The first step in Steve Blank’s method is what he calls customer discovery. He talks about developing a hypothesis, both about the product and the customer you’re trying to serve. In his talk he actually says ‘hypothesis’ is really just a more technical word for ‘guess’.
This is actually very like something we do with Social Innovation Camp, especially when we run shorter events at our meetups to help people generate ideas that could be entered into the camps. We have five things that teams have to think about. Somewhere between the two and making it a bit more relevant to our situation we’ve come up with this list of things to think about when coming up with ‘guesses’ as part of customer discovery.
- What problem are you solving?
- What’s your solution?
- Who is it for?
- How are they going to find out about it?
- How much will they be willing to pay for it?
