This is the one singular reason why 8 out of 10 startups will fail

One of the many tweets that sums up the fundamental principle of Lean Startup. Retweet if you agree with this.

[8] Most #startups fail because they try to find customers for their products, rather than finding products for their customers.
— ayo Dawodu ♛ (@tjwizking) February 3, 2015

You develop customers first. Not the product,not the app, customer development first. That's the riskiest part. It's hardly a technology problem, always a marketing one.

Don't sell what you can make, make only what you can sell, that's putting the horse before the cart - as it should be, Get it?

Want to fast track your startup? start building a Community

This post was first published on 99digital.co

If this startup game was a matter of how cool or awesome what you are offering is, then a lot of folks would have conquered that word “Startup”; but it’s not – It’s essentially how you get the bucks to roll in.. cool or no cool.. just show us the money, then we know you are ready for business.

Joseph Barisonzi has this to say

The title of this blogpost, was the title of a talk by Community building authority, Richard Millington of FeverBee during a tech meetup event at Google campus London. The main content of this post, however are my processed thoughts on the subject. Though I will share 6 snipping points from the talk.

1. Build communities, not audiences.
2. Talk about the community, not the brand / product
3. On how to initiate discussions: Ask a Question, don’t just give information.
4. Build relationship with key people
5. We interact in Niche groups. Friends and families first, then people with common interests –that’s a strong one.
6. There is a difference between a [social] network of people and a community, one has no common interest and the later does have.

Our everyday living as humans thrives on Communities and if we can apply some principles of communities to technology startups in this digital age, we would have much better results.
Today, Technology allows us to create communities that have more diversity than the offline communities we create as humans. Notice the subtle irony in that. It’s powerful!

To the core of the matter – Fast tracking your startup, a.k.a Triggering Traction.

You have to totally dig that this is a marketing game.
Here is my point exactly: You are starting a technology business, a startup as it were, understand that the most critical thing to your survival is getting your customers to pay. You must find them and get them to pay. Hard stuff.- This is why advertising is worth A LOT.

Finding your customers and getting them to pay is the most critical thing – If so Why not do it FIRST.

The convention today, especially for technology startups,  is to have the idea, do some research and all gather all what is needed to begin execution and then begin execution.
The mind is naturally focused on getting the obvious work done. Without considering the most critical thing -the reason why you will be in business, if you ever get paid, that it: the paying customer.

This is the whole point of the Lean Startup-Get-outta-the-building-Customer-development chants you probably may have been hearing.

Tackle your riskiest issues first. The goal of a startup is to de-risk your startup ASAP.
Sigh. God bless Ash and co.

Bringing this back to community building, with a mind of having your first customers – you don’t make that so obvious by the way.
You’ll have to  discover a common interest that would resonate with the members and that your startup idea can relate with.

A few examples.

Felix: Edge of Space Jump

Redbull has a strong community and they rarely talk about the drink. The common interest is Extreme sports and that's what they really focus on. We all remember the Felix dude that jumped-off the edge of space.

Nike, the sport brand, has a solid community too. The common interest here is running.
The goal with the community is to foster engagement and interaction around that common interest. - That is like gold.
You will discover insights basically. A perfect platform to "customer develop" the members, but the aim should be to sustain and guide the interactions as much as possible to the point where-by the discussion nearly focuses or focuses on a point where your offering can solve a problem or meet a need. These are the moments you don’t want to miss.

By doing this the members discover the need for your product almost by themselves, you really did not bring it to them in their faces – which when they notice you are marketing, they activate their marketing guards, then it becomes tougher to sell.

By them discovering it as a result of committing their thoughts to something they are already interested in, selling would be easier, you would spend less on marketing, really.
However, community building is a skill on its own.

At this point, you have early adopters within reach. You can now offer the minimum viable product/offering, which becomes a way to demonstrate traction and begin business, weather by bootstrapping or via investment.

That, versus completing the product and them blasting everywhere with ads- “Hey this is a product x that does magic y, you will like.. bla bla bla” -You may likely do that for a while before anyone answers you. Reason being that, the process of selling is in stages.
You as a person don’t just see a new product and say “Chairman, take my money, I like you already” – rarely happens.
The process involves you getting the message clearly, then getting interested, then thinking about it, e.t.c

You don’t face that hurdle using the community way, they are passed naturally and quickly since interest exist.

