A FASTER WAY TO VALIDATE NEW VENTURE IDEAS

THE MINIMUM VIABLE LEAN CANVAS©

“TO DISRUPT A WORLD IN CONSTANT CHANGE YOU ARE BETTER TO FOLLOW A (LEAN) COMPASS THAN A DETAILED MAP. THE LEAN HACKING™ MINIMUM VIABLE CANVAS© AND TRAINING WORKSHOP VALIDATE NEW VENTURE DECISIONS FASTER THAN ANY OTHER LEAN TOOL.”

Greg Twemlow

A SIMPLER 6 STEP LEAN CANVAS

The LEAN Hacking™ Minimum Viable Canvas© (MVC) and 1 day workshop have been developed for early-stage Startups and enterprise Startups. The MVC is designed to be easy to understand and complete and is minimal by design, focusing on the most critical elements of idea and market validation. The 1 day workshop is perfect for teams that need to quickly understand how they can ideate, validate, devise and sell their concepts.

IF WE FRAME INNOVATION AS A CHALLENGE OF DISCIPLINE—OF LEARNING TO USE THE RIGHT METHODS, TOOLS AND APPROACHES AT THE RIGHT TIMES—THEN WE QUICKLY FOCUS ON VERY DIFFERENT IMPERATIVES:

Greg Twemlow

STUDY

We become students of innovation: We don’t expect someone without training to build a discounted cash flow model or develop a marketing segmentation. Nor would we expect someone new to an industry to already understand its structure and dynamics. So why do we expect our colleagues and leaders to suddenly manifest an ability to innovate?

MEASURE

We measure methods and results: When we start seeing innovation as a discipline, then we also start focusing on what works and what doesn’t—and we set goals and measure results. This doesn’t mean we start asking for a 5-year financial projection two weeks into an initiative. It does mean paying attention to which inputs yield better outputs; did our time spent brainstorming in a room yield better ideas (doubtful), or did spending the same time studying our customers?

OBLIGATORY

We make innovation obligatory rather than optional: Finally, if we can see innovation as a discipline, then we can start demanding it from our organization. We can hold our team and business unit leaders accountable for sponsoring innovation initiatives, and charge our bright, high potential employees with developing.

USING THE LEAN HACKING™ MINIMUM VIABLE CANVAS© TO:

▸ Learn and apply the LEAN Hacking™ idea validation process,

▸ Understand Business Model/Market fit, and validated start-up methods to avoid common mistakes,

▸ Apply the Customer/Problem/Solution steps to rapidly validate ideas,

▸ Apply the Business Model/Early Adopters/Sales Test to validate the business model and prove the sales pitch.

MINIMUM VIABLE LEAN CANVAS 1 DAY WORKSHOP

MORNING SESSION

PROBLEM-SOLUTION FIT

▸ Introduce the iterative process that will validate your idea

▸ Why defining a single Customer Persona is important

▸ How to research your Customer Persona and the questions to use

▸ What to do about unexpected results

▸ When do you consider a Pivot

▸ What your Solution Design looks like

▸ How to test your Solution

AFTERNOON SESSION

BUSINESS MODEL-MARKET FIT

▸ Attributes of your Business Model

▸ How to scope the market

▸ How to test that your idea will be commercially viable

▸ Identify your Early Adopters

▸ Develop a great pitch deck

▸ How to conduct your Sales Test

▸ Feedback that could cause you to revisit the Business Model

A SET OF CLEAR INSTRUCTIONS

The LEAN Hacking™ Minimum Viable Canvas© (MVC) and 1 day workshop have been developed for early-stage Startups and enterprise Startups. The MVC is designed to be easy to understand and complete and is minimal by design, focusing on the most critical elements of idea and market validation. The 1 day workshop is perfect for teams that need to quickly understand how they can ideate, validate, devise and sell their concepts.

