Reminder: Readings are your responsibility. You will be expected to come to class prepared, having read the material, and ready to participate in the discussion
Evaluating Opportunities
- Teams please sit together
- Post-it-note Exercise
- Are you zeroing in on a product that the team likes?
Tips for choosing a product or service
- Does not have to be something never before seen
- You do need to generate evidence that people will be willing to pay for it
- It should employ technology of some sort
- Fun and cool doesn’t matter if you can’t show that people need it and are willing to pay
- Challenge yourself and your teammates
- Do a little research using your common sense!
Questions to ask yourself
- How big a problem is this really solving?
- For who, and do you think those people would be willing to pay for it?
- How would you get it to them?
- What kind of price do you think they would be willing to pay?
- Are you pretty sure this can be productized?
- What would the Shark Tank say of it?
Finding a business opportunity
Purpose
- Modeling how to conduct an out of the building MVP
- Also how to empathize with the potential user’s perspectives
Critical Thinking Practice
- You continue to practice thinking critically about new business possibilities
- Rehearse explaining and testing the idea orally so that it is understood
- Rehearse being an effective teammate even with people you just met
- Rehearse listening openly and giving valid and valuable feedback
- This will work whether you’ve decided on a product/business or still making tradeoffs
Activities
- Watch this video of my talking head together:
- Discuss the video with each other
- Talk about your candidate ideas you see that look good and play with them from the perspective of:
- What “job” does the product do for the customer?
- What domain expertise can you bring to bear?
- How big a pain does the product relieve?
- Can the product or service make money?
- Is there a way to reach these customers?
- Critical thinking!
Activity
- Take a moment to read and digest this idea Bodega 2.0
- Discuss it with your neighbor to make sure you understand it (as far as it goes)
- Come up with one or more MVPs
- What are some hypotheses that you could test with that?
- What do you think a shop owner asks themselves before adopting your product or service?
- Think about this for a little while, write some answers for yourself
Alignment
- This is very important concept. I will harp on it a lot.
- Work to the point where each team member would explain the product in the same way, as the same thing
- This can only come through discussion, writing things down, being open to new ideas and flexible to adjust your ideas.
- The only thing that makes an idea “the best” or “right” is what customers, users, people are willing to adopt.
- Whether you wrote up the idea or thought up the idea or love the idea, remember the idea is 0.1% of the journey.
Discussions
- Review your top idea together and ensure alignment
- Review the Term Project Stage 1
- It will be due next week. Begin working on it.
Thank you. Questions?
(random Image from picsum.photos)