The Leaner Start-up?
I’ve mentored hundreds of entrepreneurs who have learned and are trying to apply the Lean Start-up Method to validating their business ideas and I’ve seen a lot of common pitfalls in the application. These pitfalls are what inspired me to create the Is This a Thing? methodology. Here’s my top 10 issue list:
Not being honest about your personal goals - Setting goals upfront is a critical starting point for evaluating any new business venture. Too often I see entrepreneurs skip through their personal goals. Two common examples: not being honest about personal earning requirements and not really considering the relative importance of achieving a social mission vs. financial outcome.
Not understanding what goals you need to reach to get stakeholder buy-in - If you are seeking VC funding, then you should absolutely be talking to VCs to understanding what milestones they are looking for your business to reach to get funding. For example, every VC is going to be looking for you to be addressing a large market, so researching and validating market size should be a priority.
Not aligning on goals with your team - I very often talk to teams where disagreements in personal goals and priorities materialize months into exploring a business idea. A lot of time and aggravation could be saved by having these conversations upfront.
Not surfacing your unconscious assumptions - A critical part of the validation process is listing all of your assumptions so that you can begin testing them. Often entrepreneurs will make unconscious assumptions that they don’t delineate or think to test, but wind up being critical and risky.
Not prioritizing testing the most important assumptions - I see teams double down on testing assumptions that are not risky because it’s a safe and comfortable way to validate things they are already confident about. The most important thing an entrepreneur can do to speed up validation is to focus narrowly on the most critical and risky assumptions.
Not being focused in customer interviews - It’s so important to identify who you need to be talking to and hone in on just speaking to those people (i.e., don’t just interview your friends because they are easy to reach!). Once you have the right people, make sure you have a very specific learning goal for the conversation and focus on that.
Talking to too many people - More is not always better! I recommend pausing after 5 interviews to assess and iterate on your strategy. Maybe you want to pick a new learning goal for the next round of interviews, adjust your target audience, or move from interviews to prototype testing. You will be able to quickly pick up patterns from a small number of conversations.
Not talking to industry experts - There are likely many other people who have already explored your idea, or something similar. Taking to them and learning from their experience can save you a tremendous amount of time (consider that they’ve each probably done 100s of customer interviews themselves!)
Not getting to prototyping fast enough - You should quickly be moving past general information interviews to prototype tests that show true behavior and intent.
Not being targeted with a prototype- A prototype should be built to validate a very specific assumption and achieve a very specific learning goal - there are so many creative options of what that can look like!