© Copyright 2015 http://www.gregtwemlow.co/ http://www.leanhacking.co/

1. Customer 2. Problem 3. Solution TestEric Ries says, “The goal of such early contact with customers is not to gain definitive answers. Instead, it is to clarify at a basic, coarse level that we understand our potential customer and what problems they have.” The Customer is the first hurdle where you will test your Problem hypothesis. The process to do this is essentially that of “getting out of the building”, the Steve Blank term. Two aspects of this step are very important-That you conduct these interviews as a discovery session, not a sales pitch session, and that you interview a sufficient number of people who confirm your hypothesis, i.e. >50%. Watch these videos: • https://youtu.be/lLEebbiYIkI • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeIM5IxvY-o • https://youtu.be/RNwX0-KJfeo

Your Customer Persona has a primary problem that has to be validated. At this very early stage be careful that you are validating your Customer’s problem and not your Customer’s Customer, i.e. you are validating the Persona that will pay you to solve their problem. You may have a Domain expert in your team who is confident of the nature of the problem. Even more reason to get an objective view by asking your Customer Persona to explain the nature of the problems they experience and how they have attempted to solve them. What you think you need to test is only the first step. Talking to customers helps validate if these are indeed the right problems to tackle and more importantly helps uncover possible solutions and techniques for testing them. Inability to validate Problem/Persona is a BIG red flag.

Start by defining your solution using language and terminology that was used in your customer interviews. Try not to use too many terms that are overly technical unless your solution is for highly technical customers. At this point take time to search for your competitors and don’t deceive yourself that there are none. Assess their features/functions/capabilities and consider “can I do better?”. Depending on what your Startup is developing you may find that pictures communicate the solution far better than words. Physical products must have detailed diagrams. Websites and Apps need to be wireframes or prototyped. Showing is always better than telling and there are a myriad of tools to create website and App mockups. Watch the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeIM5IxvY-o

4. Business Model 5. Early Adopters 6. Sales TestSteve Blank says, “A startup is a temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model.” You start by documenting a set of business model hypotheses, then systematically validate those hypotheses against reality and make course-corrections, or pivots, along the way. Your business model will be tested by going back to the Customers you interviewed to ensure they agree your model is viable. Your Business Model defines what the Customer will pay for what value.

“Business Plan: A document investors make you write that they don’t read. Business Model: A single diagram that describes your business.” – Steve Blank

Not every future customer is ready for your product or service. The majority of the people that you can cater to in the future won’t forgive you if your product isn’t perfect. Therefore it’s important to start by finding people that will love your early stage product as well – people that can help you improve the product over time. Those who don’t mind that your product doesn’t have all the bells and whistles yet, as long as the initial product is better than their current solution and they believe in you and your idea/vision. This is what characterizes early adopters: • They have been actively looking for a way to solve

the problem. • They’ve tried to put together a piecemeal solution. • They have or can obtain a budget to spend on a

solution.

“Do or do not… there is no try.” – Yoda This is where the rubber hits the road. Steps 1 to 5 build into a pitch, a deck and a proposal that can be presented to the Early Adopters you identified in Step 5. The Sales Test must be conducted by the Founder/s. You will receive the most valuable feedback in your sales meetings. Is your pitch easy to understand, does your solution solve the problem, is your business model acceptable, what unexpected questions and demands are tabled and is there a willingness to be a contracted customer. Rules: 1. NO bullshit, 2. Don’t say ‘Yes” unless you’re sure, 3. It’s OK to say “I need to check and come back to you’, 4. You want them as a reference account and a published case study, 5. watch how Steli Efti hustles - http://youtu.be/IfKMsdI9wJM

LEAN Hacking™ Minimum Viable Canvas - instructions

DISRUPTIVE INNOVATION

by Greg Twemlow

DISRUPTION ISN’T ACCIDENTAL, IT ISN’T DISORDERLY, AND IT IS NO LONGER THE SOLE PROVINCE OF STARTUPS. INCUMBENTS THAT ACT APPROPRIATELY USE THE FORCES OF DISRUPTION TO DRIVE NEW GROWTH. THOSE THAT DON’T ACT APPROPRIATELY ARE DESTINED TO SUFFER THE FATE OF K-MART, BORDERS, KODAK, RESEARCH IN MOTION, BLOCKBUSTER, PALM, AND MANY MORE.

Greg Twemlow

DISRUPTION CANVAS™

COPYRIGHT 2016 GREG TWEMLOW - HTTP://WWW.GREGTWEMLOW.CO/

DISRUPTIVE INNOVATION

DISRUPTING AN INDUSTRY INVOLVES MORE THAN JUST GAINING MARKET SHARE FROM YOUR COMPETITOR.