The community way to building startups offers much more. If it is just for the feedback, that’s valuable enough. With the feedback, you involve those you are building the product for in the building process.
They would naturally accept it when they see elements that reflect their thought patterns or personality, that again, versus you and your team building the product from only your own thought lines and assumptions, and pushing it unto user. You are pretty much saying “This is what we think you need, this is what you must do and this is how you must do it and you must do it this way” and most of the time we are wrong.

Your community can be online or offline, the point is fostering the interactions – However you do it, really doesn’t matter.

So yeah.. ! That’s it on fast tracking startups via community building, I expect some thoughts would oppose to this, it would be nice to know what you think instead 

-Is there anything more critical than finding your paying customers?
If any, someone please enlighten my thinking.

PS: This post is supposed to be a follow-up post to this piece about 2 interesting ways to think about startups, I lost the points that connect them. Still a good piece to read.

The Gospel According to Lean

It is quite amazing the resonance the Lean Startup community outside Lagos is effecting.
A bit of thanks to LSM people – I think this is finally catching-on here.

I actually had 2 people ask me in church today to know more about Lean Startup. I really did not expect to talk lean in church, but then I had to do an explanation to one of them right there, He seemed to get the idea about the whole #custdev feedback loop.

I had another person give me a direct call yesterday, spent 5 minutes 23 sec explaining Lean Startup to him. Also posted comments on Facebook to give little explanation as to what Lean Startup is.

Just so we are clear in understanding, here is a bit more detail to it, not exhaustive I must say – which is why you should get Eric Ries’ Lean Startup Book at least for your first Lean Read. It is available here.

Would talk about 3 concepts in Lean and how they tie up.
First, a bit of general information about Lean Startup.
The Lean Startup way of doing things is radically different.
It in a way goes against the norm of what you expect in traditional business, enterprise or anything that involves spending resources.
It speaks for eliminating chances for waste -waste of time, money, skill, cognitive power and resources in general.

It is not a cheap way of doing things and then, it involves creating a system of experimental and validated learning.

Assumptions

This argues that whatever ideas we have is an assumption, an assumption that is invalidated- Period.
You got the idea in the shower or anywhere, consider it an invalidated idea.
This means you can’t place a huge bet on the outcomes.  You simply can’t say exactly what would happen if you executed the idea. So goes any knowledge in relation to the the idea –invalidated.

A quick example. The weather is so hot now, and I assume children in the neigbourhood would love iced lolly or ice cream to chill them, so I get the needed ingredients and I make Iced lolly.
Time to sell, and I get no sale, or few sales.
This could be the cause – Say about half of the children the neighborhood could perhaps have recent history of tummy upset and mummy thinks no sweet stuff until you are good to have them.
The other half, perhaps buy Ice-lolly at school and mom says “you can only have one a day” or some silent hidden reason.
These are very very hard to predict scenarios which one would never know except you validate your assumption by developing your customers before starting out.
That sounds a bit basic, still some folks still assume a whole lots and miss it.

Customer Development

Delivering products and services people want is linked with good customer development.
The term may be new, but it in fact means interacting with your customers. Some folks may mean it to be market research, or survey but it is not – at least not in that sense.

Surveys and the likes aim to get you information which you don’t know.
Customer Development aims to get you information anyway, whether you know it or not, it is an assumption in the first place, remember – and it gives you more – it is in the facial expressions, the emotional reactions, the pupil dilation, (if you can catch that), the voice tone e.t.c.
In essence, customer development validates or invalidates that piece of assumed knowledge via the feedback you get –which is not biased.

Back to the Ice Cream guy. Let’s call Him Sam.

He stood a chance with good customer development. Had he done it, he would have gotten useful information (Feedback)  and apply it to re-strategize.
The women tell him “Our children have tummy upset” and he could go back and make plans to include non-sugar/low-sugar Ice-cream/lollies in his options.

 I imagine him coming back to the woman saying “No worries madam, I have non-sugar Ice cream that has Vitamins A, B1, B2, B3 and C.. Perfect for you Children, infact it would stop the tummy upset :)” – He stands a good chance.

For those who buy at school, upon discovering that through customer development, he could spend half the time at school.  The Children, seeing Uncle Sam their neighbor who sells Ice Cream would want to buy from him.  The Feedback would have eliminate the possible waste of resources.
In the case he is unable to meet the demands, that would be known early-on before investing into the venture.

Feedback

Feedback is gold. It must be crafted into the whole system of your business. It is  like the compass of your business-ship. If your customers says no. It’s a no- no. They say yes and nod with it. Move fast.

