Photo by Branimir Balogović on Unsplash
Entrepreneurs need your help to build products for you
While it’s critical we sustain all efforts to limit the further spread and find treatments for the coronavirus, we also need to prepare for the new normal that will emerge when we leave sheltering in place. A lot of attention has been given to the need to help small businesses, as it should be. Another aspect that perhaps could use a greater appreciation is how small businesses form, adapt to changing times and serve evolving customer demands and needs. The technique commonly taught by our colleagues around the world is called Customer Discovery. Quite simply, it’s the process of converting an educated guess (also called a hypothesis) into informed decision making.
For entrepreneurs this process is often the difference between survival and failure. The leading cause of startup demise – an estimated 42% – is the failure to build products people actually want. It may sound obvious, but the best way to know what customers want is to talk with them. It’s also one of the more challenging aspects of building a new business and keeping an ongoing one current and relevant. Once people overcome their own fears and insecurities about validating their ideas, finding customers willing to talk is frequently a huge hurdle in its own right.
Customer Discovery is the life blood of any business. It’s the process of validating ideas for new products and services are in fact things people may actually want to buy. This is true for entrepreneurs, established companies, government operations, or any entity that has a mandate to solve problems. The act of customer discovery is simply forming an hypothesis about an observed problem, then talking to enough people who are believed to have that problem to determine if the observation is accurate and there are enough people who want it solved to merit committing time and resources into a solution.
Customers (aka as people) are busy with their own challenges and taking time out to discuss someone else’s ideas more often than not doesn’t hit their priority list. Steve Blank, known for developing the lean startup approach, is famous for his refrain to “get out of the building”. So much human communication is non-verbal and when in-person you have more of someone’s attention. Emails or surveys are just insufficient tools for learning what you don’t know you don’t know. And these means of communication are frequently ignored by most of us. The most effective way of talking with customers is face to face.
How do entrepreneurs get face to face when people are emerging from being sheltered in place? How do they meet with people when social distancing is being enforced in the workplace? How do you get someone’s attention when they are consumed adapting to our collective and emerging in-real-time new normal? In a rapidly changing world, the customer voice is more important than ever. Their experiences arising out of the chaos of the pandemic, range from new modes of working to balancing time spent with family while working from home. And throughout it all, facing supply chain inefficiencies not to mention critical dependencies on medical testing. All of these experiences are informing customer thinking and entrepreneurs are seeking these new perspectives to determine how to respond and develop products and services to meet an evolving set of needs. There will undoubtedly be a hotbed of new ideas that come from our most recent experiences that will define our future world.
Business all over the world are grappling with policies around if and when to have employees return to the office. One policy getting significant attention is whether or not to administer health test to enter the premises. How will they manage data if they want to enforce mandatory health testing to enter the work place? To serve those who continue working from home, other than video meetings, how will work from home technology evolve to enhance interaction? Distance learning in higher education will be changed - how will experiential learning be factored in to the new curriculums, tools, and systems? These are just a few examples of problems emerging as we all consider our collective new normal. To understand these problems sufficiently enough to inform the appropriate solutions to address them, requires customer discovery.
With history as our guide, we may experience a new wave of startup activity. According to Axios, “Recessions have often triggered startup baby booms. After the dotcom bust in the early 2000s, a new wave of small companies emerged to build "Web 2.0." And many of today's industry leaders got started during the Great Recession of 2008-9.”
If we want the economy and our lives broadly to resume, we have to adapt everything we do, including how entrepreneurs find and talk with their customers. We all have a role to play. We are all consumers buying products and services that originally had to be conceived by an entrepreneur. Many of us work in organizations that use and purchase products and services which only exist as a result of entrepreneurial innovation. All of our inputs can be important components in discovering the value propositions necessary to form a new venture. How we work, where we struggle, lose time or efficiency is critical input for an entrepreneur searching for product/market fit. Our problems are their “aha moments”.
As educators deeply engaged with preparing the next generation of entrepreneurs, we launched the COR Methodology to help people forge better organizational cultures. Consideration of customers and all stakeholders is a critically important aspect of these new cultures. Every organization has a culture. Most evolve organically over time. We’re helping leaders of any type of organization, from nascent startups to large global enterprises, become aware of how to shape, curate and nurture the cultures they want rather than settling for ones they may not. Culture can be formed intentionally. It’s in these constructive cultures that your perspective is fuel for the creative process driving innovation. The need for our COR Methodology was only emboldened by the Business Roundtable’s support of a new vision of Corporate Purpose which took into consideration all of a company’s stakeholders. With the advent of a global pandemic, never before has consideration of the needs of all stakeholders been more important. And the customer perspective is one of many stakeholder voices which we must pay attention to in these critical and changing times
In our capacity as university professors and mentors, we call on anyone everywhere to respond if an entrepreneur reaches out to request your time. Help them help you. Your insight and perspective on the things you are doing can be significant data points in their effort converting information into actionable knowledge. We can’t wait for everything to be back to “normal”. The customer’s voice is too important to innovation and the entrepreneurial process. New norms of human interaction should not and cannot sideline critical progress.
Granted the number of in-person face to face meetings will be dramatically reduced, but the need for ongoing contact is as important as ever. As the world adapts to our changing times, we’ll seek new ideas, products and services to meet our new needs and requirements. “Getting out of the building” now may be more a virtual experience increasingly relying on video than otherwise desired, but we all have to adapt.
As a society, one thing many people have begun to comment on is the new awareness of our collective purpose. Statements such as “we are all in this together” demonstrate the refreshing and growing acknowledgment of how essential we all are. People in roles once overlooked have been thrust into the spotlight for their valuable contributions to our common good. The new innovations yet to be conceived by an entrepreneur somewhere in the world struggling with getting enough validation of their ideas to develop the next new great thing might just rely on your input. If you’re asked, please take a moment to help them help us all.
