Transcript
As Steve Blank said in his book the four steps to the Epiphany build your
products last he says get out of the building
do some research step two find your market type what kind of company are you
do some research step 3 find your market do some research and step 4 finally when
you know all of that then you're ready to start growing you're able to start
validating your product creating your product and building your product all of
that means that three of the four steps to the Epiphany are doing research that
means you can do it without doing any product development even though product
development for some people is the most fun part only stop building your product
when you know what the customer wants what they actually want and how do you
get that information you ask them my favorite tool for finding out a very
quickly getting feedback is to do online surveys and I use the website Survey
Monkey to do that another great way to do it is to stand outside Starbucks and
ask people as they walking by you if you could ask them one or two questions very
harmless you ask them you tell them that this is a project that you are doing for
me and professors seat you have to ask some tough questions and when you get
those answers you collate them you put them all into an Excel spreadsheet you
you find out if there are any common patterns in what the customers or
potential customers are telling you about what they want your product do so
what are the kind of questions that you can ask your customers or potential
customers I would say that these this list of questions if you can answer
these questions you are making there good progress in designing that product
that customers actually want ask your customers what are the top problems in
the space that you're interested in how much would they pay to solve those
problems does the customer agree that your product or your potential product
could help them solve the problem how much would they pay for that solution
and then describe that customers day-in-the-life
so to imagine very clearly what your customer is thinking and what they're
doing and the process they're going through is the best way to understand
exactly what the product is that they want you may have some ideas about what
they want those are all assumptions you don't actually know until you hear
confirmation that these customers exist that they're willing to pay for this
solution that you're coming up with and you need to do all of that before you
lift one finger to build your product or spend one dollar on product development