How to Design Business Models Archives

January 26, 2018 By Denis Oakley

Is My Idea Too Risky?

Starting a business sounds risky. What if I end up spending too much time, money and my idea fails? Is my idea too risky for me?

You are right to have that thought, it is risky. This is why we are firm believers of the “Starters Journey” map. It is important to minimise uncertainty in every step.

Let’s discuss Uncertainty – the unknown.

You have to acknowledge that uncertainty is at its peak at the beginning of your venture.

Yes, this sounds obvious.

Yet, many entrepreneurs fail to understand the implication of high uncertainty.

Invest more in decreasing uncertainty

You should not spend time on refining or be perfecting a non-validated idea, the risk of failing is very high.

Start with cheap and fast experiment when uncertainty is high. You should only have the framework of an idea so that you are able to test and iterate.

Having assumptions is great!

You have many assumptions on how and why your idea is going to work or fail. Assumptions are a validation of your idea.

List these assumptions down once you have shaped your initial idea. You will have to first test these assumptions (hypothesis).

Other tips as you dive deeper into this course:

Optimise your experiments (aka MVPs) for learning. Don’t build a smaller version of what you intend to build.
Build a business only after finding the right value proposition(s) and business model.

January 25, 2018 By Denis Oakley

Start Your Entrepreneurial Journey

Welcome First Time Entrepreneurs

Meet the 2 of us – Denis & Leander, we are here to guide you to turn your idea into a sustainable business. If you want to get to know us more.

You are at the starting point for your entrepreneurial journey.

Maybe you found a great opportunity and want to build your business around it.
Maybe you are passionate about creating change for a greater good but do not know where to start?

Whatever the reason is we are here to help you innovate and build an idea.

What We Do:

Our goal is to provide you direction and build your confidence as an entrepreneur.

The training is available online. Each module includes a video, theory, a “how to do” section and activity sheets.

Follow this course to identify where you are in the startup journey and how you can proceed. Each module takes 2 hours, you will have tangible results by the end of each module.

Overwhelming but Predictable Startup Journey

Starting your own business can be an overwhelming process.
Building a startup is not simple; we managed to identify a pattern by helping many starters like you.

We call this curve the “Starters Journey”, a structured and systematic process for starters.

Our Prototyping Entrepreneurial Journey

We have selected the most practical method and theory that can be used in each step in making your idea come to life.

We aim to help you develop a business strategy by:

Providing you guidance and confidence
How can I jump and have a safe landing – is this idea too risky?
Ensuring the idea is sustainable – is it able to generate sufficient income?

How Will We Help?

By providing bite-sized information online explaining each step with:

Videos
Examples
Tips & Tricks
Activity Sheets

Throughout this course, you will be constantly gaining new insights. This insight might require you to change your approach, pricing and even your solution!

You will learn to prioritize your actions and learn faster. You are given guidance and will feel less overwhelmed.

July 31, 2017 By Denis Oakley

In this video I talk about how I approach Growth hacking. Whilst growth hacking is about tools and techniques and trying to find hacks for many startups it is important to take a step back. That is you need to look at the big picture and search for opportunities where your value proposition has strength and the competition and the customer has weakness or a problem. If you don’t do this then however flawless your execution you will be in an expensive world of pain unless you are super lucky.

Thinking first, figuring out what you want to do and where you want to go saves you far more money and time than starting a PPC or content marketing campaign immediately

Your Problem:

You have a product or service and you need customers

Hypothesis

Wrong – Start marketing by identifying the best available channel and conducting small experiments

Right – Consider the value that you provide to customers and understand their needs and the competitors plans so that you can craft a way forward that hits the target cheaply. Then go back to the wrong hypothesis

Rationale for the Approach to Growth Hacking

A lot of my customers are solopreneurs and entrepreneurs who are bootstrapping. As a result they are often hugely product focused. In some cases they have worked on the products for years, or have even developed a whole solution for which they can’t identify a solution or target customer. This may seem really daft when I put it so bluntly. The truth is that the majority of startups I talk to fail somewhere in this space. The ones that have succeeded have often been lucky in their choice of strategy or so closely identified with their target customer that they make the right choices intuitively.

So stepping back and thinking about the marketing before you get started is really important. It can seem expensive and time consuming because mental models of entrepreneurship focus more on product management. The cost of not doing it is the empty baseball field or the new and improved mousetrap sitting on the shelves in the store.

Action Steps:

Look at the world from the customer’s perspective
Check out your competitor’s value offering
Check out the value that you are offering to customers
Identify holes where the customer has a need but which competitors are not targeting with their marketing
Start running experiments in the holes

Arrange a Discovery Call Now

June 20, 2017 By Denis Oakley

What is the Best Growth Hack for Launching a New Startup?

The best growth hack for launch is not:

channel based, or
a tactic, or even a
methodology

It’s stepping back quietly and asking

Who are my customers?
Where will I find them?

Spending a day clearly and deeply thinking about those two questions is one of the best ways of accelerating growth and reducing the risk of failure for most startups.

On a tactical basis growth hacks vary in usefulness depending on the sector, business model and product/service. They are highly context dependent. So when you consider your startup it is invaluable to systematically brainstorm different hacks and experiments whilst scanning through the different got to market channels and then test to see what works for you.

Blindly choosing a ‘best hack’ is a great way to the worst result

March 20, 2017 By Denis Oakley

How to Get Your Startup Started

Startups have many problems. Across all my channels I probably look at between 5 and twenty startups in the earliest stages of their lives each week. In many cases the entrepreneur has given me a brief that they want me to do X and they have given me some information about the company. In a very large proportion of the startups it is not clear what the problem is that they are solving, who the customer is or how they are going to make money.

