When you are on a vacation, relaxing, you typically have the time and luxury of thinking broadly about your life, what you have accomplished thus far, and what your next set of goals, ambitions, desires are. The downtime afforded by a vacation may lead you to start thinking about ideas for starting something on your own, a business, a project, something that embodies your uniqueness in the world, that encapsulates your insights into a need, a problem, an opportunity to help people in society.
If you are like most people, these ideas are great but fleeting. They do not stick. Most of us forget we even had them the moment we landed back in the reality of the day-to-day grind. It does not have to be this way.
In my experience, people abandon their ideas because the process of morphing them into a somewhat more tangible thing quickly becomes overwhelming. Where do I start? How much is this going to cost? How do I get people interested in my idea? I don’t have the skills to build the thing?, and so on. It is natural to feel overwhelmed, because developing a business out of just an idea is one of the hardest things one can do. The good news is there are many resources available to support you on the journey.
Here I am sharing a few such resources that has helped me and my clients in the process of forming their ideas into more tangible concepts that can be developed into businesses.
- Customer Discovery. This process was proposed by Stanford Professor Steve Blank and centers on developing a simple Hypothesis -> Evidence loop to confirm your hunches about the idea. The goal here is to talk to as many people as possible that represent the group of people who will either use, buy or decide to buy your thing (product or service). This group, called in business terms, a market segment, shares a common interest or need that you have identified and that you want to solve or address.
- Talking to Humans. This is a short, straightforward book that helps you configure your conversations with the people you will talk with to do the customer discovery. If you follow the suggestions in this book, you will be in a good position to gather the evidence you need to convince yourself to invest further in your idea.
- Business Model Canvas. This is also a basic tool that helps you organize your ideas around the delivery of value to customers. The book that brought the canvas was the product of a large collaboration of people orchestrated by the consulting firm Strategyzer. It’s worth taking a look at their model and pairing it with the customer discovery approach developed by Steve Blank.
- Disciplined Entrepreneurship. This is a book by MIT Professor Bill Aulet and it’s a straightforward guide to starting a company. It goes from the idea stage to building a minimum-viable-business-product, which allows you to confirm there is market interest in the solution you are proposing. I highly recommend reading this book after you have done a few dozen interviews, as you will be able to connect the dots faster.
Of course, these are just a few of the many resources available. I work with clients in navigating this confusing landscape and choosing the approach that best works for them. The goal of this journey is to deliver the impact you seek while remaining somewhat objective on the effort in money, resources, and time, to get there.
Happy to discuss more, just fill a contact form and we can setup a quick call.
Enrique
Wonderful ♥️