What are your top problems regarding your home?

The best way to build an MVP is to distill the solution to the smaller unit of value to deliver something to a customer. Start small, time box it and focus on solving the problem at it's core even if it's ghetto (I call the best MVP's ghetto but useful). Here's an image that represents my thinking on this https://twitter.com/danmartell/status/516316632126586883

Great question, many entrepreneurs are stuck before launch because of this hurdle. I have helped many individuals turn full time entrepreneurs through succinct consecutive coaching in various industries. Here are my suggestions, but keep in mind they are generic because you didn't provide any details. 1. If you have a prototype or design, re-design it with the intentional focus of removing certain features. Making trade offs are critical and simplify your introduction, pitch, and value proposition as well increase the chances of people being 100% impressed with the limited featured offering rather than semi impressed and focus on what is done wrong. 2. aim for simplicity in your pitch, avoid jargon and create a simple story on how to present the problem solution your 1 or 2 features is offering. - go to older family members for this, not friends or coworkers. 3. go to Fiverr.com and maybe if needed look there for a cheap and quick prototype mockup. 4. create simple landing page to present as if you are a fully working startup. go to www.instapage.com for quick landing pages and if you want a domain go to www.unthinkhosting.com for cheap domains - use code unthink for discount, it should give you some savings there. 5. go to startup weekend events instead of all 3/4 above and just create a simple pitch (under 1 minute) to present your problem and solution idea. if selected you get a team for a full weekend to validate something together. 6. Or create a facebook product page, upload some images (not sales pitches) of problems w/ problem story descriptions... post a lot of those... randomly posting images of your product (already simplified in features) and launch a small budget campaign, say $15.00 for paid advertising featuring your simplified product image, little or not text in the image but with a very short story and solution as header. trust me, is critical that you remove features. If you are not willing to make trade offs, from my experience you are not ready to try entrepreneurship at all. I hope this helps and look forward to seeing you succeed! Humberto Valle

The art of the "cold pitch" is definitely something that needs to be worked on, and doesn't come naturally to everyone. A couple of quick tips: 1. 4 is not a big enough target group, you've got to cast a bigger net. Try pitching 20, and aim to get 3-5 responses. 2. When sending a cold email, really think about what you are offering them. Whilst you'll get the odd good egg that simply wants to help - you can't expect entrepreneurs and small biz owners to take time out of their day to answer your questions. To counter, why not tell them you're conducting research in the space, and would be happy to send the finds/reports back to them in a nice format, which could in turn help their business. 3. Don't give up, keep hustling. Try changing around the emails slightly, track which emails convert into responses, and fine tune from there. Good luck and feel free to book a call if you want to chat more. Best James.

Assume 1,000 air conditioners are sold each year, 50% of housholds have a smart phone, and 25% of households with a smartphone have wifi. Then your potential customer base is 1,000 * .5 * .25 = 125 customers. But that's a top down analysis; generally, bottoms-up analyses are more robust.

If you are really thinking about building your product you should first do the alpha and beta. There is a strong community of tech people on Hacker News, ProductHunt and Reddit that will support your idea and even pay in advance if you can show a demo first. Give you an example: Dropbox. Drew (CEO) made this short video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QmCUDHpNzE about how Dropbox was supposed to work. He send it to all the community and it becomes viral. Everyone started to sign up. He had a fremium model at start, but look at it now. So I will encourage you to do two things: Follow this order 1-Go and build your alpha/beta and create a demo that everyone can see and feel excited about 2-Share it with the community 3-If you want to "sell it" in advance you can use selz.com or payloadz.com And rethink you business model and moentization strategy so it adapts to your product and not the other way. :) If this helped let me know!