What are some effective ways to iterate on your idea?

Starting with a solution is good, but starting with a problem is where the real magic happens. As the saying goes, "Don't build a bridge without figuring out what needs crossing." In my stint with idea-stage startups through Huawei's Seeds for the Future CSR program, I've learned that being problem-centric is the secret sauce. So, before diving into solutions, dance with the problems. When I guide innovators, I encourage them to set their solutions aside in the first iterations because failing to realize what you are truly solving leads to an unwanted product. Assumptions in the startup realm need to be human-centered. After all, success in the startup world often begins with understanding not just what people want but what they truly need.

Test a new product or service idea without wasting time & money: 1. Market Research: Analyze the target audience, competition, and industry trends. 2. Minimum Viable Product (MVP): Create a basic version of idea to test its viability with real users. 3. Feedback: Collect feedback from early users and iterate based on their suggestions. 4. Lean Approach: Develop a cost-effective MVP 5. Test Marketing: Run small-scale marketing campaigns to gauge interest and gather data. 6. A/B Testing: Experiment with different features or approaches to find the most effective one. 7. Scaling: If the idea proves successful, gradually scale up the product or service. 8. Continuous Improvement: Keep refining based on user feedback and market changes.

Iterating on your idea is essential for its refinement and success. Start by seeking feedback from a diverse group of people, including potential users and experts in your field. Be open to criticism and consider different perspectives. Create prototypes or minimum viable products (MVPs) to test your concept and gather real-world data. Embrace a culture of continuous improvement, setting specific goals for each iteration. For instance, if you're developing a new mobile app, create a simple MVP, release it to a small group of beta users, gather feedback, and make incremental improvements based on user input to enhance the app's usability and features.

Validate the ideas with customers at hand to avoid procrastination and day-dreaming of success. Test the prototype with customers. Both steps you will get feedback from customers to give you the reality check

Before testing your idea, be sure to understand the problem that it would address. The hypothesis to the left (Young professionals need...) is not a good example of a hypothesis. What I would suggest is asking why? Why do people need this service? Keep digging down until you are closer to a root cause. Get to where you can't answer why anymore. Then ask yourself - does your idea address that? If it doesn't address it, you have two options. One is to iterate on the hypothesis - change it and keep asking why until you have a problem-solution fit. The other is to iterate on the idea until it fits the problem. Then you have 2 hypotheses - one about the problem another about the solution. It's important to validate the problem.

If you dive in the strategy designing ocean, you'll one day find out that the best strategy is to follow clues in the market. While your mind is creative, but customers will appreciate a better respond to their needs rather than your own fancy idea even in the case of spending hours & days & years on running up a mind-blowing idea.

The Lean Canvas is good. Ash Maurya is active on LinkedIn. The section above talks about hypotheses. Everything in the lean canvas is a hypothesis. And it all builds from the Problem block. So start there. Everything else in the canvas depends on the validation of the problem. Also following the prior section, your idea is a hypothesis that is part "solution" and "value proposition." But that's dependent on fitting the right customer segment - product-market fit. I would recommend testing those two together after or along with validating the problem. Those three make up the main pillars of the canvas.

There are many different perspectives on what an MVP is. Some will say that it should be developed enough to sell. But that defeats the purpose. I look at an MVP as anything that can represent a hypothesis for testing. As Steve Blank says in his course, it could be as simple as a video, or even a slide. Think about what you want to test, and what is the simplest, cheapest, quickest way to create a good enough representation. There are tons of no-code tools to help you do things like make a demo app. And they don't have to be anything like what you envision. Try manual solutions - borrow the concept of a Mechanical Turk. For example, to test a dating app, match people yourself before you develop the algorithm or build that into an app.

Building a minimum viable product (MVP) is like creating a basic version of your idea to see if it works and what people think. It's not the final thing but a way to learn and improve. To make your MVP better, you can use tools like surveys or talk to people to understand what they like or don't. For example, if you're making a new app, you might ask users what features are most important to them. Look at data from tools like Google Analytics to see how people are using your MVP. Maybe they love one part and ignore another – that's important to know! The goal is to measure and understand how well your idea is solving a problem. It's like testing the waters before jumping all in.

The goal is to learn fast! When we built our MVP at Uforo, things would often break. Instead of waiting for another sprint to address the bugs, we recorded a demo and used that to kickstart our sales efforts. We got valuable feedback that guided our feature prioritization, so we could go to market faster.

