SIPH 4 2 Developing the Business

heavenly father we give thanks to you and praise your holy name thank you for bringing us into this new day and for giving us new hope in the midst of this fundament stay with us lord as we gather this afternoon to listen learn and share each other's experiences bless us all the organizers mentors and startup mentees give us an open mind and keep a swot in heart and mind to share this same purpose in this gathering to glorify you in everything we think say and do may the purpose of this mentoring program be in accordance to your holy will all these we ask in jesus name through the immaculate touch of mary amen [Music] away [Music] [Music] oh oh good afternoon everyone thank you so much for joining us for the second discussion or the second session of start up island ph mentoring program today we are joined by one of our um one of our og mentors and she will be leading the discussion about developing the business and developing also one's business model um i'd like to introduce you to timi have led um it teams in the philippines for seven years and she is now pay rulers ceo um she's very devoted in developing and organizing startup communities all over the world and she's done a lot of work also with cebu's very own startup weekend hi timmy good afternoon hi good afternoon hot points it's so nice to see you and thank you so much for joining us again as a mentor hi timmy you're on me it's my honor and pleasure i was saying um thank you for inviting me again of course um so we're looking forward to your session today so i'll give the ball to you all right um i'm going to start sharing my screen right now could you guys let me know if you see um the developing the business yeah um yeah and nothing else no nothing is overlaid on it yeah okay so um again thank you so much for being here everyone um thank you again to dti um region 7 for ddi cebu also for having me um it's i just love programs like this because akhomismo as a startup pay ruler as a startup benefits so much from the help that's given by the government and by you know people that really want to uplift the startup community by things that the company does so it's just um i encourage everyone here to really make use of this and really take this take this um opportunity and grab it like make the most out of it so again i commend everyone that's here for being here um and it's admirable that you want to start your startup because you know leaping into entrepreneurship is exciting but it's also quite difficult and you know i i thank you for your time because as entrepreneurs and as future entrepreneurs you know your time and your energy is really your capital and i think he's really like spending the time to focus that here so there's a quote um there's an interesting quote that i i like it's by henry david thoreau and he says that when any real progress is is made we have to unlearn and learn a new what we thought we knew before um that's why i have this slide uh so you know growth isn't a linear thing um the people in this room um most likely know more than me um and i i think i could learn even more from you to be honest but you know to do something to that you've never done before which is start a startup or do this venture and to achieve success then you have to you have to let go of repeating patterns and you need to break through that and so when we go through the exercises that we go through this afternoon um i encourage you to really be willing to unlearn and relearn some things so initially we learned and then we unlearn and we relearn because you know if you think that this is theoretical i i encourage you and i invite you to just really go through the motions and really try to see like um what could be what could be byron what you could get more out of this sometimes i have this argument sometimes with um some people in apparent oh that's too theoretical that's all in the books but then you know these are frameworks um that have been proven to have worked and you might as well just give them the benefit of the doctor so you know when you're building a business from the ground up it doesn't mean that there are no rules cassette doesn't mean that there are no constraints that there are no frameworks that you need to abide by you know there's that thing but you have to learn to be able to break the rules you have to learn them first to be able to innovate in a way so you know like um the same is for you for your business and this endeavor really requires for you to operate within a certain governance right just like in the economy you operate under certain uh governance of the law of supply and demand and you know uh all businesses also operate on the premise that there is a customer and the customer is actually the most unpredictable part of your business because without them number one there wouldn't be any business and um that's kind of what we want to talk about this afternoon so i want to run a poll um i'm curious to know um who among us here in the room have graduated with a management um like um graduated from a management program in college could you so that we make it a little interactive could you um type in the chat if you are a management graduate or um or if you you know bs management or you if you've done your mba or if you did something on entrepreneurship [Music] i'm curious to know like if our people have people come from that course industrial engineering okay very nice yes yes i think you're taught also how to look at things from a management perspective my parents are actually also industrial engineers so we have someone from maitoda who is an industrial engineer and has an mba congratulations that's that's very um remarkable okay um so great i think galvan can relate now so you know in college or in in even in your job sometimes you have to make a business plan so oh so smart flow is also in ie wonderful okay so uh then um our gentle our people here from um from smartflown and my total will be familiar with the business plan so have you guys ever made a business plan um anyone so i love checking the chat actually when i'm talking because i love modifying the flow according to it wonderful so rose has already made a business plan almost every day says yes and so there okay i'm gonna i'm gonna anchor on what galvin just said we are class to create yes yes so i'm gonna anchor on that and say that if you if you have to create a business plan every single day like an official business plan if you see in my photo there it's like pages and pages of um lots of things uh moving parts right the problem with writing down because a business plan that is 20 pages long is that right now especially in the stage of your startups it's so early in the business and it's a daunting task it's just so much work where the the time you could have spent documenting you could have already