Desirability—Am I solving a real problem?

I am starting with desirability because this is most likely the most important question you should ask yourself. Does anybody even want what I am building? And a yes and no answer is not enough. Ask yourself “how much” do people want my product? Focusing on the intensity of the need rather than only the existence of a problem will eventually determine how easy it will be to distribute your product to your end user. 

If your users are already actively seeking out a solution for the problem, it will simplify your growth strategy and you will have to spend less on acquisition. Instead, if you have to educate them about the problem and your solution, acquiring new customers is going to become more challenging.

It’s important to understand that needs are not binary—they exist or don’t exist. They fundamentally differ in intensity. What you want to avoid while building a venture that is “nice-to-have” but that is not solving any particular important problem. 

Simple steps to test if there is a need for your solution

1. Fake it until you make it. Before spending too much time building the actual product, just fake it. Build a simple landing page, create a logo for it, design a couple of mockups on Figma. You don’t have to be a designer to do it, and it doesn’t have to be perfect, but visualising your solution will make it much easier for your early users to engage with it and give you initial feedback. 

2. Do some early qualitative research. Speak with your end users as much as possible. Engage with communities and try to understand how much the problem that you are trying to tackle is felt by your users.

3. Define who your target customer is. While engaging with communities of users that you are trying to solve a problem for, you will start to get an understanding of who your first customers are. Map out different characteristics of these personas like: age, income, job, hobbies, etc. 

4. Run marketing tests. The nice result of interacting with niche communities of users is that you might see that your users are actively seeking out solutions like you, resulting in you not having to spend any money on marketing (this is what could be called your ‘product-pull’). If pull marketing is not a useful method for your idea, test how much it will cost you to acquire new users in an inorganic way (push-marketing). Running a growth test is fairly straightforward by using platforms like Facebook or Google ads.

Feasibility—how easy is it to build? 

Feasibility is often defined as the technical capabilities needed to build a certain solution, but in early-stage startups it is much more productive to think about the capabilities needed to build an MVP. Or another way of looking at it, what is the first feature or product that I can create that will deliver the most value to your customer with the least amount of effort?

We are focusing on the MVP rather than the “full” solution at this stage for the following reason: having an idea for a venture that is very large and difficult to build is not necessarily a negative thing. Bold visions that solve big problems are very much welcomed in the venture ecosystem, and if the vision is compelling enough, you can get the required funding even if the end product is years away from hitting the market. 

Nonetheless as an entrepreneur endeavouring in such a vision, you still have to show some early traction that signals that you are going towards the right place—especially to investors. This is exactly why MVPs are important: think of the MVP as a stripped down version of your end vision that shows progress. Progress could be shown as a form of technical progress, for example am I progressing in the development of the technology needed to solve a particular problem, or customer traction, are my customers interested in my product, this could include things like sign up or pre-orders. These signals will make sure that you can show traction to investors in order to get the required financing needed to build your full vision. 

Simple steps to test how difficult it is to show early traction

1. Spot the core features of your product. It is always important to have a clear understanding of what the core features are of your product or service that you want to build. Often founders tend to present venture ideas with too many features: instead you should spot the one “thing” about your product that solves a unique problem for your users.

2. Map out the product in a service design blueprint. Blueprints are extremely useful to develop a deeper understanding of the technical and operational complexities of your product or service. Service design blueprints are often an overlooked tool by founders, but it’s a quick and easy way to visually represent the front end journey your customers will experience in combination with the background tasks you will have to set up to make the journey happen. More information here

3. Write down the human capital needed. After mapping out your venture idea, start to build an understanding of how many, if any, people and skills you need to build a first iteration of the product. Do you need engineers? Designers? Sales? This will help you understand how much, if any, seed funding you will need to start things off. 

4. Build a concierge MVP. Optimally, you as the sole founder or founding team, will have enough skills to start building a first and simple version of the MVP. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy, indeed at this stage the product can be delivered in a manual way without the need of complex backend automations. The key of a concierge MVP is to gain some traction and start learning from the users that you serve. Rather than a commercial product, a concierge MVP is a product for you, the founder, to better understand the user and optimise your vision so it can create the most value for them. 

Chiron, a business that’s recently spun out of our Venture Studio, was aiming to prove demand for their fibromyalgia self-management and support platform, and whether they could rely on users to interact with their app on a daily basis. The team built a simple concierge MVP via Whatsapp automations managed by founder Carron with four users over a two week period. The basis of that feedback has helped them flesh out the requirements and features for their mobile app, as well as underlining the fundamental demand for the product.