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The actionable takeaway in testing your offering is to figure out what the customer needs to do differently to adopt your offering, then test that specific behaviour.
Start with validating an idea, then develop an MVP, then build a prototype.
❓ What is a Minimum Viable Product
An MVP tests just the core functionality of your offering that satisfies your customers, to see if customers will change their behaviour.
The simplest MVP is a kickstarter video for something you haven't built yet. If the response is great, or if you exceed your funding goal, you can be sure that you have product-market fit. You need a little or no technology to make an MVP.
Airbnb's MVP was a simple room listing on a website, which soon led to paying guests. Fitbit's MVP was a wearble device that just tracked footsteps, to see if it changed their customer's behaviour.
🎁 How to make a Minimum Viable Product
Start simple. Get feedback early and often.
- Make a list of all the potential features.
- Draw a chart with the axes of "easy to implement" and "important to the customer". Plot each feature on this graph.
- Choose only the top 3-5 features in the top right, and develop your simplest offering.
- Collect massive amounts of data. Quantify the value given to customers.
- Iterate. A lot.
After building a successful MVP (often with many manual workarounds), it's time to develop a prototype (by hard coding those workarounds into automatic processes).
👩 How to Acquire Customers
Build initial awareness:
- It's best to build it through personal selling and partnerships with local vendors.
- The other option is social media (mass selling), which is easy to set up but tend to have low yield in purchases. That's okay because we just want to build awareness for our brand, but it shouldn't be our primary marketing strategy.
Positive word of mouth is the best method, but this tends to come later. In the meantime, just make sure you have great product-market fit. Remember that it's cheaper to keep a customer than to acquire a new one.
📢 How to Make an Elevator Pitch
An elevator pitch is a clear message to your customers on how you'll be able to provide them value.
Talk about your mission (People don't what what you do, they buy why you do it). Then talk about your value proposition (how your strategy can help you achieve your goal). Finally, talk about the metrics and milestones that proved the viability of your strategy.
One powerful technique for constructing an elevator pitch is called the Pixar Pitch, which uses only 6 sentences that start with:
- Once upon a time, there was ______
- Every day, ______
- One day, ______
- Because of that, ______
- Because of that, ______
- Until finally, ______
A successful pitch invites the other person into conversation. Remember that the goal of a pitch is not to get a "Yes!". It's to get a "Hmm, that's interesting,".
Conclusion
The actionable takeaway in testing your offering is to figure out what the customer needs to do differently to adopt your offering, then test that specific behaviour.
Start simple. Get feedback early and often.
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