The Elusive Product Market Fit

Hi everyone, I'm Brett, a first year TI:GER MBA student.  My group PaniPure is working on a new method of desalination.  Below are some thoughts on how to find your target market…

If you were to draw the process of starting with a technological advance and turning it into something actually useful, it would appear as a 1st grade scribble - ignoring the certainty of lines constraining a form.

And so it went as my PaniPure TI:GER group sought a clear product market fit. The technology itself is a water treatment method which strips salt and other chemicals from water, potentially pulling salt and other particles from an impure medium. What was immediately evident was the apparent relevance of the technology - water security is a constant ally of journalists in search of a topic.

The group began in a similar vein, seeking to apply the tech to poverty stricken regions of the world to provide clean drinking water. This was promising at first, but proved a dead end after limitations of the technology were seen in the application. The technology could not remove bacteria from water - an essential characteristic of safe drinking water.

The group next turned to a more prosaic need - in home water softening. This appeared promising initially, as the equipment to power such systems was thought to be highly complex and expensive. This suspicion was proven incorrect rapidly with simple online searches that revealed the superior cost structure and simplicity of existing approaches.

These two avenues helped to define the space within which the PaniPure technology might be of use - where significant infrastructure already exists and where removing impurities, but not bacteria, are both critical. This led my group to consider the complex and massive agricultural irrigation industry.

This was a good bet - water prices were known to be high due to limited supply. The group had little experience with the market and first worked on understanding how farms currently obtained irrigation water. This began by calling the agricultural state extension services - a government agency in constant contact with farmers and their needs. This connection led to many more and helped paint a picture of the irrigation water industry. With this knowledge, those responsible for procuring water were contacted next, primarily farms and water management agencies. When these contacts began sending the team data and test water, it was clear that PaniPure had found a connection with end users.

The TI:GER Network

Hi guys, I'm Maggie.  I'm a first year Georgia Tech MBA candidate and this is my second semester with the TI:GER program.  My group is working on a medical device that can treat diabetes.  Since one of the best parts of the TI:GER program is its large network, I thought I'd tell you a little bit about our mentors...

Thanks for reading!

Regarding our mentors, I’ll quote the indubitably wise Tony the Tiger here: they’re grrrrrrrrrrreat!

Let me back up for a moment.  For those of you who don’t know, each TI:GER team gets assigned a law mentor and a business mentor.  Below I try to give a highlight reel of our meetings.

Our law mentor is a former TI:GER Emory Law alum – he graduated from the program four years ago.  In our first meeting, he had all the documents we’d sent over bounded and tabbed.  He’d also brought another member of his firm to help out.  They blew me away – so energetic, so willing to help, so knowledgeable.  Both have been a huge asset to our team as we struggle to understand the current patent landscape.  Last week our group went to one of the mentor’s home for pizza and we got to know each other outside of TI:GER.

Our business mentor has been with the TI:GER program for about 5 years.  A former TI:GER student now works at his start-up company.  Our team had been struggling with this one issue about why competitors enter a specific market, and our mentor was able to give us an answer within 2 minutes of starting our meeting.  I also really liked his comment “I’d be happy to open my network to you.”  We need to speak with endocrinologists (docs that treat people with diabetes) and our mentor immediately knew who we could get in touch with to get an introduction to those doctors.  That kind of knowledge and networking is truly invaluable to our team.

The TI:GER mentors far exceed my expectations.  I’m so impressed that these successful professionals really care about our project and want to help any way they can.  So far this has been one of my favorite aspects of the TI:GER program.

Get Out of the Building: Customer Discovery

Hi, I'm Jonathan.  I'm a first year TI:GER MBA student and my team is working on a new way to sort stem cells.  I thought I'd tell you a little bit about our customer discovery process...

Everyone wants our technology! Our technology is perfect! Show me the money!

Those are the mantras that every entrepreneur wants to believe. The blood, sweat, and tears that went into developing a technology should justify its widespread appeal and commercializability. Sometimes this is the case, but usually not. Kevin Costner certainly led us astray when he uttered those now famous words “build it and they will come.”

If I have learned anything from being in the TI:GER program, it’s the fact that you have to get out of the building and talk to people. The other option is to create beautiful business plans, estimate market growth, and decide which island you will buying. The problem with that approach is that as soon as you show your plan to a real entrepreneur or potential investor, the first question you will get is “how do you know?” You will not be able to respond in a convincing manner. Customer interviews are essential to understanding your technology’s appeal to consumers (not guaranteed) and the degree to which it addresses a pain point (may be not at all). The goal is to gather as much data as possible from the people who will buy your product or service to justify moving forward – affording you the insight you will need to tweak your product, pivot, or go back to the drawing board.

This process is tough. It takes a dedicated team to ask the right questions and deal with answers that may run contrary to original expectations. There will be ups and downs, but in the end you will be grateful for the experience because you will identify a path forward (even if its not the one you set out on originally). Trust me – my TI:GER team is learning this in real time.

