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MenuHow do I validate the business idea and get specific strategy before getting into investing in materials and starting?
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Validating your business idea before investing in materials and execution is crucial. Consider creating a landing page to showcase your concept and gather interest. Use social media and online ads to drive traffic. Collect email sign-ups or measure click-through rates to gauge interest. Conduct surveys or interviews to gather feedback and refine your strategy before moving forward. With my expertise in Design Thinking and passion for delivering actionable strategies, we'll turn your vision into a strategic reality. Let's innovate your success together!
Hi, I have 32 years of business experience in different markets and I hold a degree in Sociology because every business deals with people ;) I would suggest creating some sort of test group where you expose your ideal clients to your product or service, and have them complete a detailed survey. You can do this relatively cheaply at public markets or hosting a party-like event. You may be able to generate a small amount of sales to cover the cost of putting together the event. Tip: getting completed surveys are key. Offer a drawing or prize where the winner is chosen from completed surveys. Hope this helps! Happy to discuss further.
To validate a business idea and create a specific strategy, I'll start by conducting thorough market research to understand my target audience's needs. For instance, if I'm considering a subscription box service for eco-friendly products, I'll research consumer preferences for sustainable goods and competitors in the market. Next, I'll develop a simple Minimum Viable Product (MVP), perhaps featuring a curated set of eco-friendly items, and gather feedback from a small group of potential customers. Based on their input, I'll refine the product offering and iterate as needed. Alongside, I'll outline a clear business model focusing on subscription pricing and calculate basic financial projections to ensure profitability. Finally, I'll plan a pilot launch to test the concept on a small scale, utilising social media and targeted online ads for initial customer acquisition. This step-by-step approach will help me validate demand, fine-tune the offering, and establish a strategic foundation before committing to larger investments in materials and full-scale operations. Hope this helps - but more than happy to chat further as I've been through this cycle more than 4 times with a successful exit. No written rule, but always great to learn from experience and iterate fast.
The first thing you want to do is to market yourself. Don't be afraid to step out and introduce what you have to offer. Display your products in full Glory so that you may attract the attention of people that wants your products and services. Once people can count on what you have to offer then you start building around that starting point. And this is where the investment comes in because you're starting to build an infrastructure around your idea because your idea made that person or consumer comfortable enough to return. Now professional service will carry you a long way because word of mouth will give you a big lift off with other consumers. The more you build your infrastructure making it attractive with stability your business will sore.
Designing the right products or services to support organizational growth is essential for all organizations. Any organization can create a product or service that they desire but to be the most effective for the organization, there needs to be an established need or the ability to create a need in an undefined market (blue ocean). Regardless of whether you are meeting or creating a need, the design must meet the needs of the customer.
What Is Design Thinking
Design thinking is a process that allows for iterative innovation of products and services throughout the journey. It can be used to solve existing problems or to create new products and services from scratch. Throughout the design thinking process, you must understand the problem/need, develop solutions that solve the problem/need, and prototype, test, and iterate to meet customer expectations. Whichever reason you are trying to use design thinking, there are some foundational concepts introduced in this chapter that you must keep in mind.
Designing for Empathy
We briefly discussed this in the previous section, but the needs of your customers are the most important part of what you are trying to achieve. Gathering the relevant customer needs will be integral as you move through this process. You need to establish a clear understanding of their needs and seek clarification throughout the process that you are moving in the right direction. The worst thing you can do is create a product or service with no customer input. Inevitably this will not produce the results expected.
There are numerous ways to collect customer input that can be used to inform design. One method for meeting existing customer needs is to conduct some internal reflection or competition research and determine what customers love, want improved, or hate about comparable products. When it comes to working in an undefined or unknown market space (blue ocean), focus groups can be used to target potential groups and early adopters.
Define the Need
So, you have gathered the data from the intended or existing customers, but now you need to aggregate all that data into usable information that results in a clearly defined need. Many times, customers have problems defining their needs in terms that can be used to design or improve things. You may have gathered information like “I want it to be faster,” “It needs to be lighter,” or “I think it should last longer.” Although these give you areas to focus, you need to dig deeper and quantify how much faster, lighter, and longer to completely understand the need.
This will require returning to customers to attain the quantifiable data, but some may be able to be attained by more thorough research into the competition’s products. Reading reviews may provide clarification to these questions. Either way, you are looking for your starting point and will continue to iterate later in the process. Just remember to always keep a people-centric view as you move through the process because people are the ones making the decision to use the product or service. Their journey must be satisfying.
Ideation
Now it is time to start generating ideas on how to solve the problems and needs of your expected customers. Without clarification of the customer pain points, this would be a waste of time. I am sure you have heard of diverse ways to generate ideas like brainstorming but a lot of time that presents numerous ideas that are focused on a central theme but do not necessarily solve the problem or need. The data you collected from the customer focuses the brainstorming of ideas to solve that problem or need.
Once you have the ideas to solve the identified problems and needs, you will still need to ensure that the ideas for one problem or need do not negatively impact the expected gain from other ideas. For example, if your customers desire more features and a longer battery life, you will need to account for the added battery consumption from the new features. Since brainstorming would have been focused on just the features or just the battery life, you would need to know what features are to be added before looking at the battery life.
Prototyping
During this phase you will create a scaled down version of the product or service that allows you to evaluate your latest ideas and see if the problems/needs identified earlier were solved. This will not always be a fully functioning product and can be a simple paper prototype or 2D diagram. The purpose of this portion is to foundationally establish whether you have solved the problems and met the needs of your customer. You may also bring in the customers from the focus group or an entirely new set of customers to determine if the identified problems and needs were addressed. The outcome of this may result in more iteration before moving to final testing.
