How to develop great products

This week we're going to cover some of the prototyping techniques that will help you build things that your customers actually want. They key is to focus on your customer while also focusing on yourself. The last thing you want to do is build something that takes too much time or money to maintain.
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Tasks
  • Create a Theory of Change for your product or service. You will have to refer to work you've already done on your Mission and Vision.
  • Write up a draft of the Ignition Plan that you will launch in a few weeks from now. There's no expectation that you will have a complete version of this ready this week, but it's great to make a start!
Downloadable resources Feedback Further reading​
Tools to adopt​

Webinar Notes

Your product or service offering probably needs a health check. This will help.
Many people start thinking of the features of their product or service before they know their customer, know their market, know the related costs and so on. So we’re going to spend this time going over what you thought, with a fine toothed comb and hopefully by the end of this you'll have the right processes in place to help you come up with the best product and service offerings possible. There are a number of downloadable resources available this week including one deep dive titled, “How to pilot from idea to market”. I hope you take the time to read through that information as well. 

Do you practice active listening?
PRO Tip: grasp the importance of good feedback. Good doesn't always mean positive. Good feedback is quality feedback.

You'll have noticed that there have already been a couple of appeals for feedback in the emails you receive to notify you of these sessions. Though it isn’t always fun learning that someone you're providing a service to, has a problem with it, it is important to know exactly what the problem is so that you can do the work to fix it as soon as possible. They could also just really like it and want to have the opportunity to tell you so.

This harkens back to our conversation about thinking with integrative complexity. One of the things many entrepreneurs take for granted is the ability to fix things before they break. If you know your market and know your customer, you should be reasonably aware of the expectations they'll have of you and your business going forward. To be a real ace at this, the best thing you can do is read the comments under the posts  of your competitors and in the forums of your industry. If you can find a company that is doing very similar work to what you want to do, meaning they are serving a very similar ideal customer in the same industry, you can read the comments and the criticisms people give them on social media and across the internet to ensure you already have those things figured out before your customer even realises you exist. 

One of my favourite stories about something like this is the development of the Metro Bank franchise in the UK. As you can imagine, it's very difficult to enter into the financial services industry because of the amount of regulation that each organisation needs to comply with regularly. So, before fintech and challenger banks became well known, the traditional banks had become very complacent and people had many complaints about them and the way they worked. They complained about the opening times of the banks, which were standard working hours, meaning that if you had an office job, it was difficult to find time to go to your bank. They also complained about the unfriendliness of the staff and saw banks as valuing their money more than them as customers. 

When the entire system looks the same, the outliers will stand out. The founders of Metro Bank decided to take each of the complaints and log them one by one, code them and theme them up. Using those complaints they came up with a set of operating guidelines about their bank that would help them compete in a space that was heavily monopolised by traditional banks. For example, they opened earlier and closed later, so if you had a job with the traditional work hours of 9-5, you could come to the bank at 8am until 8pm. They also opened their bank on weekends, for the same reason. They decided to make the banks pet friendly, by making dog treats available at the counters, to help counteract the unfriendly vibe traditional banks were giving out. Importantly, they wanted to make sure their customers felt like they were special, so they added greeters to the bank entrance, offered tea or water to waiting customers and opened the bank a little earlier than 8am if someone was waiting in the cold or rain. They also introduced a policy of closing the bank later if a customer ran in just before the official 8pm closing time. It may not seem like a lot, because their function as a bank didn’t change; they still offered the same services as everyone else, but their method is what got customers to switch over and never look back. 

You have to listen to your customers and your competitors’ customers to know the direction in which you should go. If you’re launching something entirely new, you might want to produce something like a prototype of your product. This is called a Minimum Viable Product. It is your way of getting a working model of your product or service out to the public and asking for their feedback on it. As I have said before, people don’t usually know what they want until you put it in front of their faces. So it’s your job to do the research, create something that makes sense as a starting point and then put it out there for the world. Depending on the industry, it may be difficult to come up with a minimum viable product, but think about what you could do to reasonably test the viability of your idea before you sink a whole load more time or money into trying to make it work.

Everyone. Some. Ones.
This is an introduction to sales funnels. 

A sales funnel is the conversion of the masses to the miniscule, relatively. If you think about last week, we talked about the difference between people that follow you and those who end up buying from you, using the Beyonce example of having 100 million followers but only getting 1M sales in the first week of an album release. I say "only", because that 1M number is entirely relative. That is a sales funnel at work. 

100 million is everyone that has come across Beyonce and decided they like her because she’s Black, female and a singer. 

Let’s say some people, like 30 million people listened to the album on a streaming platform. Those are the people that like her stuff and want to engage with it more. They engage with her because she is Black, female, a singer and she exudes a level of perfectionism and hard work that they want to emulate in their own lives. So, out of curiosity they follow and listen to the free version of her album when it becomes available. 

