2.6.4. Testing your business idea- Fake it till you make it

the question: ‘What other service offers people the opportunity to meet professionals in order to ask specific questions, on a regular basis?’ We thought about hospitals or other health services and what mechanisms they put in place to optimise their customer services. What can we learn from their shortcomings?

If you already have a few ideas, see which one impacts potential users in the best way and is at the same time, the most feasible. You can use the scale tool (importance vs feasibility) that will help you visualise your options and better prioritise the ideas to be developed further.

2.6.4. Testing your business idea- Fake it till you make it You might have heard that 7 out of 10 business ideas fail. You probably don’t want yours to be one of them. One way to prevent it is by building a culture of experimentation in the company you work for (or your own). By allowing teams to build a prototype or perhaps even two different versions of a product/service that you will be able to show them to potential users and validate the assumptions you had about it.

Remember, the prototype should be simple, made of basic materials. Don't spend too much energy on its production. The main goal of this project is to validate the idea to see if your solution meets user expectations and if you can improve it. Feedback is the most valuable thing you can get! Ask, watch… don't justify yourselves, just thank your testers for their honesty. Record the feedback in order for it to be shared later with your team. This will allow you to refine your idea in the next iteration of the offering and reduce the number of assumptions as well as build on the experience of your potential users, and not on your imagination. Last but not least, experimentation helps you decide if you need to pivot or persevere with your business idea. Pivoting would mean to change the course: target customer, product/service offering or even a business model. Do not panic! Thanks to Design Thinking divergent phases of the research and ideation, you can always get back to the material collected there. Treat it as a reservoir of ideas that can help you change the route but still stay relevant to customer needs. One of the legendary pivots is connected to Twitter. The company started as a podcast service but after facing clear competition from Apple, they decided to pivot and search for another offering. Group SMS was born and, as they say, the rest is history! The current Covid-19 crisis challenged many entrepreneurs to change or add to the original course of their business. For example, AirBnB now offers online classes in almost every subject. This is entrepreneurship!