But come back soon and ask again.

The average person would conclude (assume) uninformed that Ice-lolly/Ice-cream doesn't sell well in his neigbourhood, but with feedback, adjustments could be made and the true potential of the market is realized.

By the Way.

If you look at the concepts of  Lean Startup from a business plan standpoint, you may realize planning so long into the future is high risk. 3,5,10 years+  business plans are probably a sham. The rate of change these days is just crazy. Have what you want to achieve in view, but be flexible on how you get it. Experimentation is the new planning.

Yeah, that’s it – the Gospel according to LeanStartup – Enjoy the Journey

Cheers.

6 Lean Start-up Resource persons you should be following as a start-up

 "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." - Isaac Newton

This list is by no means exhaustive and could have more people added to it in the nearest future. If you have no idea of what Lean is all about and how it relates to start-up, I suggest you read this first

1. Steve Blank

   Popular proponent of customer development, author of 4 Steps to Epiphany, and If you’ve ever heard the term “Get out of the Building” used in a start-up context, yes, that’s Steve Blank. Highly experienced in field of start-ups - having been part of about a dozen or more successful start-ups, he shares his lessons and experience with the start-up world. You should keep tabs on him.

2. Eric Ries

   Author of The Lean Startup and a major player in the Lean start-up movement. His works on the lean method is what gives entrepreneurs around the world a better chance of being successful in business and management as well as a technology entrepreneur. I probably won't be writing this, without having seen his early works on the lean start-up methods. He is the hero.

3. Alex Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur

   Key contributors to business model generation, from which they developed the business model canvas. The canvas presents an intuitive way to visually capture the most critical aspect of your start-up - the business model. They also co-authored a book on that subject. Get a preview here.

4. Ash Maurya

   Ash’s works are simply enlightening. Founder, Spark59 and author of Running Lean  and soon to be released “Customer Factory”. His works also includes the remodelling of the Business model canvas by Alex Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur (above)  into the lean canvas. Signup for one of his email courses and see the light about how your business model is the real product.

5. kevin dewalt

   Kevin’s latest start-up – So Helpful is a unique one, and I presume the lightbulb moment could be while applying lean principles from his vast experience in the startup field. Indeed a very helpful persona. He would be co-anchoring a webinar with Eric Ries soon, (Mentioned above) on leanstartups and customer development around the world. Highly resourceful.

6. Stephany Hay

   Lean Content authority.  Are you looking to commence online writing or perhaps you are in the business of blogging or content creation for marketing purposes, Stephany Hay applys lean principles to writing and shares values on how helpful it could be. Fine, you may not be doing so bad in terms of content creation that gets the page-views, but by applying lean concepts to writing, you would see how much more better you could get with less.

There are a lot more people.

Locally, I have stumbled on one person that seems to apply lean concepts to their businesses - Bankole of techcabal. Brilliant.

Let's begin afresh.

The third blog. It's first home.
My first blog on the web which is a technology blog, had 1,2,3 homes before it's present location at tsusk.blogspot.com .

It's been fun and impactful sharing my technology pieces on the internet, and I hope I can still lay hold on them in say 10-20 years from now. That aside.

Since I mostly talk about a different subject these days - Technology startup Development [still somewhat related to technology, but the business aspect of it ],
I thought it well to create a separate blog. I had this thought in 2012, but here I am posting the very first post today.

Something spurred it.

The need to conquer the word "start-up" - as a friend described it as the most abused word [arguably  ] in the technology space today.

The lessons so far are extremely insightful -  all thanks to the lean start-up fever I caught in Stanford's then, Venture-lab program- which in itself applied lean principles. Today there is Noeved, a product of that lean exploration. You probably have noticed the redirection of the link.

A thankful tweet:

So much thankful for 5 people in the world today: @eesley, @ericries, @sgblank , @AlexOsterwalder and @ashmaurya

— ayo Dawodu ♛ (@tjwizking) August 4, 2013

Great lessons so far.

But beyond lean startup - this space, my friends, is where I would share my personal views on crossing the chasm between tech start-ups and tech business. May be doing some vlogs, for some content that may be lengthy in words.

"Theory is the language of the scholar, Pragmatism is the language of the leader." - Peter J Daniels

Only the doers count.

We need less teachers and more examples.

Technology is great. We shouldn't make is look bad by doing it wrongly.


So yeah.. that's it . Cheers to an exciting journey already.