The 1 million people who decided to buy are Beyonce’s Ones or Beyhive. Those are the people that feel like her stuff speaks directly to them. They engage with her because she is Black, female, a singer and she exudes a level of perfectionism and hard work that they want to emulate in their own lives. They are also enamoured with her creativity, the tone of her voice, the lyricism in her music, the topics she talks about, the producers she works with, the clothes she wears, the way she presents herself and so on and so forth.

When we’re talking about the Ones here, it is not a single person, it is a representation of every person that comes across your stuff that fits your ideal customer profile. The kicker is, they don’t have to fit the ideal customer profile 100% to become part of the Ones. There is a range to play around with that could be anything from 60% to 100% match fit. So by that logic, you’ll find it easier to get the people that are 100% match fit to your ideal customer profile to buy your stuff, but the goal is to get the people that are match fit 60% and above to buy from you.

There are strong funnels that help you convert the maximum number of people into paying customers, and there are weak funnels that stop you from converting people effectively from everyone, to some to the ones. I hope you did read the Kevin Kelly article, 1000 True Fans from the “further reading” last week because that's going to contextualise a lot of this information for you nicely. 

Converting to the Ones starts with contextualising your ideal customer profile, by taking it from the static reality and confronting it with real people. By asking the right people the right questions you'll target effectively and reap the rewards of your targeting through sales. 

Focus groups, surveys, and polls are key tactics for your business success.
Something I see entrepreneurs get wrong most often is research, and I’m saying this as someone that used to be a professional qualitative researcher. So, in the next few moments, I am going to give you some really useful tips that will help you take your focus groups, surveys and polls to the next level. The first thing to think about is, who you’re asking the questions to? Make sure you’re asking the right people for their input. By the right people, I mean people that fit your ideal customer profile significantly. That's how you bring your ideal customer to life.

The thing to remember when you’re designing focus group questions, surveys or polls, is that people have no idea what they want or what they would want or what they would do in a situation that isn't real and right in front of them. People aren’t giving entrepreneurs useless answers on purpose, the entrepreneurs are unfotunately probably asking entirely useless questions.

The worst thing I see is when an entrepreneur says they did a survey and the majority of their questions are things like, “would you pay £9-15 for a t-shirt?” “If I put a t-shirt for sale on Instagram would you buy it?” “If I gave you a pink t-shirt, would you wear it?” Well, based on those questions, they got answers and so they created a hot pink t-shirt priced at £14. They marketed heavily on Instagram and no one bought it. The first thing the entrepreneur wonders about is if the price was too high, so they do a sale. Maybe one or two people buy it, but then it still isn’t shifting units like they thought it would. It's because they didn't ask the right questions from the beginning. 

A while ago there were a lot of articles out about an influencer who had about 2 million followers on Instagram but couldn’t sell 36 t-shirts. She, like most entrepreneurs, took a “build it and they will come approach” without knowing that's what she was doing. The designs she created looked nothing like her instagram feed. It was a really big expectation vs reality shock. In the last session we focused a lot on your ideal customer. You should be creating things that you have evidence to support that they will like, not things you want them to like, or simply things you think are cool but don’t actually line up directly with what your ideal customer wants. For example, I like One Direction and Jay Z in equal measure, but if I’ve built my brand on Jay Z related stuff, then suddenly released One Direction related merchandise, no one that has supported my work until then will be interested in supporting it now. 

You know your ideal customer profile, so you have a handle on the broad strokes of how your customers want to be addressed, how to engage them and get them interested in what you're selling. Now you have to create the actual product or put together the actual service package. For example, you’ve decided you want to produce a t-shirt. You’ve done your research and you know that producing a t-shirt is the best option for you in terms of time commitment, resource availability, skillset and so on. 

The questions you should be asking are, what type of design do they want? What colours do they want it in? What quality are they used to? What price range do they typically shop in? And other questions that will help you deeper understand the current buying habits of people like your ideal customer that exist in the real world. You should be posing questions without the use of any hypotheticals, that directly correspond to the decision making process of the t-shirt production. 

By setting a list of questions that deep dives into the habits they already display and the choices they have already made, you can use the information you gather about their past decisions to determine what their future decision will be and how that relates directly to your t-shirt. For example, if they shop at Tesco or Walmart for their clothes as opposed to Calvin Klein and Louis Vuitton, you know what price range and quality level they're expecting from you. If you ask, “when you’re buying a t-shirt you most often buy them in which colours?” and “Most of my t-shirts have a graphic design on them. True or False?” you are already getting much closer to figuring out what they are more likely to buy than not. With the information you collect and the ideal customer profile you've created you’ll be much closer to producing something that truly speaks to your customer. 

