Part 1: The new initiatives / 0 to 1 handbook

Before joining the investment team at Blume Ventures, I worked on starting various platforms and brands. Some of these platforms/brands have scaled up to become multi-million-dollar monthly revenue businesses. But how do you find that big idea and ensure it reaches your ideal customer persona? I will cover some basic building blocks in this primer to help you with these challenges.

This primer is very tactical and can serve as a handbook for those who want to lead new initiatives, join a founder’s office, or become chief of staff. It is also useful for anyone going through the zero-to-one journey of company building. Let’s dive in!

There are three main steps when you are going from 0 to 1:

1. Finding a whitespace
2. Fixing your distribution channel
3. Fixing your products’ positioning

I recommend following the same chronological order as mentioned above. Attempting to fix your new product’s positioning or distribution channel is irrelevant if you have not identified the correct whitespace. But how do you effectively find a whitespace? In this note, I will focus on finding a whitespace, as there are many tactical ways. However, fixing your distribution channel and product positioning relies mainly on survey responses. This note will cover only the aspects of how to find a whitespace.

Finding a whitespace

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The four key ways to find a whitespace are:

Keyword research

Keyword research can be done on Google and marketplaces.

Google search trends (relevant for all products, digital and physical)?

The best tools to find the search volume of a potential query are:

• Google Keyword Planner (free): Google Keyword Planner is a free tool inside Google Ad Suite that helps you find and analyze relevant keywords for your online content and advertising campaigns. It provides search volume data, competition insights, and cost estimates straight from the horse’s mouth.
• Google Trends (free): This is sometimes the most intuitive way to see how one search query performs compared to another.
• SEMRUSH / Moz (paid): Though these tools are used for SEO, they can also be used to determine search volumes and keyword trends. Since they show the competition for keywords, they might indicate what problems the incumbents are solving.

I recommend using Google Keyword Planner because it is free and beginner-friendly. If you are trying to create a new category (e.g., Uber in 2010), search the keyword search volume for the problem it aims to solve (e.g., book taxis online). If you are trying to gain category share, you can search the keyword search volume for existing brands and the problems they are solving.

Marketplace search trends (largely relevant for consumer goods)

The most useful keyword research tools for marketplaces are:

• Jungle Scout
• Helium10
• SellerApp

In addition to keyword volumes, these tools also show the sales of comparable products. All three tools mentioned above are good enough and offer a free trial. You can use any of them or try new and upcoming tools to see which provides the most value to you.

Once you have determined the search volumes for the problem you are trying to solve, you can conduct surveys to ask your consumers about the best way to solve it.

Surveys

The three most common ways to do surveys are:

Forms

While Google Forms is the best open-source tool for creating forms, it is most effective for getting responses from people within your second or third degree of connection. If you want to get responses from potential customers you do not know, Facebook and Instagram are the places to go. The top three form builders with Meta Pixel integration (to optimize campaigns based on form submissions - more on advertising in a creative first world covered here) are:

• Typeform
• Jotform

You can figure out which one you are more familiar with and take a paid plan for either. It is important not to ask too many open-ended questions and to give questions with multiple choices of answers so that the responses give you a pointed direction.

Calls

This is a good way to talk to existing consumers, but it is crucial not to lead the respondent to an answer you want to hear. One way to get a higher call connection rate is to send a personal WhatsApp message and obtain an opt-in from the respondent.

Whatsapp/Facebook/Discord Groups

This is also another old-fashioned method that still works. There are dedicated communities (groups) on social media channels. You can use the conversations and problems people face in these groups for market research.

Borrowing a product market fit framework that Sequoia Capital posted about, do figure out the depth of the problem in your surveys.

Once you have conducted user surveys, it is beneficial to compare your findings with the existing products in the market. While keywords can indicate how much a product or problem is being searched for, you also need to assess the actual usage and traction of comparable products that may or may not solve the problem perfectly. But how do you check this? Let’s find out.

Existing Players’ Traction

This can be further classified into:

Website Traffic

The two tools I would recommend are:

• Ubersuggest - This shows unique monthly traffic and some other audience characteristics
• Similarweb - Same as the above

Both websites' free version shows traffic data for the last three months. Getting a paid version will show historical trends and a lot richer data. The free version is good enough if you’re going from 0 to 1.

App downloads

While the two tools mentioned that give website traffic also share some data concerning app downloads, two dedicated platforms for app insights that I can recommend are:

• Apptweak - This is a slightly cheaper app store intelligence tool with a seven-day free trial
• data.ai - This one is quite expensive & recommended for someone with deeper knowledge

Marketplace Tools

The most useful keyword research tools for marketplaces are:

• Jungle Scout
• Helium10

If the consumer goods you want to launch have less than 10K units sold per month as a category, you will create the market. In addition to the tools mentioned, Google Merchant Centre also shows the top sellers by category (note that this tool only shows rankings, not sales figures).

Now that we’ve done thorough research and identified a whitespace, the logical next step is to find suppliers and conduct quick hypothesis testing.

Finding Suppliers

There are two types of suppliers that a consumer business might need:

• Product Suppliers - These are only relevant if you are testing a hypothesis in the consumer goods space.
• Service Suppliers - These are relevant for someone dealing with goods and services.

Product Suppliers

• The simplest way to find a product’s supplier is to look at the manufacturer's details on the packaging. Most suppliers are now willing to work with newer startups as they’re seeing an increase in demand.
• If you do not want to buy the product, you can go to their ecommerce listing & zoom in, and find out on the packaging + on the product page.?
• You can also check on b2b marketplaces like IndiaMART, Justdial, etc, and look for suppliers.

If you want to iterate and test demand quickly, you can use one of these suppliers’ white-labeled products (after testing it). Alternatively, you can provide them with your desired product composition. These suppliers will create samples, and you can choose the one that works best for you.

Service Suppliers

As with finding product suppliers, the easiest way to find service providers is to check what other platforms are using. Sometimes, using an existing B2C service is simpler if your scale is not too large (e.g., using Dunzo or Borzo for intra-city delivery, booking a lab test via Healthians, etc.).

Before fixing your positioning and distribution channel

After identifying whitespace opportunities, the next step is to determine whether you have the right to play and the right to win in your target market. For example, when a new OTT content app enters a market with a large addressable audience, it establishes its right to play. However, the app’s ability to win depends on the right go-to-market strategy.?

Given the OTT context from the above example, the right to win for an OTT platform like STAGE is that their content strikes a chord with the regional & cultural identity of a Haryanvi or a Rajasthani user as of now, with more languages to come.???

In a future note, I will cover frameworks for fixing positioning and distribution channels in depth.

Tl;dr

The way to do a 0 to 1 project or launch a new platform/product/service is to first look for whitespaces via keyword research surveys, find incumbents' traction, and then figure out a way to provide the service/product. This helps you determine your right to play. If you have a right to play, you need to figure out your right to win.?

Special thanks to Rohit Ganapathi, who helped me think through this. You can write your feedback in the comments or reach out to me at [email protected]; I would be happy to cover more topics or any of these in detail. Feel free to share ideas & suggestions.