Be mindful of staying scientific in this process. If you alter too many things too quickly, you won't be able to learn precisely what resonates with your target audience. You want to learn fast, but you want to learn effectively more. Without a properly designed feedback loop, you'll end up spinning in circles far longer than with a well calculated approach.

For building, as mentioned above, you don't have to build an actual product or part of one. You just need something that reasonably represents what you're trying to test. Keep it simple, cheap, and quick so that you can easily iterate. For testing (measuring) and learning, be sure to use open-ended questions. What you test is whether or not people answer the way you think they would. Don't use surveys - you can't learn very much from them. You want to understand the customers, not just get opinions. Your questions should begin with "How..." or "Why..." or "Tell me about..." For example, you might expect people to use an app for a particular event, but they frequently offer something different. You're not likely to learn that from a survey.

You will get feedback and advice by using open-ended questions when testing (measuring). You don't need to just test with customers. What's important is making sure you're talking to people who fit your target market or can speak about that market or an aspect of it. You can start by asking them questions in regard to your problem statement. If they don't have the problem or don't see it as a problem, they're not the right people for feedback. Any answers from them can lead you in the wrong direction. So make sure you clearly understand your target. Not their demographics, but their behaviors and things they like and do that fit what you're offering. For example, don't talk to people who don't golf if you're building a golf product.

Don’t waste too much time drafting your perfect product before putting it out there. If you feel like something could be interesting for your audience, start with a landing page, a waitlist, some beta users or trials to get real life feedback as fast as possible. Look for commitments such as real sign ups or even payments rather than someone saying they might be interested just to be nice. Make sure to put what you are testing in front of the right audience - if someone it’s not valuable to them, they might just not be your customer

Imagine your idea is like a puzzle – sometimes you need to rearrange the pieces to see the bigger picture. Be open to changes and willing to try different things. If you're creating a new app and notice people are struggling to use it, be flexible enough to tweak the design. Maybe it's as simple as changing the colors or rearranging buttons. Remember, it's okay to face challenges; they're like road bumps on a journey. Embrace them, learn from them, and use them to make your idea even stronger. Just like how a chef tastes the dish while cooking, keep testing and tweaking your idea until it's perfect. It's not a straight road, more like a winding path where every turn brings a chance to improve.

When iterating, don’t change too many things at once. There might have been only one factor preventing your idea/ product from being well-received, so try to tweak things before disregarding everything. You might have addressed the wrong person or caught them in the wrong moment, you might have spoken about the wrong problem or positioned your solution in the wrong light… that doesn’t mean you aren’t onto something! At the same time, don’t be delusional or ignorant of the feedback you are getting and don’t be scared to start something again from scratch and try a new approach

One way to help ensure that you're being flexible and really using your creative mind is to purposely generate bad ideas. Sounds crazy, right? It's not. I've seen it so many times over the years. Hidden inside a bad idea is a potential good idea. It wasn't bad, it was just poorly expressed. Thinking about it more can lead to much better, less obvious (more novel) ideas. That also leads to just having more ideas and more fun. A reason that it works is that it takes away the self-censoring of ideas. Think about how many times you've had an idea, but didn't write it down because you thought it wasn't good. It might just be poorly expressed, not bad. Getting it written down means you can keep thinking of better ideas that are similar.

Testing your idea in the market is one of the most effective strategies. Go to market and collect data, your data will provide a clear path to further develop your products and services to meet your client needs. Experiment, try different approaches and different markets to valuate your idea. Ideas, don't grow a business. Focus on taking action.

Find out what will stop customers from buying and adopting your offering. Customers will generally understand the value in a minute or less but that doesn't mean they'll buy it, especially b2b customers. Consider what you really are asking of the customer in order to adopt your offering and you'll be far more successful.

I think before working on any idea, an entrepreneur should first understand the size of the market and how big the problem is that they're looking to address. There's no point getting out there building an MVP if the solution is not meeting a huge demand in the market place. Where possible do a lot of research online, reach out to people in the industry, join forums etc Going through this process will also help you better understand who the target market is and how to best build, position, market and sell the product/service once you're ready to launch. Too often I see entrepreneurs rushing this process only to build something that very few people want or worst yet not selling any product at all.

Remember that ideas are just ideas. They are the easiest thing to change about a business. So don't get stuck on one, don't fall in love with an idea, fall in love with a problem.