Technopreneurship Notes: Lean Startup and Business Model Thesis

The session begins with a prayer for guidance, wisdom, and support.
The prayer emphasizes meaningful discussion, community bonds, and service to humanity based on the Immaculata University Prayer Booklet.

The primary goal of a startup is to identify the right product that customers desire and are willing to pay for, as quickly as possible.
This involves a build-measure-learn feedback loop.
Formulate Hypothesis: Create a testable hypothesis (e.g., commuters want to order food from their cars).
Build: Create something.
Measure: Collect data to test your hypothesis.
Learn: Analyze your results.
Examples:
- IKEA: People are willing to assemble furniture at home.
- People are willing to pay monthly for streaming unlimited music online.

Everything in a startup should be considered a grand experiment.
MVP (Minimum Viable Product): The smallest version of a product that can be used to test a hypothesis.
- How many sign-ups are needed to validate the hypothesis?
Lean Startup Principles:
- Everything that doesn't create value for the customer is considered waste.
- Everything that doesn't lead to validated learning is waste.
Experiments:
- Formulate your hypothesis, perform experiments.
- Observe, don't just ask (e.g., don't ask “Why would I use that?”).
Examples:
- Successful use of Google AdWords to observe customer behavior.

The Video MVP: Create a video to explain the product and gauge interest.
The Concierge MVP: Manually provide the service to a small group of customers to learn their needs.
- Focus on a single customer to learn everything and adapt the product for her.
The Wizard of Oz MVP: Pretend that you have developed a fancy technical solution, while behind the curtains, it's operated by humans.
Examples:
- Pop-le, with significant sign-ups, demonstrates customer interest.

Establish a Baseline: Measure current performance.
Attempt to Tune: Make small changes to improve performance.
Pivot or Persevere: Decide whether to change strategy or continue on the current path.
Pivot: A change in strategy.
- Customer Segment Pivot: Target a different customer group.
- Value Capture Pivot: Change how you make money.
- Engine of Growth Pivot: Change how you acquire customers (e.g., viral vs. paid).
Persevere: Continue on the current path.
- Don't be a quitter, but don't be pigheaded either.

Definition: An approach to business development based on applying lean production principles to innovation.
It provides a guide to drive a startup, build, and maintain products.

A one-page business plan.
Elements:
- Identity: Define what you offer.
- Problem Worth Solving: Identify a significant problem.
- Target Market: Define your customer segments.
- Our Solution: Describe your product/service.
- The competition: Identify competitors.
- Marketing Activities: How you will promote your product.
- Sales Channels: How you will sell.
- Revenue: How you will make money.
- Expenses: Costs involved.
- Milestones: Key achievements.
- Team and Key Roles: Who is involved.
- Partners and Resources: External support.
After writing the plan:
- Test the plan,
- Review the results and,
- Revise the plan.

An experiment is the first product.
How to Experiment:
- Define a clear hypothesis using the Leap of Faith Assumptions.
- Use ‘Genchi Genbutsu’ approach for better understanding.
- Start by building an MVP.
- Identify and eliminate waste.
Example: Zappos

Believing or attempting something without proof of outcome or existence beforehand.
Types of hypotheses:
- Value Hypothesis
- Growth Hypothesis

A version of the product that enables a full turn of the Build – Measure – Learn loop with minimal effort and development time.
Has core features that allow the product to be deployed.
Helps in avoiding building a product that customers do not want.
Can be deployed to Early Adopters likely to provide feedback.

If we do not know who the customer is, we do not know what quality is.
Try not to presuppose what attribute of the product the customer will consider worthwhile.
Learn what the customers care about.
Remove any feature, process, or effort that does not contribute directly to the learning you seek.

Identify 3-5 problems of your target customers that are worth solving based on your top business ideas.

Questions to ask:
- Where do you go to learn about a product or service?
- What offline/online resources do you use?
- Where do you prefer to do your shopping?
- How do you prefer to interact with the vendors?
- How important is it to get a good deal?
- What types of mobile devices do you own?
- What type of indulgent or luxurious purchases do you make?

Research a company/product of interest aligned with your business idea to identify problems and customer needs.
Come up with 10 questions for your target customers to validate your problem and solution.
Upload your answers in Animospace:
- SDG and its target/s
- Business Idea (top choice)
- Company/product of interest
- 10 questions

Based on the formulated questions, conduct an interview/survey (at least 10 interviewees) and document findings.
Come up with your business model thesis.
NOTE: Customer and beneficiary may be different.

Issue X is a problem for audience Y (target user/customer) AND my solution Z is so “valuable” (proposition) that they will CHOOSE to use it to solve their problem OVER the existing solutions.

Lack of privacy is a problem for THOSE WHO TEXT MESSAGE AND my SNAPCHAT app is so protective of data that they will CHOOSE to switch from FACEBOOK in order to improve privacy.