THINKING – Sprint 3
How to test your idea
The reason for this sprint
Until you confirm your idea for making groups of strangers very happy works, it doesn’t make sense to invest the time and money to implement it. And no idea is perfect out of the box.
This sprint leads you thru how to properly test your idea with potential customers.
Knowing your customer is your competitive advantage! Many aspiring entrepreneurs do their customer research haphazardly and wind up wasting time and money on ideas that do not get any traction or quickly get beat by competitors. They never had a chance of working.
We lead you through the steps of getting to know your potential customers well enough to know that you could make them happy.
This requires you to be brave and motivated enough to go out and engage strangers that you think could be your customers. It also leads you to know how to ask the right questions.
Sprint exercise
This is a very demanding session, but the benefits in risk reduction are immense.
We first ask you to read or listen to our article Testing ideas with strangers.
We then challenge you to plan, then execute and then think about and analyze the ton of information you will gain from asking open-ended questions to strangers.
To plan, write out your thoughts on the following:
Where do you plan to strike up conversations with strangers?
Why do you think this place is filled with people who you might be able to make happier?
How do you plan to strike up a conversation?
How many conversations with strangers do you need to have for you to get a good sense of the breadth of wants of your potential customers?
Once you have completed all these interviews, you need to organize your notes and then write out your thoughts on the following:
Are any themes or similarities across different interviews emerging about what will make your target group happy? To help you describe these themes, write out direct quotes that support these themes.
What do you need to change or rethink about your idea? There are always things you find that cause you to modify your thinking.