So you’ve got a billion-dollar idea, what’s next!
I’m an avid reader of Medium articles,, but I never thought I’d be writing one myself, well here goes nothing🙂.
“Hey Mark, I’ve got this business idea that’s gonna make us rich!”; if I had a dollar for every time I heard that 🙄⇊.
The reality is that ideas are a dozen or so and contrary to the common saying,
“Ideas don’t actually rule the world, successful businesses do.”
The road to the creation of successful innovations (i.e.entrepreneurship) is fraught with confusion and disappointment. The regular eureka moments in the shower or the brilliant concepts you get when you’re baked don’t make you an experienced entrepreneur, the best way to be an entrepreneur and bring your great business idea to life is to walkthe walk.
Entrepreneurship requires an iterative strategy to reduce waste of time and money and overinvestment in a product or service that nobody wants on the market. Such an Iterative Approach includes taking incremental steps towards a perceived future outcome and assessing the success of the project at each stag.
So how should budding Entrepreneurs learn to approach their ideas?
hmmm, good question, the answer lies far beyond what the eyes can see!
(Drum roll pls)=>I PRESENT TO YOU THE LEAN METHOD!!!!
The lean method provides a systematic way to assess ideas iteratively. It offers guidance as to where to focus and what to ignore. The lean approach works best when a business operates as a startup.
A startup is a human institution designed to create new products and services under conditions of extreme uncertainty.
The central principle of the lean method is to generate more excellent value for consumers with fewer resources. It helps to optimise channels and procedures for developing and providing more excellent value to the consumer, with little or no loss of money and human resources. The lean approach allows an entrepreneur to easily explore if the new business plan is feasible by quickly and iteratively developing solutions and concentrating on essential facets of the product and business to distribute capital effectively.
At its core, Lean is a business methodology that promotes the flow of value to the customer through two guiding tenets: continuous improvement and respect for people.
The Lean method’s core component is the build-measure-learn feedback loop represented in the schematic below,
The lean method is all about testing the viability of ideas in an iterative manner and each iteration is a cycle of the following steps:
1) ‘building’ something that expresses the nature of your idea (e.g. a graphical prototype or sketch),
2) ‘measuring’ how well it works (e.g. by asking potential customers whether it solves their problem), and
3) ‘learning’ from your findings in step 2 to improve the next version of your idea.
The results of step 3 would inform what needs to improve and what needs to change when starting the next iteration of idea testing. (i.e. what works and what needs to be changed going to the next ‘building’ stage). The first iteration can be as simple as the proverbial “sketch on a napkin”. This would generate early feedback and revision of the idea and accelerate the learning process. Feedbacks can be vague and ambiguous during the early stages of the iteration process but as your business idea evolves, they become concrete and targeted to specific parts of the business product or service. A word of caution though, you should make sure to not be too reactive to feedback as this prevents capacity building and may prevent you from actualising your vision.
In my next article, I’ll discuss a fundamental tool to managing the evolution of your business idea , The Business Model Canvas.
Best of Luck and always remember “good enough never is 😉”!