been working on your idea and when you think of business plans sometimes you think of a stack of documents you think of that bindering there and unless you have a team and if you have metrics in place you know it will take weeks to create the ban by the time that you've wrapped up something in your something in your framework or something in your in your market or something has already changed so that's a problem with a business plan thus and i'm sure that smart flow is aware of where we're headed on this topic a business plan was created to really mitigate risks i mean it's not just documentation right there is a purpose for why it's there and it's the same in any business big or small you need to plan or you need to have you know you have to have an oversight of your business but for us now for new businesses um there is an easier way to manage this and it's via a one-pager and it only actually takes 20 minutes to assemble this like it will only take you that much time to be able to write a business plan one pager and i love one pagers because you know if you have to change something then it's just one little port right you don't have to go back to look up for that particular um section and then look as to and then type it up then a minute and then you have to think of the words etc anyway so with a lean canvas or with a canvas model then as you pivot as you tweak as you learn more about your business and as an assumption changes it's just so easy to edit but at the same time you have it all in one page right so that is what we are going to do um this afternoon we are going to fill out the lean canvas so the lean canvas was created and modif is a is a modified version of the bmc so um smartflow mentioned that you know you create a business model canvases for your business for your feasibility study so the lean canvas is a different kind of bmc um it was modified according to the learnings of this book this is ash morya um he wrote the book running lean so um it's just a different way of really um approaching it but it's also very good i'm happy to share the book to you guys if you want eventually i can upload it to some drive i have a i have a digitized copy of this it's very interesting to read but essentially um what we are gonna do this afternoon is we're gonna for the benefit of our our facebook audience we're gonna play the video um and then we're going to fill up our lean canvases this afternoon so um essentially i would request that um the teams uh sign up for a free account here on this website that i'm flashing on the screen i think it's called lean canvas a lean stack sorry leanstack.com so sign up for a free account there and then you can create a lean canvas um i think one for free but also i would request that the teams do it um all together so if there are three of you then there's only one lean canvas for um one gene lean canvas for my toda and one one team lean canvas along for a smart flow um so there's only one version per company okay so you will be creating your lean canvases while playing this while um the dpi team and the company team will be playing the video but um i think you can feel free to just um go into a are we are can we do breakout rooms here um joy or uh miss marilyn so that they can they can organize themselves for startup siguro um [Music] is that possible i just want to check uh we'll work on that one we'll see and then we'll message lang's uh chat okay thank you so much i think i forgot to like give that um specification earlier but it would be easier cigar for them to watch it all together and so um the key to this is you sign up for your account and then you watch the video um and so in the video there will be cues as to when you're gonna pause and then type up on your lean canvas so the first thing you set up first is your lean canvas account on lean stack and then you you then play the video and then ideally you do it together so my only advice during this time it's like don't be frustrated with the spaces that you leave because that's exactly the point um the small boxes because they're so small they require for you to be concise without going so much in depth and getting lost in the details um that don't really matter right now so it forces you to really synthesize and so take that as part of the challenge okay so uh time check um i think you need around 23 ish minutes i think that's the time they're 23. so we'll be back here by 2 30 i sorry no 2 40 so that you guys have time to break up into the breakout rooms um and then also play it together and fill up your lean stack together lean canvas together and then um sir louie will assist us by playing the video for the audience so the audience can also get a glimpse of what our startups are doing all right so i'm gonna ask on the help of our organizers for this one all right and so i will pause for my section um once the breakout rooms are all set i think uh siri louis you can go ahead and start playing the video i'm gonna stop sharing so that you can control the video share hi this is ash with spark59 today i'm going to show you how to create your initial business model canvas in 20 minutes you might be wondering why just 20 minutes after all a business model is a pretty complicated and critical thing to get right surely you should spend a lot more time on this but here's the thing the perfect plan is a myth studies have shown that most successful companies report having drastically changed their original plans along the way companies like groupon paypal flickr are all examples of this what really separates successful products from those that don't make it isn't necessarily starting with a perfect plan but finding a plan that works before running out of resources the way you do that isn't through rhetorical reasoning on a whiteboard in pursuit of that perfect plan but rather through empirical testing getting outside the building and stress testing and then refining your plan time is the scarcest resource in a startup which is why it is important to time box your initial canvas so you don't fall into the analysis paralysis trap i find that 20 minutes is enough time for the first pass perfection is not the goal here but rather the goal is to sketch or baseline a snapshot of your current thinking with that out of the way let's get started if you haven't done this already head on over to leancanvas.com and click the

