and I'm thinking about building one, too. Hey, we can take…
Thanks! I've read Running Lean, but will check out BMG.
Re: My startup validation process
#10I'm spending time refining this, so would be genuinely interested in any feedback, or ways to improve. It's absolutely not the finished article, and intended to be quick and deliver results.
Neil would you be interested in turning this into some sort of service? I could help with that, shoot me an email (check profile).
Great, I'll be in touch.