Welcome to the eleventh article of our Entrepreneurial Wednesdays series. In this series, I share my thoughts on lean entrepreneurship as I take my first steps in my journey. I will be sharing my lessons learned with you.
The topic with which I would like to kick off this article is comparing. When you are trying to test your product with the public, the results are not the only element that matters. Actually, there is a way to change the results, to make them better and more positive. Of course, the core of it lies within the quality of the product delivered. But by results I mean not the fact that your potential customers like your product. But most importantly those results that give you a clue on the better alternatives of the product, future innovation or maybe your customer segment.
Save time, Learn more
Speaking of your customer segment. It is not entirely necessary to throw the product out there for all of them. You can call it discrimination. But there is a lot of wisdom behind this act. In the process of validation, the information is your currency. Instead of buying the product, your customers give you their feelings, opinions and views on it. Now let’s imagine that you are working on two different types of your product. Does launching the first type and then the second type and asking which one was better sound efficient to you? Well, not to me! You can launch them at the same time, save time and learn more!
Split Tests
The method which is used to get such results is called A/B Testing. The letters A and B stand for two different groups of customers. Both of them, of course, are part of the segment your project focuses on. This method is considered to be a marketing tool. But startups can use them also. Surprised? I hope not. The base of this method stands on delivering two different types of one product into two different groups of customers in one segment. After some time and scaling, the results and behavior of each of these groups will show you which type has brighter future.
According to these results you can critically decide which type is the one that needs your focus. I think that is saving time right there and no energy is wasted. Even though it can happen that both of the types will fail, but that gives you an information saying that there could be a slight change needed. But you will never know unless you try it yourself. And if you do it, do not forget to think critically about yourself and results of your work. It drives you forward when you question the decision you make. A decision that highly affect the quality of your work.
Priorities, Priorities
It is hard to decide what to do first when there is so much work to be done. Thankfully, there is something that can help. KANBAN deals with the priorities with ease and with a nice overview of the whole process. Imagine KANBAN as a box divided into different phases. These phases are called ”unmade”, ”work in progress”, ”done” and ”validated”. Each of these phases can only contain up to 3 subjects. This way you cannot get lost with your priorities and you will have a clear idea of what’s going on with the processes that are crucial to your development.
Once a subject moves from ”unmade” to ”work in progress”, it clears a space for a new subject in ”unmade” but fills one of the three spaces into ”work in progress”. There is no chance of being overflown with work and eventually losing your mind. The ”life” of the subject is strictly lived inside these phases and with no more than three subjects in one phase it is easy to control it.
I recommend anyone with the lack of time management skills to check out KANBAN because it is a great tool to not lose the big picture on your activities. Next time, I will be writing about A Metrics!
