Idea to Startup

Idea to StartupStartup Istanbul2016

Vladimir De Franceschi

Vivek Boray

Why markets matter

1) No Customers = No Business therefore, market is ALWAYS right

2) Cheapest Cash = Customer Cash

2) Customer Cash = Freedom

2) Antidote to Self-Delusion (KPIs)

So you want to start a startup

1) To Clone or Not to Clone? Depends

2) Lifestyle Business. Worth it?

2) Venture fundable business. Not easy

{Hypothesis A}

$$$

$$$

$

{Hypothesis B}

$

$$$

$$$

$ $

OpportunityValue

Proposition DistributionStrategy

FinancialModel

TAM = Your Total Available or Addressable Market (everyone you wish to reach with your product)

SAM = Your Segmented Addressable Market or Served Available Market (the portion of TAM you will target)

SOM = Your Share of the Market (the subset of your SAM that you will realistically reach – particularly in the first few years of your business)

Defining the Market

Learn it, Know it, Live it

Know your customer

Know your resources (money, time, people)

Find the path of least resistance to profitability: Distribution strategy

DistributionStrategy Product

Startup Realities

Never enough money

Never enough time

Never enough people

Where is the market?

I D$

0

I D$

0 . . .

ValidationunderConditions ofUncertainty

Find the Success Loop

Footnote:Doing nothing = competition

• Startups begin with hypotheses about a customer problem or need

• Founders talk to customers to discover and validate whether the total solution solves that problem or addresses that need

• If, and not only if, there are no “buy signs” from the customer or customers repeatably point out missing features, does the product change

• Collecting feature lists and holding focus groups are for established companies with existing customers looking to design product line extensions

http://steveblank.com/2009/11/30/customer-development-is-not-a-focus-group/

Steve Blank’s Lessons Learned

Gartner – Research Forrester Group – Research iCD Research – Research eMarketer – ResearchChubby Brain – Researchresearch.google.com – Research CrunchBase – Startup company and people profilesCompete.com – Traffic analyticsQuantcast.com – Traffic analyticsAlexa – Traffic analyticsCompareN – Aggregate site traffic and compare web statsBureau of Labor Statistics – Gov’t collected data and projectionsInternet Archive – Research historical versions of websitesMechanical Turk – Amazon’s survey toolQuestionPro – Survey toolRivalMap – Web app for market information

Resources