create your canvas button to sign up for a free account after creating your account you will be prompted to name your first canvas i like to name my canvases by the customer segment they address because i find that the customer segment box drives the rest of the canvas you probably already have an inkling of possible customers your product addresses in your head but the first step is splitting these broad customer segments into even smaller verticals each of these vertical segments potentially represents a different business model and should ideally have its own canvas this is sometimes hard to see so it might help to consider an example this is an actual product i built in my last company cloudfire was a service that helped people share lots of photos and videos easily with each other the really broad category here was anyone that shares lots of photos and videos while i would have loved to service that market it's not specific enough when you try to market to everyone especially as a startup you end up marketing to no one down below you'll see a number of more specific and possible customer segments that i then created sometimes the split won't be perfect for instance photographers videographers and graphic designers may share enough common attributes to be lumped together as a creative segment i wouldn't worry too much about that right now the most important thing though is not going too broad like using the anyone that shares lots of photos and videos or going too narrow where you shrink the market size too much the next step is to pick your strongest customer segment for your canvas this might be one you most want to service know the most about or have the strongest channel to reach whatever your reasons start with a single customer segment and use that as the name of your canvas for the cloud fire product i decided to use parents as my first customer segment mostly because i had recently become a parent around that time frame and observe several problems that i was motivated to explore after doing this you should then see the canvas screen you can simply click in any of the boxes to start typing the blue numbers indicate a suggested order for traversing the canvas this order is only a recommendation even i'm going to deviate from it slightly in this video based on a newer flow i have been more recently using for the rest of the video i'm going to walk the canvas and show you how to fill each section using the cloud fire product as a concrete example you can reference it is most effective to complete your canvas as i cover each section while the content is still fresh in your mind so i'll have you pause the video after each section before moving on so my preferred flow these days is to complete the canvas in a set of blocks the first block that i like to tackle is the problem customer segment quadrant so much of your business model is dependent on the proper identification of customers and their problems that a solid footing here creates a very strong foundation for the rest of your canvas you've already identified your main customer segment from earlier which goes in the customer segment box it's common to have multiple participants or user roles in your business model i would next go ahead and list all of them out here but you should distinguish between customers and users when you do so that distinction is pretty simple customers pay you and your users do not for most products that distinction is also pretty straightforward in a software as a service product for instance you attract leads or users and aim to convert some or all of them into paying customers in a multi-sided business like the one driven by advertising for example google search you have users who create value through participation that you then monetize through ads here the advertisers are your customers and the users are those that are doing searches for these types of products i recommend keeping both users and customers on a single canvas marketplace businesses however are a lot more complicated here you often have two or more parties that simultaneously work to create value classic examples are ebay airbnb where you need both buyers and sellers to make the business work additionally each party often has a different incentive channel and other elements on the canvas that you also need to understand so for these types of businesses i recommend creating a separate canvas for each party involved as a slide aside there is a hashtag feature in the lean canvas tool that lets you visually group different customer segments on the same canvas in the screenshot above you'll notice different colors for buyers and sellers on the canvas based on the hashtags that are reused in multiple sections this is a nice feature that lets you quickly keep all your customer segments on a single canvas and toggle them on and off but if you're more comfortable creating separate canvases do that instead now it's time to get even more specific with your customer segments and further narrow them down into early adopters early adopters are those people that need your product the most and the early success of your business model is going to be highly dependent on how well you can define and qualify your early adopters while we all would like to build a product like facebook that is used by practically everyone on the planet even facebook started with a very specific early adopter which happened to be a college student and not just any college student but a college student on the harvard campus here is a customer segment box for the cloud fire product i have listed parents as the primary customer and their family and friends as viewers down below i further qualified my early adopters to be parents with younger kids because i felt that they would need my product more than parents with older kids pause the video here and complete your customer segment box before moving on with your customer segments and early adopters defined we'll now move on to the problem box outline the top three problems your product addresses for this early adopter you can have less than three problems but try not to list more than three a helpful technique for uncovering good problems at this stage is using a five-wise you start with a customer problem which is usually a surface problem or symptom you then ask yourself why this is a problem and do this five times each time refining the list of problems till you have a list of deeper problems that you can put on your canvas here's an example of this technique applied to the cloud fire product another useful technique is using the job to be done concept popularized by clayton christensen the basic idea here is that customers hire your products to get a job done this is often something they have already been trying to do but probably unsuccessfully once you correctly identify that job you're in a much better position to identify underlying problems and eventually define a solution for that this idea also ties nicely into the next quadrant where you ask yourself how your early adopters solve these problems today here you want to be able to describe your customers current reality what existing solutions or alternatives are they using today to get the job done doing nothing by the way is also an alternative as we'll see shortly this information will be invaluable in properly positioning