No money is no problem
Attempting my first live blog post from our +Lean Startup Machine workshop in Milan. Taking my own advice to Fuck it, Ship it. Beware this post was written in the five minutes left before teams get back in the building with the results of their first experiment.
Don't get me wrong, not having money can be a huge problem. But for the purposes of doing customer development and validating a problem worth solving, it is a bad problem statement. The purpose of the first round of #custdev is to LEARN and you are not going to learn that much by proving that people want more money, more time in the day, more eyeballs to their site (even though we know that is a vanity metric:)
The key is to identify and isolate the underlying reason WHY this is a problem and test THAT.
We were just working on an important and serious problem with a team related to caring for aging parents. Worthwhile problem, and the reason we do these workshops in the first place.
Imagine that running a few experiments and focusing on the right questions can ultimately lead to happier lives in a very sensitive time in the lives of both the parent being cared for and the child caring for them.
In order for that to happen, we need to ask the right questions... NO MONEY TO DO WHAT? NO TIME TO DO WHAT? When you find yourself writing your problem hypothesis and you find that it is as vague and unoriginal as the one in this tweet, ask yourself why and you are halfway there towards changing the world.
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Don't get me wrong, not having money can be a huge problem. But for the purposes of doing customer development and validating a problem worth solving, it is a bad problem statement. The purpose of the first round of #custdev is to LEARN and you are not going to learn that much by proving that people want more money, more time in the day, more eyeballs to their site (even though we know that is a vanity metric:)
The key is to identify and isolate the underlying reason WHY this is a problem and test THAT.
We were just working on an important and serious problem with a team related to caring for aging parents. Worthwhile problem, and the reason we do these workshops in the first place.
Imagine that running a few experiments and focusing on the right questions can ultimately lead to happier lives in a very sensitive time in the lives of both the parent being cared for and the child caring for them.
In order for that to happen, we need to ask the right questions... NO MONEY TO DO WHAT? NO TIME TO DO WHAT? When you find yourself writing your problem hypothesis and you find that it is as vague and unoriginal as the one in this tweet, ask yourself why and you are halfway there towards changing the world.
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| Image courtesy of the Javelin Board |
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