The 3-Week Business Model Bootcamp

I've worked with a lot of early-stage businesses over the last 15 years.

If I had to boil it down to three issues they all have in common, these would be:

1. Customer: Not clear about who their customer is and have defined their target market too broadly.
2. Customer Problem: Not understanding their customer's problems, the context behind these problems or the problems with their customer's current solution. Same-same but different, they tend to guess customer problems working back from the solution they have built.
3. Business Model: Perpetuating the "build it and they will come" mindset and failing to recognise - early - that they need the entire business model to work in order to have a viable business.

There is a better way

After reading the Lean Startup in 2012, I became obsessed with the idea of "faking it till you make it" and finding ways to re-risk a venture before building a solution - or writing a single line of code.

Luckily, Ash Maurya was one thousand steps ahead. Inspired by Eric Ries' book (who in turn was inspired by Steve Blank), Ash created a "framework of frameworks" to help entrepreneurs apply the Lean Startup Approach. Ash is doing for the Lean Startup what Atlassian did for agile: help people apply it through tools and frameworks. Lean Startup is the church and Ash is the priest.

If you haven't already, do yourself a favour and read Ash's book Running Lean.

Through an in-person course in Sydney, I got certified as a coach and trained in Ash's approach. You can learn more about this at Leanstack.com

I'm a huge believer. Before reading "Running Lean" and getting trained by Ash, I had spent years writing business cases accompanied by fancy PowerPoint presentations and complicated financial models. It was incredibly time-consuming and often distracted the team from the more important but often deprioritised work of validating an opportunity before committing resources to build it.

Someone in NZ did a study years ago about the number of people in a typical organisation that were devoted to the different parts of the classic "Double Diamond" design approach. 

As it turns out, we put far more effort into building solutions than we do into designing - or validating them. It usually goes like this:

I have a great idea, I will get the money, build it, launch it and then get customers.

The problem is that you spend a lot of time, effort and money and only realise when you launch that your product doesn't actually solve a customer problem. Imagine all that time and money that could've been put to use elsewhere. 

How can More Traction help?

I created the 3-Week Business Model Bootcamp to help Climate Techs define a business model and actionable product strategy to get your product off the ground.

Does this sound familiar?

• It can feel overwhelming to conceive and launch a new product. Where do you start?
• A lot of thought gets put into the solution, but have you thought about how you're going to sell it?
• Building software is time-consuming and expensive. Have you got proof that it's actually what customers want?

Here's what we can do about it :

• Make a plan, prioritise and break it into actionable steps
• Start to test your path to market through experiments before you've started/finished building
• Get to know your customers and align your product roadmap with customer insights.

How do we do it?

• Using frameworks that help clarify and align teams developing new products
• Define a product strategy and an execution path
• Help conceive and execute experiments before building solutions
• Guidance and coaching both upfront and ongoing 

Approach:

• Workshop 1: Define your business model (90min)
• Workshop 2: Define your traction model, 3x3x3 goals (90min)
• Workshop 3: Define the experiments to test your business model assumptions (90min)
• Monthly, 45min check-in thereafter - Optional

Objectives

Workshop 1:

• Define your customer segments and early adopter
• Agree on all parts of the business model(s) that underpins your product & identify the riskiest assumptions within it.

• Define the success criteria that will let you know how you're tracking towards the realisation of your product's vision
• Define 3x3x3 goals and use this to prioritise short-term activity
• Flesh out the work to systematically test and validate the assumptions captured in the business model(s).

Workshop 3:

• Flesh out your path to customers
• Identify opportunities to experiment along your path to customer
• Develop recommendations on experiments to go forward with