and pricing your product here is my filled out problem box for the cloud fire product you'll see a list of three top problems i picked from the earlier five wise analysis along with a list of possible existing alternatives parents use for photo and video sharing pause the video here and complete your problem box before moving on the next set of blocks i like to tackle is the combination of your solution your unique value proposition and revenue streams these three things taken together help to define your offer or minimum viable product which i'll define here in a second the solution box is the one we entrepreneurs are most in love with because we love to build cool stuff but your solution isn't usually what's riskiest on the canvas instead of falling in love with your solution embrace the concept of a minimum viable product the minimum viable product is the smallest solution you can build that still delivers customer value that is it still solves a specific problem and ideally also captures some of that value which is just a fancy way of saying it gets you paid until you gain a deep understanding of your customers and their problems you cannot really define the right solution that said i'm sure you have an inkling of what you'd like to build anyway so let's list those but still constrain them around the top three problems you listed earlier so for each problems that you listed earlier briefly outline how you envision solving them using your solution here is my filled out solution box for the cloud fire product i envision solving these problems with software and list the top three features i would need to include in my minimum viable product again pause the video here and complete your solution box before moving on next we turn to the unique value proposition not only is this one of the hardest things to get right but it's also the most critical at least initially when you first introduce a product the initial battle is all about getting noticed by customers it's getting a chance to have a meaningful dialogue with a prospect you get this chance by making a compelling offer or promise represented by your unique value proposition the good news is that like everything else on your canvas your unique value proposition is also a guess or hypothesis you'll have lots of opportunity to test and refine it later here are some techniques for getting started your unique value proposition is derived from the intersection of your problem and your solution so craft your unique value proposition around your number one problem and instead of just thinking in terms of top features and benefits think in terms of your finished story benefit your finished story benefit is the value a customer derives after using your product so if you have a job board service for instance your unique value proposition isn't the cool resume building feature you have but rather the promise of helping job seekers find their dream job next avoid the use of empty words like simple fast or easy yes i know apple uses these all the time but you are not apple they can get away with it because they have built a reputation and brand around simplicity you haven't and need to be a lot more specific with your unique value proposition here's a formula by way of dane maxwell for creating a compelling unique value proposition that uses three fragments the first is the end result the customer wants which is like the finished story benefit the next is constraining that with a specific period of time when they would see these results and then finally you want to address any objections they might have the second and third items in the formula are great if you can fit them into your unique value proposition without sounding overly salesy otherwise leave them out down below are several examples of unique value propositions that use a finished story benefit with some or all of these elements and finally it's a good exercise to work on your high concept pitch the high concept pitch is something hollywood producers use all the time to distill the script of a new movie they are pitching into a memorable sound bite so for instance instead of describing the movie aliens they might just say it's like the movie jaws only in space you can do the same thing with products for example when youtube first launched the founders were describing it as flickr for videos it's important to recognize that the high concept pitch is not a unique value proposition it's not something you'd put on your landing page but it is valuable nonetheless it's valuable for helping spreading the meme of your product by word of mouth here is my filled out unique value proposition for the cloud fire product you'll see a couple of unique value propositions here along with a simple high level concept pause the video here and complete your unique value proposition box before continuing on next we're going to cover your revenue streams or pricing box at first glance this might seem a little out of place since we have mostly been considering aspects around your solution but pricing is very much part of your solution it's very much part of your product i often use an example to illustrate this imagine you have two bottles of water in front of you one is priced at a dollar and the other at three dollars which one do you think is better even though both bottles would probably be indistinguishable in a blind taste test here price alone has the power to define the product in your mind the next question which bottled water would you pick not only is price a part of your product but it also determines the customers you attract in the case of bottled water we know markets exist at both price points but the customers who routinely buy three dollar bottled water are different from those that would prefer the one dollar bottle pricing is often considered more art than science and can seem pretty daunting but there are some simple techniques for getting you started i often see entrepreneurs doing cost-based pricing versus value-based pricing which is a mistake remember customers hire your product to get a job done when they view your product they naturally compare it against their existing alternatives not what it costs you to deliver your solution these alternatives serves as price anchors in your customers minds that is why it is so important to understand these existing alternatives and then position your solution against them i'm also a big proponent of keeping your pricing as simple as possible at least at the beginning resist the urge to create multiple pricing plans at this point rather pick a price aimed at your early adopters and keep their existing alternatives in mind in the case of a multi-sided business model even though you aren't directly charging your users you are still building an asset the challenge with these business models is that this asset isn't worth anything until you