Since I started working in startup back pre-2003 I have spoken to thousands of entrepreneurs and this appears to be a pervasive and nontrivial problem. There are many many entrepreneurs who do get it. In part this is because they have nous that the rest of us like, or because they have gone through on e of the many amazing training courses available – whether from Ycombinator, Udacity or a huge range of startup blogs like this one.

At the same time there are so many entrepreneurs who have never come across this idea and so they build a product to service an idea not a customer with a problem.

So being really clear, the first things that you need to be sure of as an entrepreneur are:

Is there a real problem?

If you can’t give me 10 real people’s names and what the problem is in their words I’m going to be a bit cynical. In a lot of cases if you can’t do that you haven’t got out the building and started trying to sell the idea. You haven’t seen your idea splinter as it comes into contact with reality. It’s better to do it now than it is later when you have spent thousands of hours and a shed load of money and are into serious panic mode.

Do the customers care?

Some problems are so small, so trivial or just not worth solving. You may have proved it but if the customer is going to pay you peanuts and there aren’t enough customers out there to justify buying enough peanuts to make a jar of peanut butter then why bother? In many case a lot of people cannot accurately describe their customers (partly because they have never met any)

How hard is it to solve?

It’s amazing building mousetraps. Seriously. There is nothing better than to sit down and make or build something awesome. I built a sandpit once for my kids. It was made out of IKEA slats from an old bed. It was glued together and had a waterproof inner line. It was a work of art. They played with the cheap plastic sandpit we got from Tesco. In that case I supplied a wonderful but over engineered solution that cost massively more – both in cash and time – than they wanted to pay.

So What to Do?

Get out the building! Talk to customers as early as possible and build what they want. It’s actually far less scary than sales because you aren’t actually selling anything to anyone. All you are doing is asking

“Do you have this problem?”

That can be put into conversation in so many ways. As you do it hundreds and thousands of times as you get into your startup you get a real sense of who the customer is. Then they tell you this is the problem I really have and this is how you can solve it for me.

Without even sounding a teeny bit salesly you can then ask

How much would you pay for that?

And they tell you. Bang! In just a few hours a potential customer has said if you build me this I will buy it from you. Then all you have to do is jot down their email or phone number and move onto the next person.

“Do you have this problem?”

And pretty soon you have a bunch of answers that you can categorise and derive the feature sets that customers really want. And you have a nice big email list of people who can can say to

You said you had this problem and that you would buy the solution if it cost $X. Well guess what we have got a solution for the problem and it costs $X. Press this button to go to the checkout.

This converts. It is far easier than building a business in any other way.

In a nutshell this is what I do for my customers. I help them to get from the idea to delivering the first products to customers

April 20, 2016 By Denis Oakley

Get Rid of the Code for you MVP

This is a quick post on why code and the ability to programme is not important to you – initially – when you are looking at building your MVP. No code in an MVP!

I’m working with a couple of startups at the moment and we ended up having the same conversation in both at the moment. The first is a sports based startup in Los Angeles. I was talking with the CEO when the message came through on slack from the CTO

Backend for the MVP will take about 3 1/2 months
No Programmers does not mean no MVP

There was a long pause and a mutual feeling of – “we really need to start rethinking a lot of things right now”

That was the first.

The second was with Leander when we we were having our weekly meeting working on Lean Card. The actual detail is for a later conversation but basically we were working through ideas for the product road map and what the MVP should look like. Then Leander said

If our unique value proposition is that we offer “awesomely easy business cards” then what we are offering can be described as project management. I don’t need a computer to test that.

So in both cases we ended up sitting down and thinking how the business team could sit down and test all the key hypotheses without a single line of code.

This drive came from a few reasons

We can do it now
If it doesn’t work we can change easily
We don’t waste Dev time or money

MVP for Sales

For the sports startup the key testable hypothesis was whether suppliers would make a commitment which would validate part of the model. The LA sales team already has verbal commitment but we felt it was really important to actually get suppliers signed up to provide traction and real validation.

The idea is then to build some ultra simple sales sites on Facebook – provisionally with Wufoo and stripe and test several different customer segments. That will be done in the next few days and will start giving us some real validation – and just as importantly real life experience of which segments are best and how we need to design the app.

MVP for Operational Processes

For Lean Card the idea was exactly the same. Instead of using a cobbled together tech solution the MVP here was to sample do the process of project managing business card design with family, then friends, then acquaintances, then strangers, so that we could experience what worked and what didn’t. We have a strong idea of what the roadmap should be, but the getting out of the building, totally non scalable process of doing everything manually ourselves is going to make it very clear what is really needed in the first electronic versions and what is not – and maybe even that we need to pivot.

In both cases the net result is to derisk the development process as much as possible. A few months ago I was working with a startup who was looking to persuade people to wear their iphones to stream TV style adverts on public transport. We stuck some iphones to people with sticky tape and started playing Coca Cola dvert using YouTube. Then we send the ‘volunteer’ walking through a busy shopping centre to see what happened. The rest of the team tried to count how many people looked at the screen and how long they looked for. Total failure and an early pivot.

The learning point for this is to forget about the code and brainstorm simple and easy ways that you can start looking for validation of key hypotheses, start testing workflows that are critical to operations and see how customers react.

As someone said to me yesterday

It’s scary going and talking to strangers

Very true, but get out there and do it!