Fast Startup – Mark Richards Explains The Smart Fast Startup
Posted September 20th, 2011 by Nathan Furr with No Comments
The Must-Have Shortcut
Most of the good startup wisdom out there, from Lean Startup, to Customer Development, to Y Combinator, emphasize engaging customers early by building something that offers the product concept or a product feature and then measuring customer/user response. This methodology is way smarter and faster than the old startup (and current big company) process of building out a real product and hoping users come. However, there is a first step that can get you to must-have and product/market fit even faster.
Validate Monetizable Pain First
Offering a minimum viable product is a fantastic way to learn what target customers want. I do it all the time. The only problem is the learnings you get don’t always lead to a breakthrough product focused on monetizable pain. The reason?
Monetizable pain is about the customer’s problem, not the startup’s product.
How to Validate Monetizable Pain
Validating monetizable pain requires a method for measuring the value of a problem. It requires the development of a reliable metric for customer problems. Unfortunately the well known business metrics don’t really help us because they have much more to do with the solution side of the equation. For instance, one obvious business metric is sales. Sales can measure the success of a product. But nobody buys problems. (They unfortunately arrive free of charge.)
Full story at http://smartfaststartup.com/2011/09/20/how-to-become-a-must-have/
Posted in
Lean Startup Book News
Tags Entrepreneur Lean Startup Book Startup Business Model startup model
Written by Nathan Furr
Leave a Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.