Homework due for today
- Read: Achieve product Market Fit. Prepare for an in class discussion!
- After reading the above article on your own, get together with your project team, spending 1-2 hours together
- Discuss and decide on the Term Project you want to pursue.
- Everyone listen to each other: What is your vision of the product? Try to be specific. Of course you still have to research it but trying to get aligned is very important!
- Review Frame 1 Report to help you think it through
- Discuss and debate the “Value Proposition Canvas” and how it applies to your project.
- Start drafting the Term Project summary based on this discusison. It will be rough and incomplete.
- Team Deliverable: Frame 1 Report: Draft 0.1
- An entrepreneur has to learn to think strategically, analytically and carefully when evaluating what to do, how to do it, and what to do next.
- Read Delivery Startups are Back like it’s 1999. Think about the idea of a delivery startup on campus.
- What might be some of the advantages of targeting college students? What are characteristics of them as a customer base which would make it hard for a fedex or amazon to deliver to them? What are some of their needs which might be different and hard to meet by a general business? How would you test some of these questions and assumptions? What kinds of products might be amenable? Is there room to capitalize on the slowness of the mailroom? What products, services, customers, campuses, geographies, and any other characteristics might be relevant? Is this a worthwhile idea to pursue?
- Deliverable: Write up your thoughts on ‘On Campus Delivery Startups: An untapped opportunity?’ and some of the questions I raise above
- Write a self and team assessment about your experience during the Pilot Project, touching on: What each person on your team, including yourself, did on the team, took responsibility for; give each one a grade, including yourself, and explain why you think they should get that grade. Your post will be confidential and supplement the instructors’ view on your contribution to the team during the pilot phase. Deliverable: Posted on latte
Discussion
- Post-it note session
- Review homework. Each team discuss their product so far.
Value Proposition / Positioning / Elevator Pitch
- There are many ways to approach describing your product
- Positioning, value proposition, elevator Pitch
- All different sides of the same coin, used differently
- These definitions are not precise and the terminology is not set in stone.
- People will argue about them but you need to be familiar with how to talk about your product effectively.
Value Proposition Statement
Example 1:
"For tourists visiting a new destination, who want to supplement their experience with local knowledge, NewProd offers local and knowledgable audio guides automatically based on location"
Example 2:
"For local professional and non-professional guides, Newprod is a way for them to discover new paying customers by providing location based audio tour segments which produce leads and also bolster reputation."
Example 3:
"To new residents of Boston, Breadcrumbs is a new kind of recommendation app that provides a focused, quick and entertaining recommendation for a destination of discovery and entertainment, because unlike Yelp and Facebook and similar sites, Breadcrumbs presents truly unique insider recommendations in a fun and focused smartphone app."
TEMPLATE For [WHO], who [PROBLEM], [SOLUTION NAME], will [DO-THIS-JOB] by [IN THIS WAY]
- The sentence specifically answers some key questions:
- WHO: Who is it for? How would you characterize them?
- PROBLEM: What is their problem, what is the job their looking to hire a product for? What is their pain?
- SOLUTION NAME: What is the proposed solution? Your product name goes here.
- IN THIS WAY: How does it achieve that? A very brief description of the salient characteristics of what your product or service does.
- Notice that this is an ‘internal’ statement, never meant to be shown to customers or even investors.
Elevator Pitches
Here’s an example, please critique it:
"Do you know how when someone is new to a city or visiting it, it's hard to know the hotspots and the fun places to go? Or say you have 2 hours to kill while you wait for your flight? We're building a smartphone app which will give you a few focused recommendations based on where you are, what you want to do and how much time you have. We'll crowdsource recommendations, and have game mechanics to make it fun. We're not sure yet how we'll make money but we're thinking along the lines of coupons or sponsored recommendations. It will be designed as a platform so we can easily release it for other cities.
- Tips for Elevator Pitches
- You should have it at the tip of your tounge so when you run into the president you can answer the question: “So, what’s your business do?” in a clear, interesting, catchy, provocative manner.
- Purpose of an elevator pitch is to sell. To get the listener to say, “hmm, let’s sit down so you can tell me more.”
- An elevator pitch is meant to be spoken or read to a potential investor or board member
- Put yourself in the listeners shoes, really!
- Imagine that they say, “So What?” in response to each of your lines
- If there’s a very obvious objection, respond to it right away.
- Hook them with the first words out of your mouth.
- Your goal is that they say, “Tell me more!”, or “Please show it to me!”, or best, “I need one of those, I will pay anything for it!”
Positioning
- A very brief statement that summarizes the way you want people to think about your product or service especially as compared to similar or other products
- Lots and lots of sample positionings:
- Tips for Positioning
- Meant to clearly answer a series of key strategy questions
- In a consise form, for internal use
- Not for selling. For communicating and maintaining alignment
- Try and be precise and clear
- Sometimes you have 2 seconds or 2 words!
Excercise
Review Next Lecture