Travelling to the Wonderland

This installation at V&A is one of the best I have seen in a while, the more you look the more details you find. It's by Xu Bing who was inspired by a Chinese fable called Peach Spring Blossom where a lost fisherman discovers a wonderland behind a mountain where the inhabitants live in harmony with nature.

Blogging for Imperial CreateLab

I initially heard about Imperial CreateLab from a friend I made when I was making the Imperial Hackspace Podcast. Suffice to say he's pretty clued up about social enterprise and innovative design happenings at Imperial College. So when they started looking for a blogger for the Createlab website he suggested I might want to do it. It just so happens that I had come up with an idea for an app, and Createlab's blog would be the perfect place to document my journey of taking an idea to a fully fledged start up.

Find my first blog post here or read it below. When it was published @ICreatelab tweeted about it, followed by 9 retweets, potentially reaching 12.8K people. Now that is exciting! In a social media kind of way.  

So you've got an idea for a startup, now what?

It used to be that everyone has a book in them, now everyone has an app in them. And I reckon I have a pretty good idea for an app. But as someone with no business or coding skills it could easily remain just that. You always hear about people who are sitting on their million dollar idea or invention that they will make happen “at some point” or “when I have the time/finances”, but you just know it’s not going to happen. And there’s a good reason for that: it’s hard!

Making an idea into a prototype, doing thorough market research and getting people to invest in your business is the long and winding road to a successful business. I have been told, and I have found out quite quickly, that it requires hard-work, patience and lots of determination. Determination can be the first thing separates the wheat from the chaff and the business leaders of tomorrow from the sitting-on-an-idea wannabe’s.

"It requires hard-work, patience and lots of determination"

If you are someone who has an idea for a start-up business know this: if there is money to be made by fulfilling a particular need there will be other people working on it. So moving the idea forwards quickly can be key.

Dealing with Intellectual Property

My very first issue is that I do not have the expertise to know what my next step should be. Of course there are many others who are literate in all things startup but surely it would be unwise to share my idea with them?

Wrong! Of course you want to protect your Intellectual Property but as we mentioned it’s a long road to make something out of an idea, not many people are going to put that level of work in. Sharing your idea with someone who can help you think about how to move it forwards can be a very valuable thing. As Millie at Createlab told me knowing when it will be useful to share your idea is probably the second thing that separates those that make it to those that do not. That’s not to say you should not be careful about it, I would not share my idea with an employee of Google. And I also will not share the full idea with you. As lovely as you are, you could be anyone. All I will say is that I’m developing an app that encourages a balanced life.

Criticism

"Embrace criticism and in the end you have something that you know your customer wants"

The other useful thing about telling someone your idea is getting critical honest feedback. So far I have told three people who work in start ups my idea and they all think there is something in it, but first I need to do thorough customer research to find out what the exact needs are and get a clear idea of who my customer is. One of the people I spoke to was Mark who I met at a Createlab Drop-in mentoring session. He said that people are already solving the problem my app would address in their own way with what is available to them, so perhaps there is not as much of a need as I thought. At a point like this anyone who believes in their idea would defend it through reflex. But actually he has a valid point and all criticism is incredibly useful. From this conversation Mark helped me to realise that finding out what people already do to solve the problem should be part of my market research and through this I can figure out a way to make my solution better. 

Allowing your business idea to be your baby that is perfect in every way is another quick route to failure. Lean start-ups work on the principle that you make a prototype, test it with the customer, improve the prototype, test again and repeat. You go through this cycle again and again until it is the product is right. This method embraces criticism and in the end you have something that you know your customer wants.

Next steps: Market research

My next step will be a substantial amount of market research to answer some key questions about my customers. To get good answers you have to ask good, non-leading questions; so I shall be investing in a book that has been recommended to me “The Mom Test” by Rob Fitzpatrick. See details below.

Reading list:

·         Website: Custdevcards Ideas on how to have more useful conversations with your customers http://custdevcards.com/

·         Book: The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick “How to talk to customers & learn if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you” http://momtestbook.com/