A fantastic example of understanding your customer is shown in the Shane Dawson x Jeffree Star Conspiracy Palette documentary series on Youtube. Though they don’t go into massive detail about their fact finding mission, having both worked hand in hand with their individual fanbases for so long, there is an intrinsic understanding of what their customer wants married perfectly with what they want to create. Collecting information from multiple sources like competitor criticisms, comments under blog posts and social media, polls, focus groups and surveys is the first really big step. The next step is to use your integrated reasoning skills to determine what the answer to the question is, the question in this case being, “what type of t-shirt does my customer want from me?”

Do you get their needs, fiends and seeds?
This idea is based on the Strategyzer’s work on the Business Model Canvas which many companies use to build out their understanding of their business model. They call it jobs, pains and gains.​ What we’re doing here is slightly different. We believe that people buy from people. People want to be spoken to like people and treated individually and with understanding. Hence, we encourage entrepreneurs to understand the needs, fiends and seeds of their potential customers when seeking to develop a product. 

You have your vision statement, from week 1. Go and have a read through it. You know how you're trying to change the world and what you want the world to become. You have hopes for your customer, that they can live a life free of the problem that you're trying to solve. Tap into that here. 

Let’s start with needs. If your customer was to achieve a life in which this problem doesn't exist for them, who will they need to be? Let’s say the problem you’re trying to eliminate is the difficulty in finding true love and you’re using a dating app to do it. So to find true love, your customer needs to be ready for true love. What does that mean? They’d need time to date and a relatively stable mental state. They might also need a little more awareness on how to date in the 21st Century, what clothes to wear, what to say and so on. 

Ok, so what are their fiends? Fiends are the things that stop them from trying to achieve these things in any other way. You can think about fiends like the devil on your customer’s shoulder that whispers things in their ear to stop them from even trying to achieve this problem free life. In keeping with the dating analogy, a fiend could be a lack of self-esteem or self-love. Perhaps they think no one is out there for them. Or maybe they just think it would be better or easier to achieve career success or other types of success before considering dating. 

Their seeds are the things that help them grow. What do they tap into that feeds them? How do they crush the negative self-talk that is stopping them from trying to solve this problem for themselves in any other meaningful way? It could be that they read self-help books, join confidence building programs, watch a lot of Iyanla Fix My Life or a number of other things.

Make a list of the needs, fiends and seeds your potential customers have and then think of ways to incorporate that information into your product or service research. Set up your questions to help you understand the core of their pain points so you know how to overcome them. 

Design your offering based on what you know.
Let’s take a moment to summarise and fast forward into the future. You’re in a world where you've practiced active listening so you know what customers expect of the market and your industry in particular. You also know who your true fans are because you've created your ideal customer profile and applied it to the real world by finding a group of people, let’s say 30-50 people, that fit the profile between 60% to 100%. You've engaged in qualitative research in the form of a focus group, a survey, interviews or polls with that group. You’ve also found out their needs, fiends and seeds, all that is left to do is turn that information into a working product or service.

Take a moment to write down exactly what you want to build, how you will introduce it to the public and what interaction you want them to have with it. For example, will you mark success by number of downloads, pre-orders, orders, newsletter sign ups, event attendees, and so on. Choose interactions that will require them to at least enter their contact information. This information is the beginning of your Ignition Plan. It should have details about all the features you want to add, your revenue model and your ideas for a communication strategy. 

You know what you want to create, but is it the best? 
Your definition of the "best" product or service will be determined by your skills, interests and other factors entirely specific to you.

Something I think often unfortunately gets left out of the product development process is the entrepreneur’s choice, preference, personal goals and interests. Remember that as you develop this thing that you're making, you're the one that's going to have to live with it when it gets unbelievably hard, when your life shifts and things change. You'll still have to keep things going. 

Make sure you don’t over promise and end up under delivering. That’s one of the things I struggle with actually. I am always so sure I can do it all, and then end up only being able to do 80% of it well and the other 20% requires me to lose a significant amount of sleep. I’m working on it. Do what is best for you. Consider what the lowest hanging fruit is for you right now so that you can start moving the needle forward. 

Do you know the details of your competitors' offerings?
Make a list of the companies creating similar products or services. How are they addressing your ideal customer's needs, fiends and seeds? It's one thing to know how much they charge and what they do but it is an entirely different thing to know how they speak to their customers' souls. 

We covered the Metro Bank example earlier in terms of active listening, I’m bringing it up again in this context because I really want you to understand that business is so much more than what you can do, it is a lot more about how you do it and even more so about how you make people feel while you do it. So when you’re analysing your competitors, think about the softer side of things as well.

