Imagine taking on a task in which your only duty is to turn a concept written on a piece of paper into a business with a successful product and satisfied customers. Everything in between is up to you to understand. You don’t have a roadmap, a business plan, relationships, or anything that can explain your role.
It is your task as the founder of a startup that gives birth, nourishes and cultivates anything from scratch. And it can be very confusing and mentally difficult. There are many unanswered questions and even when you have answers, they are not the right answers.
Yes, you can take a look at the competition, ask mentors and advisors, but no one will have a better answer than other people who will take money out of their pocket to buy and use their solution. Here are five questions you can answer by simply talking to your prospects.
1. Are we our time?
Doubt and uncertainty are a painful component of the initial journey. As entrepreneurs, we are action-taking and threat makers. Often, many of our movements and projects would likely seem ineffective, raising the question of whether we are wasting our time.
Our potential consumers are the first organization to answer this question. They won’t tell us how to spend our resources to maximize production, but they will tell us if the solution we’re running on values the investment in the first place.
2. What is the opportunity?
An examination of the festival and the gaps in your price proposal can give us an indication of the market opportunity. But to actually perceive the deeply felt and unresolved disorders that our target customers face, we want to communicate with them.
It’s hard to create a successful initial product without a transparent understanding of the challenge we’re solving. Today’s buyers can use a competing solution for several reasons. Possibly there would be more than one segment with similar desires, but with other expectations. If you look closely, the challenge may be the same, but the urgency of desire for all other buyers may be different. This is one of the maximum answers we can find by talking to our buyers in the long run.
3. What do we build?
A challenge can be solved in several ways. Creating other answers and testing which product solves the most productive challenge is not an option. However, talking to long-term buyers about their needs, expectations, and demanding situations with existing responses can do so from a more powerful foundation.
Potential users can describe product features and features, user pleasure and interface, load and necessarily anything similar to the solution they need to use and will pay with pleasure. The creation of a consumer advisory board can drive this feedback cycle.
4. Who is the buyer?
Suppose you have two consumers who pay the full value of your product. However, the first visitor takes 50% more visitor time and cancels the appointment of his club or business with his start five months before the time of the visitor. Both consumers make you money and want your solution.
In this simplistic scenario, the first visitor is not necessarily the wrong buyer. This is the time of the visitor who happens to be the most productive. This visitor charges you less to win and at the same time achieves higher margins.
Approach your efforts to identify your ideal client like any other investment you make in your startup, because through the time they tell you who he is, more money you will earn in the long term and less time you will devote to loyalty and support. Talking to potential consumers is the first and maximum steps, because with the data you get, you can formulate and verify informed assumptions through experiments and campaigns.
5. How do we do them?
With a quick Google search, you can locate more than fifty visitor acquisition channels that you can use to attract consumers. What if you knew the most productive channel for your startup and its consumers? Identifying your consumer acquisition channel with the highest conversion rate means you can find what will bring you more ideal consumers for less effort and money.
Identifying this channel also requires knowledge that you can collect from tests and experiments. However, just like locating the ideal buyer, it all starts with assumptions and the more you know about your customers, the more valid your assumptions will be. Asking your prospective buyers where they spend most of their time and how they found out about their existing solution is a big step forward.
In conclusion, each and every entrepreneur will have to face uncertainty. Actively engaging your customers in the long term in decision-making, especially at the beginning, can bring clarity to your adventure and confidence in your decisions.
Abdo Riani is the founder and CEO of VisionX Partners, a startup progression company that works with marketers to launch and expand their startups through
Abdo Riani is the founder and CEO of VisionX Partners, a startup progression company that works with marketers to launch and grow their start-up, product progression, business progression, marketing, operations and start-up consulting services.