pass a certain threshold or tipping point find out what that tipping point is and get some ballpark numbers on the value of that asset by looking at comparable advertising rates and or acquisitions depending on the type of business you're building here is my filled out revenue streams box for the cloud fire product i use my existing alternatives as anchors which range from zero dollars with facebook all the way to 99 dollars for the apple mobile me service i use these alternatives to come up with my starting price of 49 a year pause the video here and complete your revenue stream box before moving on next we're going to cover channels or your path to customers your channels or path to customers are one of the more riskier items on your canvas you might be able to identify a problem worth solving build out a solution and even get a small group of customers to derive value from it but if you can't get your product in front of enough customers none of that might matter channels aren't something to defer to later but rather something you should start building and testing from day one the good news is that you don't need to build scalable channels from day one it's okay to start with a handful of outbound channels to jump start your learning first here are some possible outbound channel suggestions that might help at the same time take a stab at identifying where your scalable channels might come from these typically take time to build so it helps to think about them now versus later here's a list of some possible scalable channels that you might be able to employ later on now here is my filled out channels box for the for the cloud fire product you'll find a combination of outbound and inbound channels listed here pause the video here and complete your channels box before moving on now we're going to move on to how you measure success using key metrics key metrics represent the key numbers that tell you how your business is doing a startup is inherently chaotic but at any given point in time there are only a few key actions or metrics that matter these will change as your product moves through various stages but at this point in time i'd like you to identify two key metrics the first is identifying the key customer action that drives value in your product in other words ask yourself what key activity would you use to measure your value proposition so for example if you were building a blogging platform publishing a blog post would be the key activity for twitter posting a tweet is a key activity the second key metric is stating your success metric for your product what would you need to achieve to make this product worthwhile it could be a revenue target like building a 10 million dollar business or a hundred million dollar business it could be having some impact on the world or it could be something else altogether here is my filled out key metrics box for the cloud fire product my key activity is based around sharing if a parent doesn't routinely share their photos and videos with others chances are they will lose interest and not keep paying for the product my success metric for cloud fire was building a 5 million business which roughly translated to acquiring a hundred thousand paying customers pause the video here and complete your key metrics box before moving on we're the home stretch now after getting hit with a killer idea and convincing yourself it's worth pursuing the next thing that should be keeping you up at night is how you build enough runway for your product we'll use this section to do some ballpark sizing of your business model and estimate scope and feasibility of implementing it start by outlining your fixed and variable costs things like people servers and other resources you will need to implement this business model it's impossible to be totally accurate at this stage because a lot of it will change with time it does help to consider a shorter horizon like a break even point and use your pricing and cost structure to come up with the number of customers you would need to break even and then go all the way calculate how many customers you would need to realize your metric for success from earlier again the point is not accuracy but ballpark sizing for establishing if you have a problem worth solving on your hands here is my filled out cost structure box for the cloud fire product pause the video here and complete your cost structure box and do a similar sizing estimate and now the final box the unfair advantage unfair advantage is also sometimes called competitive advantage or barriers to entry on a business plan it essentially describes how you'll defend against competitive attacks most first-time entrepreneurs don't completely understand what constitutes an unfair advantage and often lists things that aren't one of the most commonly cited unfair advantage is being first to market take a look at these companies none of them were first movers in their markets but fast followers one could actually argue that being first to market can be a disadvantage because the burden of learning and marketing a new product is all on the first mover here are other things commonly cited on business plans all of these things while important don't create a sustainable unfair advantage on their own so what is a real unfair advantage i subscribe to a simple definition put forward by jason cohen who is currently the founder of wp engine and also writes the popular a smart pair blog his definition is that a real unfair advantage is something that cannot be easily copied or bought so let's list out some examples of some real unfair advantages bad news is that you probably didn't see an unfair advantage that applies to you today the good news is that that's okay even facebook didn't really have an unfair advantage when they started they were number 11 or 12 in building a social network but they still managed to build the largest social network on the planet which has now become their unfair advantage the more important thing is to have an unfair advantage story unlike the other boxes on the canvas the unfair advantage is unfortunately not one you decide to test one day if and when you start getting some traction with your product your unfair advantage will be tested by competition and copycats you may also not have a readily identifiable unfair advantage today rather than listing something weak and clearly not an unfair advantage leave this section blank some unfair advantages are revealed over time like in the case of zappos having a blank box staring back at you also serves as a constant reminder to keep looking for one here is my fill out unfair advantage box for the cloud fire product since it's targeted at a very specific and emotional niche i envision building differentiation over time by fostering a strong sense of community among my customers pause the video here and complete