Disruption Canvas™

©Copyright 2015 http://www.gregtwemlow.co/

2. Intelligence Gathering 1. Purpose Statement 3. Customer Profiling• Catalog disruptive threats, sorted by

threat severity • Focus on industries that are fat & lazy.

In what industries are companies, producers, or brokers pocketing too much money for the value they add, victimizing consumers or others along the supply chain?

• Big companies focused on EPS results are easy targets

• Tasks that are overly time-consuming, complex, expensive

• Some industries are ready for disruption, while others are cemented in the past by laws that protect the incumbents and are not changing any time soon, in the absence of a surprise “black swan” event

Pick one or more of: 1) Take market share from competitors, 2) Create new markets, 3) Design & produce products that revolutionize lives/industries/knowledge, 4) Attack a parent company or traditional market, 5) Disrupt dominant market brands, 6) Make the world better/fairer/smarter/cleaner/healthier, 7) Generate profit that is self-sustaining/enriching/empowering, 8) Reward investors, shareholders & staff, 9) Benefit all three groups - customers, suppliers & the company, 10) Attack an existing market dominated by entrenched incumbents that are inefficient, expensive or both disrupt the way knowledge is transferred to employees, customers, and other

The attitude, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” is the enemy of disruptive thinking. It’s the seemingly unbroken aspects of a situation that provide the richest opportunities for innovation. They tend to be the things we ignore, precisely because they don’t change. It’s more effective to start by identifying something in your business that’s not necessarily a problem, in a place where others wouldn’t expect to look. In other words, think about what usually gets ignored, pay attention to what’s not obvious, and start with things that ain’t broke but that could make a customer’s life 10x better. Taxi customers weren’t exactly threatening revolution when Uber launched.

4. Disruption Ideation

Disrupting an industry involves more than just gaining market share from your competitor. It’s a shift in how business is done — the money flow and value delivered, ideally squeezing out inefficiencies and those profiteering from lack of transparency. A disruptive hypothesis is an intentionally unreasonable statement that gets your thinking flowing in a different direction. Disruptive hypotheses are designed to upset your comfortable business equilibrium and bring about an accelerated change in your own thinking. You’re trying to find a way to rearrange the pieces, which in turn will provoke a different way of looking at the situation.

5. MVP Design 7. MVP Launch/Measure 6. Scale-Up Modeling• Dramatically reduce complexity (at

least 10x better) • Make stupid objects smart • Make loyalty dramatically easier than

disloyalty • NEVER make a customer do something

YOU can do for them • Transparency - no spin • Incorporate Gamification • Cut prices 90 percent (or more) • An MVP has value to your customers,

so they should pay • If customers won’t pay for your MVP go

back to the drawing board. You either have a dud idea or your MVP is just a concept demo

Generally speaking, all commercial offerings progress sequentially through four stages: introduction, growth, maturity, and decline. Your focus right now is on the introduction, the official birth of your disruptive idea. Focusing on the introduction stage means that you’ll need to work closely with early adopters to refine and tune your idea before it gets anywhere near a mainstream market. Why? Because, for a disruptive idea to really take off, you must introduce it to people who have the motivation to appreciate the change in status quo. These people like being part of disruptive change, and if you succeed, they’ll tell the next group, which will pass the word on to the mass market. Keep in mind that early markets are small, so don’t focus your pitch on convincing your audience of how huge a potential market is. Only mainstream markets are huge, and disruptive ideas never get their start in mainstream markets. Promising that is a sure-fire way to lose credibility with your audience. So, think small and target only early adopters where you can make an impact with what Gary Hamel calls, “revolutionary goals, but evolutionary steps….”

Disruption can’t occur without scalability. All disruptive ideas must be tested for true scalability and in so doing identify the bottlenecks that could constrain growth. Creating a reliable model will almost always require multiple concurrent tests.

Understand at what ‘x’ factor growth your solution will grind to halt. Is it 2x, 10x, 100x ? How will you remove the bottleneck ? What will that cost and how long will it take ? A truly Disruptive business will have a clear path to limitless growth.

CONTACT GREG TWEMLOW FOR MORE INFORMATION - HTTP://WWW.LEANHACKING.CO/#CONTACT