The Startup Owner's Manual. Steve Blank
Чтение книги онлайн.
Читать онлайн книгу The Startup Owner's Manual - Steve Blank страница 24
Название: The Startup Owner's Manual
Автор: Steve Blank
Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited
Жанр: Экономика
isbn: 9781119690726
isbn:
Figure 2.2 Business Model Canvas
As a startup moves through the Customer Development process, it will use the business model canvas as a scorecard, by posting the hypotheses about each component of the model and then revising the hypotheses as the founders gather facts. Think of your first version of the business model canvas as the starting point showing the hypotheses that must be confirmed in face-to-face or online interaction with customers. More often than not, the customers will reject components of the business model, saying, “I’d rather buy that from a retailer,” or, “The product needs to have these features to be important to me.” As customers approve or dispute the business model hypotheses, the company either accepts the customers’ approval or pivots to change its business model to better target the opportunity.
Using the business model canvas as a guide makes it easier to figure out where and how to pivot, since the team can visually diagram its alternatives and see what it needs to change. Each time the founders iterate or pivot (see Rule No. 4) in response to customer feedback, they draw a new canvas showing the changes. Over time, these multiple canvases form a “flip book” that shows the evolution of the business model. Agile startups can end up with a six-inch-thick stack of business model diagrams they can burn at the IPO-celebration bonfire.
Much more about how to use business model diagrams to “keep score” throughout the customer discovery process can be found in Chapter 3.
…hypothesis is just a fancy word for “guess.”
Rule No. 6:
Design Experiments and Test to Validate Your Hypotheses
Initially, hypothesis is just a fancy word for “guess.” To turn hypotheses into facts, founders need to get out of the building and test them in front of customers. But how do you test? And what do you want to learn from the tests? Testing and learning require you to be thoughtful on constructing and designing your tests. We call this “designing the experiments.”
Customer Development experiments are short, simple, objective pass/fail tests. You’re looking for a strong signal in the signal/noise noise ratio, something like five of the first 12 customers you call on saying “I need this right now, even if it’s still buggy.” Early tests aren’t necessarily precise, but should give you a “good enough” signal to proceed.
Figure 2.3 The Customer Development Insight Cycle
Start by asking yourself, “What insight do I need to move forward?” Then ask, “What’s the simplest test I can run to get it?” Finally, think about, “How do I design an experiment to run this simple test?”
One of the things that trips up engineering founders is thinking that these tests have to be actual code, hardware or the real product. Most of the time you can mock-up the web page or create a demo or physical prototype to elicit valuable learning.
Rule No. 7:
Agree on Market Type. It Changes Everything
One of the radical insights guiding this book is that not all startups are alike. One of the key ways in which they are different is in the relationship between a startup’s new product and its market. These product/market relationships generally fit one of these descriptions:
bringing a new product into an existing market
bringing a new product into a new market
bringing a new product into an existing market and trying to:
re-segment that market as a low-cost entrant or
re-segment that market as a niche entrant
cloning a business model that’s successful in another country
What confused entrepreneurs for decades is that the traditional product introduction model works when introducing a product into an existing market with a known business model (i.e., known customers, channels and markets). However, since the majority of startups are not pursuing known markets (those in new or re-segmented categories), they don’t really know who their customers will be. These types of startups are searching for a repeatable and scalable business model.
Market type influences everything a company does.
Market type influences everything a company does. Strategy and tactics that work for one market type seldom work for another. Market type determines the startup’s customer feedback and acquisition activities and spending. It changes customer needs, adoption rates, product features and positioning as well as its launch strategies, channels and activities. In sum, different market types require dramatically different discovery, MVPs, and sales and marketing strategies.
In existing markets, where customers exist, marketing is relatively easy: users can describe the market and the attributes that matter the most to them. The new product or service typically runs faster, does something better or cheaper, or otherwise improves on a customer-defined attribute. Users, the market, and competitors are known, and competition involves comparing the product and its features with others.
In a new market, a company lets customers do something they couldn’t do before by creating something that never existed before. Or it dramatically lowers costs to create a new class of users. By definition, new markets have no customers yet, so there’s nobody to know what the product can do or why they should buy. This makes getting feedback and creating demand particularly challenging, since the product is unknown to users and the market is undefined and unknown, and costly to develop.
The key isn’t competing, but instead understanding whether a large customer base exists and whether customers can be persuaded to buy. A classic founder error in a new market is the “fast-burn” spending of sales and marketing funds, a practice that may be appropriate when selling to existing customers in a known market, but makes no sense in a new market. The new-vs.-existing axis is at the core of the market-type definition.
Re-segmenting an existing market is useful when the incumbent is too difficult to attack head-on (like Amazon, Facebook, or Microsoft). A re-segmentation strategy is based on the startup’s market and customer knowledge, ideally identifying a market opportunity that incumbents are missing, which usually takes one of two forms: a low-cost strategy or a niche strategy. (Unlike differentiation, segmentation forges a distinct spot in customers’ minds that is unique, valuable, and in demand.)
Low-cost re-segmentation is just what it sounds like. Are there customers at the low end of an existing market who will buy “good enough” performance at a substantially lower price?
Niche re-segmentation looks at an existing market and asks whether some segment of this market would buy a new product designed to address more specific needs. СКАЧАТЬ