Test Your Solutions
Once any final adjustments are made from the prototyping phase, you will integrate the changes into a fully functioning product or service and conduct rigorous tests to determine results. This is where you would want to run beta tests with customers, including the ones that provided input throughout the process. Beta testing is good because it will allow you to reach a broader audience but not fully release the product or service. Based on feedback from the beta testers, you may need to refine and iterate the product before moving on to full release.
Implementation
Once your beta test refinements and iterations are complete, you are ready to release the full version of your product or service. There are numerous ways to release the products, but you need to ensure that the release focuses on the problems solved and the customer needs met. This will generate the highest potential for success of your new product or service implementation. Depending on the length of your design process, you may also need to determine whether the original need or problems that existed are still the intended customer group’s major pain points. This should have been done throughout the process, but you will need to determine based on the individual industry.
Key Takeaways
The customer must be the focal point in every product or service that you offer as an organization. Without an identified need, there is a greater chance of organizational resources being wasted on development. Continue to validate customer needs and problems throughout the design process. It is a promising idea to evaluate prototypes internally, but you must evaluate the products with the intended customer to understand the impacts from the improvements you have made. Last, the experience your customer has with your product or service should be tailored as much as possible to their individual needs.
The foundations of design thinking do not stop at products and services offered by the organization to customers. These concepts carry forward into the processes an organization uses internally and externally. There is always a customer (internal or external) that is impacted by the process, product, or service you design. Combining the foundations of design thinking with that of continuous process improvement can help organizations achieve exponential growth and efficiency across the organization.
Related Questions
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What happens to a convertible note if the company fails?
Convertible notes are by no means "earned." They are often easier to raise for early-stage companies who don't want to or can't raise an equity round. Equity rounds almost always require a simultaneous close of either the whole round or a defined "first close" representing a significant share of the raised amount. Where there are many participants in the round comprised mostly of small seed funds and/or angel investors, shepherding everyone to a closing date can be very difficult. If a company raises money on a note and the company fails, the investors are creditors, getting money back prior to any shareholder and any creditor that doesn't have security or statutory preference. In almost every case, convertible note holders in these situations would be lucky to get pennies back on the dollar. It would be highly unusual of / unheard of for a convertible note to come with personal guarantees. Happy to talk to you about the particulars of your situation and explain more to you based on what you're wanting to know.TW
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What legal precautions can I take to make sure nobody steals my startup idea?
I've discussed ideas with hundreds of startups, I've been involved in about a dozen startups, my business is at $1M+ revenue. The bad news is, there is no good way to protect ideas. The good news is, in the vast majority of cases you don't really need to. If you're talking to people about your idea, you could ask them to sign an NDA ("Non Disclosure Agreement"), but NDAs are notoriously hard to enforce, and a lot of experienced startup people wouldn't sign them. For example, if you asked me to sign an NDA before we discussed your Idea, I'd tell you "thanks, but no thanks". This is probably the right place though to give the FriendDA an honorable mention: http://friendda.org/. Generally, I'd like to encourage you to share your Ideas freely. Even though telling people an idea is not completely without risk, generally the rewards from open discussions greatly outweigh the risks. Most startups fail because they build something nobody wants. Talking to people early, especially people who are the intended users/customers for your idea can be a great way to protect yourself from that risk, which is considerably higher than the risk of someone taking off with your idea. Another general note, is that while ideas matter, I would generally advise you to get into startup for which you can generate a lot of value beyond the idea. One indicator for a good match between a founder and a startup is the answer to the question: "why is that founder uniquely positioned to execute the idea well". The best way to protect yourself from competition is to build a product that other people would have a hard time building, even if they had 'the idea'. These are usually startups which contain lots of hard challenges on the way from the idea to the business, and if you can convincingly explain why you can probably solve those challenges while others would have a hard time, you're on the right path. If you have any further questions, I'd be happy to set up a call. Good luck.DK
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What companies have successfully implemented both B2B and B2C products or services? Which should I start with for the non-profit sector?
I would suggest the first question to ask is "what problem do I solve?" And of those people I solve problems for "who do I create the most value for?" In the non-profit world you need to add "How does my business help the non-profit run better and/or help the group the non-profit focuses on?" For example, if you've created a platform that drives donations, your company "has created a platform that helps you reach fundraising goals faster." What you don't want to do is market and sell to B2B and B2C audiences simultaneously. They have different ways of buying - a B2B audience needs to have their benefits quantified (using your thing makes me x amount more) - and it's extremely hard for a startup to be able to do both well. Better to start with one, execute really well and move into the other. Feel free to give me a call and we can dig into who your most valuable audience is.AV
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What advice do you give to a 16 year old entrepreneur with a start up idea?
First, hat tip to you for being a young entrepreneur. Keep it up! If you have the funds to build out your MVP, hire a developer and possibly a mentor. If your idea is marketable, you don't need to give up equity by bringing in a co-founder. If this is your entrepreneurial venture, I would recommend you do retain a coach to help you see all the things you may not know. Have you already done your SWOT analysis? Have you identified your target market? What is your marketing plan? What will be your operating expenses? There are lots of questions to ask. If you would a free call, I'd be happy to help you in more detail. Just use this link to schedule your free call... https://clarity.fm/kevinmccarthy/FreeConsult Best regards, Kevin McCarthy Www.kevinmccarthy.comKM
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Should I hire a bookkeeper? (what does one do exactly?)
NIcole is right. When I first started my business I thought I was saving money by doing my own bookkeeping. It took me much longer than it would take a bookkeeper - all time that I was not spending on marketing or billable activities. And in the end I made errors which made the initial work of the bookkeeper longer. I now have a consistent routine. My bookkeeper picks up all my material monthly and does my books in less than 2 hours. Very worthwhile.RL
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