your unfair advantage box so there you have it if you followed along you should have captured your first business model congratulations next time i'll cover how to bulletproof this business model from here and show you how to start the process of stress testing your plan a until then take care [Music] hey next attendees i'm justin wilcox i'm the founder of nimbus health a software company where we have um hi uh louis could be here so that we can yeah thank you all right um so i think we told the startups that we will um give them until two four to 2 40 i believe 2 40 to kind of just wrap up in their break rooms and um figure out and and fill in the last pieces of their lean canvas so don't worry we'll give you a small small uh break cigaro in between later um to wrap up uh so yeah i think we'll we'll give you maybe around five more minutes igoro startups so that you can do that maybe while the startups are um doing um finishing up their lean canvases i wanted to share this with our audience um it's a page on dean stack so if you guys want to learn more about the lean um the lean methodology um really like what it stands for and what it believes in then i encourage you to go to leanstack.com and read the manifesto because i feel that they already accurately um really condensed yuma principles behind why the lean canvas is so and so it's it's really a way to you know um i think they have on here uh they have very big statements like the speed of learning is the new unfair advantage and everything so they have six main main rules six main principles um about learning being your new unfair advantage about really your product being your business model and not just the actual um thing not just the system not the not just the technology that you're building not just just the not just the products that you're selling but it really is your business model um it also says here that you know the reason why we do this is to really de-risk the business as compared to like not taking any risk it's more like you want to look at where it's risky and work on that part another principle of lean is really it being very customer problem-centric and don't fall in love with your solution the problem sometimes with startups is that we're so in love because we're engineers most of us are engineers so we fall in love with our solution and how how amazing it is how techno technologically advanced it is but really at the end of the day your customer is um your customer has the same that whether that will you know what that will grow as a business um the fifth principle is really evidence-based the evidence-based as compared to really just um you really have to validate and so the next video that we're gonna share is going to talk a little bit more about that the sixth principle is really prefer outcomes over output so um you know you really wanna you really want to grow and measure traction traction as in like it gets further uh as compared to as compared to just outputs so how many people are signing up um etc etc so yeah um i encourage you guys to read this it's so beautifully written out and it really um it's really an overview of what they stand for as a business so this is leanstack.com manifesto they're manifestos they have several manifestos here but uh that that's one of them this would start also yeah very interesting so i encourage everyone to read that i'm gonna share that on the chat group as well okay all right um so i'm gonna proceed um in a bit i'll start sharing my screen because it's about to hit 240. [Music] you just prep that [Music] hi timmy are we all are we going to close the rooms at 2 40 so they can come back or later yeah yeah i think we can we can bring them back so that we can like close off and then eventually we can put them back in break out rooms for them to finish just so that we can um proceed with what we want to show also our public audience [Music] easy okay um i'm sharing my screen um is it okay now uh do we see my screen and or is everyone back i just want to check sorry now we can see your screen and everybody's slowly getting back together okay see you guys again we'll just wrap up over the next 10 minutes and then we'll give more time also to the to our startups to complete if any okay just give me the go signal when i can start maybe i'll start in at 242.

you can start already you can start already okay so yeah so um you know this is the statement from the book that i shared earlier um from the scene writer which is ash morya and you know i'd love to and just you know um let that sit that you know most startups fail not because they failed to build what they set out to build but rather they were building the wrong thing essentially and that being said the riskiest part of your canvas at the very beginning especially in your stage right now is really the problem portion is your problem portion correct have you concisely um captured that no because if you're not solving what your customers are really problematic about then they're probably not gonna end up paying for it or they won't stick to it as a solution so here's some food from thought for thought my dad's favorite comic comic is peanuts and here's an interesting and uh i'll i'll let us uh find take time to read it it's quite funny all right so i i know everyone here is pretty smart and i'll let you figure out how that relates to the previous um statement so this is one of my favorite quotes also um about in the startup world is that you know the customers don't really care about your solutions and they only really care about your problems about their problems and so the question really is at this point in your startup at this point in your businesses journey how much of your problem statement have you validated and by validate that i mean like you've actually verbally talked to someone and and they confirmed for you that indeed this is a problem worth solving so how do you do this um uh easiest is surveys but i really discourage that medium because they're a bit close ended and a little bit limiting um you know blanks are a little bit limiting so you can actually i mean the best case talaga is really to have conversations with uh people that kind of fit within the persona of your early adopters as was discussed in our video earlier and so you can actually there's actually a way that you can have a guided conversation with them um to favor um you know to to actually get their insights um and this this guide also gives you a way in a time you don't impose any biases on them because sometimes you know we have the tendency to pitch pitch pitch and really like guide the conversation a way that might favor our solution and we don't want to do that because as was said in the manifesto earlier you know fall in love with your customer with a problem as compared to your solution so we have to be flexible in that