Maaike Doyer walks through how startups validate ideas by testing assumptions and observing real users. She breaks down three stages: problem-solution fit, willingness-to-pay, and business-model fit, using examples like milkshakes and espresso to show what actually works.
Chapters
It's all about learning, right? I think if we talk about— I skipped some of the validation slides. Validation, what it really is all about for me is you need to discover the things you do not know yet. And that's very hard to discover the things you do not know because all the things you know, you took them into account and you built them into your plans, right, or in your business models. They're in your products. They're in there. Those are the things you know. But there's so much out there you do not know. And that's why you want to do validation because you want to learn as many of the things you do not know yet so that you can change your product or adjust your model so that it will work, right? Because it's so annoying if you came up with something like, oh, shit, didn't think about this stupid little thing and now my whole product doesn't work, right? That's what you want to prevent happening, right? It's the fail fast thing, right? You want to explore that early on. And so it's all about the learning. So it's very important that throughout the process you clearly understand what are the assumptions that I actually have. Because everything that you have at this moment, if it's just on a paper version, it's just an assumption, right? It's just something, a guess. And it could be an educated guess, yes, but it's still a guess and you need to test that. So what are your assumptions and how can you test them? Basically what the loop looks like is what is your idea? And you can put that in a canvas, you can put that in a value proposition, you can put that in a prototype. What needs to be true for the idea to work? What really needs to be true? Because if that one thing is not true, the whole model will fall apart. It doesn't work anymore. What is that critical thing? How can you test that? And what do you learn from every test? And how does that change your idea? And what's the next thing to test? This is the cycle of validation. It's the build, measure, learn continuous cycle, not only about your products, but really about your whole model and how things work. As we just had an espresso example, the product was working, but the model was not working. And so there are many elements in there that you need to test. And so it's all about this cycle, and especially how do the insights change your idea. Make sure that you actually have a place that you can change things, that you can keep it, you can keep that whole loop. And again, I'm gonna shift. I mean, and of course, the only way how to learn these kind of things is get out of the building. Only option, right? You cannot learn by sitting behind your computer. That's not what you can learn. It's get out of the building. And when you go out to your customers, Typically, watch first, then ask. A lot of the time, I mean, we love our own idea, right? That's why you came up with it and that's, you believe in it, right? And you should. But it's about watch first, then ask. Remember the milkshake? When they started to ask their customers, how do you want us to improve the milkshake? No impact on sales. But when they started to watch, the observation, like really counting how many people are walking in this, right? restaurant, and what time, what are they wearing, are they on their own or not? That's the observation part. That's what gave them the real valuable information. So always, if possible, start with observation. What can you actually see? Can you sit somewhere in a corner and just watch how people are actually doing it? And when you're having interviewing, interviews with people, try to look for the needs and not for the solution. And also that is very hard because we're solution-oriented people, like, hey, I have a solution for you, cool, right? But first, it's always what is the job to be done? What is really the need behind that? Because if that job to be done is not correct, then your solution is not solving anything, right? So that's typically the first thing that you need to check. Make sense? Yeah. Yeah? 2 hours is long. I can see a bit like, yeah. So typically what's— there are 3 stages in the validation. First thing is the problem-solution fit. If that doesn't exist, well, you can stop your product, right? Because there needs to be product-solution fit. And I mean, you now recognize this map. First, you need to confirm the job to be done. Is this really the job to be done? Is this really important in their lives? Is this really something that they need to have fixed, yes or no? Because if they don't want to change their flight schedule, for example, well then the whole platform doesn't make sense. So we need to confirm that. We typically say 3 iterations means, for example, 3 rounds of testing, and a round of testing is max 1 week. It's not that we're talking months, it's just quick. Quick rounds of testing. Test the solution, that's also the prototyping, that's what can we do in here. And of course we need to make sure that we have that problem-solution fit. So can we test that? Is that indeed, because if we know this is the job to be done, we have a solution, do they actually meet, right? Otherwise it doesn't make sense. Problem-solution fit. The next part is show me the money. What are they willing to pay for? Because a lot of people want to have a lot, right? So everybody, oh yeah, that's a cool product. Do I need to pay for it? Maybe not, right? So the willingness to pay really says something about how urgent their problem is because it says something about the urgency of their problem, right, compared to all the other problems that are in a person's life. Are they willing to pay for that? Show me the money. And the last phase is really the business model fit. Where it's all about, can we get the whole business model working? Can we do it once and can we scale it? Can we do it large? Because like the lamp, for example, that we just had from Estonia, the little lamp, that didn't work in the business model fit because you just couldn't produce it. That didn't work the way it was set up that way. So the business model fit was not there. So that's an example of the product solution fit. Thank you.
