Food for thought: Startups, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship

We last spoke about PMF as an elusive but necessary concept in the realm of company building.

Founders typically find some semblance of that when they make the transition from having to push products to customers to having customers pull their solutions from them.

The journey there isn’t straightforward; different founders take different approaches that still work. PMF is hardly a “milestone” but a moving target and most would find themselves continually working towards it to stay ahead.

Here are three evergreen principles that can help in your PMF journey:

1.????? The market always wins!

Whether or not you have the perfect product, in an unfavourable market, failure is guaranteed.

The worst nightmare for a budding entrepreneur is to wake up one day with a perfect solution that no one wants.

Eric Reis puts it like this: “We must learn what customers really want, not what they say they want or what we think they should want.”

Staying focused on the process of validated learning as early as possible is one good way to de-risk that main market risk.

2.????? Talk less and listen more!

Simply engaging potential customers’ time alone isn’t enough to generate viable user research.

The reality, according to Rob Fitzpatrick, is this: your users and customers don’t always tell you the truth, and even if they did, the chances are high that your brain would interpret it out of context.

Henry Ford said it like this, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

The idea here is to eliminate pieces of fluff from conversations and get to the core truth in each interaction. By developing questions that are focused on specifics and listening intently, you can achieve stronger insights and zone in on the right problem to solve.

For instance, when interviewing users, aim to get to the bottom of how and why certain features will help them. Such detailed feedback becomes powerful research data for you to build meaningful products.

3.????? Gut plus logic equals direction!

In your journey as founders, there will be times you need to persist, and times you need to pivot. Relentless grinding can’t open up dead-ends.

Gaming company Kabam tried everything from programmatic ad sales, in-house ad sales to no avail when recession hit in 2008. With the ad budget plummeting, they saw that insisting on the same revenue model wasn’t helping. They made the call to maintain their solid go-to-market strategy but switched to building strategy games and earning through in-game purchases instead to stay in business.

Believing in the short video market’s potential, ByteDance made a bold decision back in 2016 to enter the short video industry despite the competition. They were unimpressed by the available short-video products then and set out to do something better, delivering only new and good experiences to impress users to win market share and the rest is history.?

These examples show that pairing logical reasoning with your gut feeling is one good way to help you get the conviction you need to go on the right path.

Read last month's newsletter article here !