aspect so you guys will have to do customer interviews at some point um i think within the week that should really be your assignment before you guys enter the next session um of our mentoring and it seems kind of scary and daunting and it's not great right because talking to people is not always comfortable for everyone but unfortunately this is really the way to go i and you know it's been updated now because we have social distancing and stuff like that but uh you have to have that you have to make time to have conversations with people and so we call this problem interviews or customer discovery so this is um the video that uh louis is going to share suru is going to share with us as to how to create these conversations and guide the conversations uh have these customer um discussion and this customer discovery conversations with potential early adopters so um sir louis [Music] hey next attendees i'm justin wilcox i'm the founder of nimbus health a software company where we help hospitals automate medical record processing now that's what i do for work but what i do for fun is actually customer dev labs it's a blog where i and other founders take our customer development experiences and we write them up and share them so that other people don't fall into the same traps that we did getting started so if you like what we talked about today definitely go check out the blog speaking of which what we're talking about today is four customer discovery hacks these are the four things that i found hardest to get started with customer development all right now that we've got our interview set up we need to figure out what are we going to ask our customers and this is something that i really struggled with when i started customer development so that's why we have hack number three what to ask so a couple ground rules for interviewing number one no pitching this is about listening if you find yourself ever proposing a part of your solution just to get some feedback on it stop you're pitching and we don't want to do that the reason being as soon as you start pitching your mind changes gears it goes from learning and absorbing information into trying to pitch something and sell a product and this time is all about learning so this is all about listening to your customer all about listening to their problems you'll have plenty of time to pitch later okay rule number two past and present questions are fantastic that's what we're going to ask questions about the future like would you ever or will you ever hypothetical questions those are no good we want to ask questions like have you ever or tell me about the last time things that have happened in the past and are in the present now the reason is if we ask about future questions we're getting our customers predictions and those are basically useless and in fact they can be worse than useless because if they tell us something that we want to hear would you ever pay five dollars for blah blah blah and they say yes we might mislead ourselves into thinking we have a real product the truth is they don't know the answer to that question and it's going to be misleading so we don't do it the other reason is as soon as you're asking would you or will you questions you're probably starting to pitch a solution and we don't want to do that okay so with those ground rules in place let's talk about what you ask your customers the script that i use looks a little something like this number one tell me a story about the last time problem context so for example tell me about the last time you were late to an appointment and the reason why we asked this question first is because it's very open-ended it's asking for a story and it's asking our customer to sort of go on whatever tangents they want what we're looking for here are things that are particularly difficult or annoying for our customer so your job is to ask this question listen intently and then dig in when you find your customer talk about something that's interesting to you that you don't know about or you don't fully understand dig in ask questions why was that hard what was annoying about that why is that that way this is where you're gonna spend most of your time now if during this conversation it's not obvious to you what was the hardest part about this context you're going to ask them explicitly what was the hardest part about this problem that you ran into then they're going to tell you the hardest part and this is exactly what we want and now this question number three this is golden it's also very awkward you're gonna ask them why was that hard let me give you an example of why it's gonna be awkward so tell me about the last time you were late oh you know i was i had to feed the dog and i had to pick up my keys and i couldn't find them and then i ran into traffic what was the hardest part about it ah traffic was so annoying it was frustrating and i'm gonna ask why was that hard and they're gonna think of course i know why that's hard it's hard because it was frustrating and we're going to ask and then say you know why it was hard because i had to drive across the bridge and i was afraid i was going to run out of gas and i was stuck in traffic and we asked because the why is exactly what we're going to pair it back to our customers when it's time to go pitch our solution we want to use our customers own words when we market to them so that we know it will resonate so in this case why was the heart afraid to run out of gas we can say afraid to run out of gas because you're running late that might be the best marketing message so this is really important even if it's awkward ask make sure you understand why this was particularly hard number four we're going to ask how do you solve this problem now so i might ask how do you solve this lateness problem now they might say oh you know i just i'm not late at all i just don't care i don't do anything in that case we know this isn't a real pain for our customer because they're not trying to solve the problem if they are trying to solve the problem you know i set my clocks forward fast and i um i try and get reminders from google and blah blah then we can ask the next question which is why is that solution not awesome if they say oh you know what i know the clocks are set fast and i just ignore the reminders we've got a problem they're trying to solve so it's a real problem and their solution is not awesome so maybe we can solve it in a better way all right so this is the outline for your interview these are the basics bonus points though if you can do any of these three things number one emotions take real note of the emotions your customer expresses during the interview frustration anger guilt greed happiness whatever it is note those down because those emotions that's how you're going to connect with your customer when you can empathize with your