High impact, low effort.
You want to be able to build your business effectively without breaking the bank, losing countless hours of sleep and still enjoy a healthy social life. Right?

The downloadable resource, “How to pilot from idea to market” is a really helpful deep dive into the 4 core components you'll need to have for your business to work. The components are, the concept, logistics, branding and customer service. As you read through and you come up with different opportunities and methods to achieve your goals in each component, make sure you have a keen understanding of what's going to have the highest impact on your customers and what can be produced with the least amount of effort from you and your team. Give every idea you have an impact score, impact being the level of importance it has to your customer conversion strategy. Basically how important is this idea or feature to your overall strategy to get people to buy from you? As for effort, hopefully that is self-explanatory. The lazier you can be, the better. One way to figure out what is high impact is by creating a Theory of Change. Though it is typically used in the non-profit sector, a theory of change is a really useful way to ensure what you’re building is going to achieve the intended consequences.

One of the things I learned early on was to recognise that I have the tendency to move faster than it may be wise to. When you’re passionate about something it can be easy to become impatient for the realisation of favourable results. So you change things, and then change things again. The problem is that in the middle of changing things so much, you're losing your ability to effectively track whether the first change, the second change or the thirtieth change is the one that helped you get to the place you needed to be. On the other hand, with so many changes, your customers will soon get frustrated with having to learn new processes every time they click onto your website, log into your app or engage in your service. 

So how do I stop myself from moving too fast and breaking useful things? Well, I write notes. Nowadays, I write post-its. It all started with a diary that I called My Future Change Log. I would write my ideas for new features, new administrative measures and so on in the book and then I would forget about it. If anything I was thinking about doing was going to significantly impact the user experience of our product or service, or it was going to significantly increase or even significantly decrease our workload, I would give it a 30 day pause. After 30 days I would review and then implement the change if it was still relevant. I found that most of the time, after the 30 days, the idea no longer made sense, I had already found a much more cost-effective solution or there was a less time consuming way to achieve the same result. Only very rarely did the solution I had thought of 30 days earlier actually get implemented and when it did, it was as game changing as I hoped it would be.

I thought it would be a good habit for you to get into early, so we’ve created a downloadable resource that you can use that explains the whole concept well. 

Sprint to the finish line with effective testing.
I once had the privilege of being taught how to pivot by Tom Chi, one of the pioneers of Rapid Prototyping. He told the story of how he and a team of Google engineers developed the first version of the Google Glass product. For such a transformative piece of technology, things actually started from a low budget, skill heavy place. The skilled engineers used tools they could easily access and skills they already had, to determine what would work and what wouldn’t work, quickly. Tom tells the story much better in his TED talk. 

Another great resource on this subject, also created by Google people, is the Sprint method. It's pretty much about putting yourself under artificial pressure to perform in a short space of time. A Sprint gives you 5 days. The idea is that if you believe it's a time sensitive project, you'll create things quicker and work more effectively. In a Sprint, you can create something that works without all the bells and whistles, but is enough to prove your hypothesis. 

I’m not going to ask you to put yourself under a 5 day lockdown with your idea, but I will ask you to set very clear parameters for success. Rather than focusing on creating a result by a specific time, you’re instead going to focus on creating a specific result and the methods you're using to get there. We’ve developed something called the Ignition Plan. It gives you the opportunity to map out your prototype in a one-page document that you can edit as you move from one version to another.

How to run an Ignition
An ignition is basically an experiment that's intended to be run multiple times until you get your business working like a fine-tuned machine. Use the downloadable resource, Making my Ignition Plan, to set up the parameters of your experiment. The steps of an Ignition are pretty straight forward. 
  • Design your prototype. Develop it so that it works in the real world; at least enough to get the point across and test your key assumptions about your market, what your customer wants and the way they want it presented to them.
  • Assign your success metrics for a given time period (typically 2-6 weeks). While there is an associated time period, we're really focusing on the metrics you assign yourself as the marker of whether the way you are doing what you are doing is working. That means everything hangs on the numbers you set yourself to achieve. A PRO Tip here is to imagine you're a normal person with normal amounts of genius and luck, with nothing on your side but what you are able to create for yourself. That will help you determine what a sensible goal is for your chosen time period. 
  • Go out and try to make it happen, documenting every step of the way.
  • Review your actions after the time is up. In the review you should be focused on what brought you closer to reaching your metrics. There's the possibility that the metrics you set yourself may be a little too conservative. If you hit your goal, tweak things to see what you could do better to hit your goal faster in the next time period, or double your goal for the next time period. 

You're on your way to success if you have a presentable product or service that works, and is creating revenue during an Ignition.
This webinar was presented by:
Bayo Adelaja, Chief Do-er at Do it Now Now
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