PROOF OF CONCEPT IS ALL ABOUT TESTING the assumptions of your hypothesis, and, to do this, you need facts which are supported by research.
Research is not simply asking friends and family if they would buy your product or service. Rather, you need to objectively assess whether your niche customer wants to buy your niche product or service. This process will help to determine whether you should spend resources in developing a product prototype. Service-based business ideas are easier and less risky to test, especially if the service is of a consulting nature, but they also need to be tested.
RESEARCH INVOLVES TALKING TO THE PEOPLE whom you are going to service. You must find potential customers who are willing to talk to a stranger, or to try a product or company they’ve never heard of before. These customers are your early adopters, and they are very valuable.
Where do you find early adopters? You go out into the world and look for them. For example, if your business involves children’s birthday parties, you might want to attend a few pre-primary and primary school level fêtes. This would be the perfect place to chat to the parents and their kids, offer samples, present ideas and look for feedback. Two or three out of every ten people you talk to could well fall into the early adopter category. If they are willing to test your product, get their details and contact them at a later stage.
By interacting with customers and asking them a series of purposeful, carefully composed questions, you will get the authentic answers and insights that will guide you in terms of the product, service or company you are seeking to build. You should also make sure to appreciate this experience. This is where you get to live the reality of being an entrepreneur – someone who continually sells their ideas to investors, their products to customers and offers jobs to prospective employees.
If you trust this process and follow it fully, you will dramatically improve your chances of creating a successful start-up, launching a new product, or improving an existing offering. You need to allow early adopter customers to guide and lead you in building something for which they are willing to pay. Remember, the business must center on their willingness to pay for a service or product – and not what you think they need. They will eventually be consuming or using what you do. Pay serious attention to what they say about it.
You can cement your relationships with early adopters by building the prototype product and asking them to use it for free. Better yet, get them to pay for it, assuming it is advanced enough, in a development sense, to warrant a charge. By charging for your prototype product, you confirm its potential value – even though the product will probably not be a final version.
You need to speak to your early adopters as often as possible. This is essential to fully understand their need. Only once you’ve got the full picture of what they want, can you develop an MVP to solve their problem or fulfil their need – better than any other product. Working with early adopters is not a quick, once-off process.
Quite the opposite, in fact. It’s a long-term relationship, where continuous feedback is key. You need to develop an MVP based on the initial insights that you gained from your first interactions with early adopters, and then refine that MVP based on their feedback when they used the first iterations of your product.
USING YOUR HYPOTHESIS TO GET EARLY ADOPTER FEEDBACK
AFTER YOUR EARLY ADOPTER HAS used your product/service for the first time, do the following:
INSPIRATION, VISION, THE ABILITY TO INSPIRE A TEAM… None of these things are nearly as personality based as the mythology of business would have you believe. When leaders achieve in these areas it is because they are crystal clear about their subject matter. It is this clarity to which we respond, as much as anything else.
Once your concept is clear and proven, the next step is to start to define your business strategy, supported by the execution plan. Read the next chapter to learn how.