customer they can feel that and that's how we're going to actually move our solution number two three-peat once you get through this process you can start all the way over at the beginning tell me about another time you were late if you can get through this process three times you'll learn something new every time and you'll really understand your customer through and through finally five whys if you can ask why five times why was that hard why did you do it that way why is the world like it is you will understand the core crux of why someone is doing what they're doing and why it's difficult if you ask five times you'll get down to the core emotion and the core motivation of what it is that they're trying to solve all right so that's my script and now it's your turn go ahead and write your version of this script and then go to a neighbor and interview him or her when you do make sure you're not pitching and that you're always asking questions about the past and the present and never about the future good luck so all this information is documented up on customerdevlabs.com go check it out i'm justin wilcox let me know what you learned great thanks louie thank you sir louis for that um i'm gonna wrap up lang um on this so i just wanna show this um this slide uh let me know if you guys can see my screen so essentially um these are the questions or the types of questions if you remember on the blackboard right he he outlined this so to further break down and relate um to what he just discussed each question here will help validate a certain portion in your lean canvas eventually so probably we won't have that in this session um when you guys present your lean canvas later on but um it's for moving forward so essentially you it will help you validate your problem hypothesis it will really help you um strengthen your unique value proposition it will help you these customer interviews will help you learn about existing alternatives how how how do people currently solve these problems and what is the opportunity you have to come in and it will then strengthen your solution hypothesis and what goes what features would go into your solution so if we if we um do it that way if you look at that um the question number one relates to problems question number one and two and four will actually help you formulate problem and then question um three and five will help you work on solution uvp etc so you know you might think that it's not useful but it really will help you confirm and validate this portion um of your lean canvas okay so mapping that out it looks like that um i'm happy to share a sample customer interview form um if you guys want so this is an actual form of something that we use i actually use and the conversation would be like you know an average of an hour to really have to dig in deep and find out the problem statements so we did this for a corporate innovation project um for bosch before where i used to work okay so and when you do your interview i'm gonna close off with this please really do listen um not just to reply not to pitch but really to understand and this article if you guys can um look this up uh and if i'm sure a lot of us know about the seven habits of highly effective people it really talks about that this is also a really good um uh video uh that talks about you know how to be a better listener i'm not saying you guys aren't better listeners but sometimes we always need that reminder so essentially your assignment um eventually going into the week is really to do at least 10 problem interviews um and then validate your statements tally them and tweak your business accordingly so i i'm gonna close uh that's a shot this session um the sharing um with this um frankly i really don't have all the answers to your questions but i hope this does these two frameworks um bring you some clarity um to where you are in your business and to shed light on the riskiest parts and how to address which parts are riskiest and which parts you need to in you need to address before really launching your product and you're starting a business in the pandemic is really brave and i commend all of you and the odds are so the market is so different right now it's shifting but you know this team this program is really rooting for you and it's really you know the strongest survived it's a survival of the strong sorry it's not the survival of the strongest but the survival of those who can really adapt and i feel that you being in this program is really one thing to adapt to change all right so um i think we will wrap up uh we are gonna be i'm just presenting like the flow cigar later i'm sorry i think joy had a flow earlier but um i organized it alphabetically um in the air in the in the order of presentation so essentially you're going to present your lean canvas in a pdf form um ideally could you submit the pdf forms to uh i think it will still be louie that will be sharing his screen um your deadline would probably be around 3 10. 3 10 um and then we can start by then so on or before 3 10 and this will also give you guys time to run to the restroom grab your water grab your coffee so that we can so we can be ready for when we come back here um this portion um won't be streamed live um to our facebook audience uh just because right now our startups are still really um you know in the process of validating a lot of stuff about their business but it will be really exciting when we then have our demo day because then you'll see the fruits of their labor okay great so if there's any q a from the audience i'm happy to answer um for the startups you guys can reserve your questions um until your certain portion because we will be giving you five minutes to present your lean canvas and then five minutes to ask questions so don't worry startups you'll have your dedicated time and we really want to spend time with you guys on this um but i guess for the audience if we do have any like miss marilyn or or um the dti team or your joy if we have someone hi but if not then i'm happy also too um yes i think we have to proceed to the fireside chat or the more uh yeah the so that we can um go ahead and and discuss their um lean canvas with the farsight mentor seth mayor thank you so much to me um really really really wonderful work um thank you all to our startups and for those who are watching us at home um and and i think that's that we're gonna end the live feed now um see you next saturday at the same time 2pm until 5pm um if you want to join the program um we have another program next year and if you want to get in touch with team timmy she is on facebook she's also on linkedin so you can get her details and reach out to her um on those channels so again thank you so much for all those are watching at home have a wonderful day bye

2021-10-21 17:38

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