The CEO at my previous company was fond of Colin Powell and often shared the following quotation with clients (from his book It Worked for Me: In Life and Leadership):

"If it ain't broke, don't fix it" is the slogan of the complacent, the arrogant or the scared. It's an excuse for inaction, a call to non-arms. It's a mind-set that assumes (or hopes) that today's realities will continue tomorrow in a tidy, linear and predictable fashion. Pure fantasy. In this sort of culture, you won't find people who pro-actively take steps to solve problems as they emerge. Here's a little tip: don't invest in these companies.”

If you don’t seek out new information from customers you will become complacent and severely limit your market upside. Talk to people, get their insights, and solve the problems that customers want solved. Don’t take my word for it, listen to the general.

Hello everyone,

We’ve given TI:GER Tales a new twist.  Instead of a single student’s perspective, the blog will now incorporate thoughts from students working on a variety of teams.  We hope you find the posts helpful and gain some helpful insights into what it’s like to be in the TI:GER program.  Enjoy!

TI:GER Program wrap up

Well, after two years of preparing for graduation, I was caught by surprise when it actually happened. Now that the festivities have ended (and my family has returned home), I've been able to reflect on my time in the TI:GER program. 

Graduating is bittersweet. These past two years have been a tremendous gift and have allowed me to focus on my personal and professional development in a way that few adults are given the opportunity to do. The saying that youth is wasted on the young might have some truth to it. 

Through the TI:GER program I've had some amazing experiences, networked with some incredible men and women in the Atlanta start-up community, and gained a great group of friends. Additionally, I've learned how to work better in interdisciplinary teams, how to deal with uncertainty, and how to fail fast. This experience has certainly formed the cornerstone of my MBA experience and I can't imagine being as prepared to return to the workforce as I am without it. 

Before I turn the blog back to Margi and next years students, I wanted to leave you all with my two greatest lessons from this semester, and I'll use my recent Ben Franklin readings to frame them. 

1) "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." This semester, more so than my previous three, my team was able to effectively divide work but still form a cohesive report at the end of the project. I attribute this not only to my great teammates (shout out!) but also to our upfront planning. Previously our divide and conqueror approach would come early in the process. We would go out independently, do our research, then bring our big pile together and try to craft a cohesive document from it. This semester we moved the planning and outlining stage to before the research stage. Essentially our team would meet, determine what information (specifically) we needed to proceed, then break and look for it independently. This made the end of the semester paper writing and compiling much smoother and really helped ease the time burden during a stressful finals week. 

2) "Think of three things: Whence you came, Where you are going, And to whom you must account." Forgive me for taking this quote out of context and fitting it into my "consulting is a skill" box but I think it works. This for me is the simplest expression of how to structure projects. Our sponsor was great at giving our team a wide array of projects and let us select which one we thought would be interesting and achievable given our education and work backgrounds. Once we had selected a project, our team would get clear client goals for the project, forming the foundation of our accountability. Lastly, our team would decide what our goal was (presentation, report, etc) and would make sure that all of our work was leading to that final product via the outlining process described above. By understanding our strengths, our goal, and our client, we were able to work quickly and effectively on this project. 

Once again, thanks for reading these posts. It's been a great experience for me and I've gotten a chance to talk with several of my readers via email or in person. I wish you all the best, wherever the road takes you! 

Marketing Claims Research

Happy March readers! Spring break is just around the corner and after a busy midterms season, I’m in need of some time off. This semester has been as hectic as my other three but I can see the finish line in sight. I can’t believe I’ve only got two months left at school, time has flow by!

So far this semester my TI:GER project has been focused on creating and ranking marketing claims for an biotechnology start-up. While there are claims that any medical device company needs to make in order to achieve FDA approval (efficacy and safety claims), there are also a wide array of other claims such a company would like to be able to make for marketing purposes.

Through our team’s research of competitor companies, we generated a list of claims that other medical devices in our field used to distinguish themselves from the current technology. This process involved going to competitors websites to find the claims and then reading the actual studies that were undertaken to back up these assertions. Most start-ups need to be lean and make sure their money is spent in the most effective way possible. By understanding not only what claims were being made in the market, but also the underlying testing required, our team was able to develop a cost vs. claim table.

After we generated our unranked list of claims and associated tests, we met with our client to determine next steps. Our client was pleased with our progress but needed our team to go the next step and rank our recommendations. These rankings were done in concert with the client as well as through competitor research. Our final deliverable was a set of the top 10 claims the start-up should test for in order to truly differentiate them in the market.

The next step is to vet these claims with current users of the technology. The next phase of our project (market entry analysis) will provide our team with ample time to speak to actual users and discover what would be the most important factors to them when considering changing technologies. Phase one of our project has been a blast and I’m excited about the next steps! 

Spring 2014 Kickoff!

As always, the fall semester flew by and now I'm starting my fourth and final semester in the TI:GER program. My time in the program has been marked by constantly evolving projects and the opportunity to continue to explore new markets and my current project is no exception. Our team last semester supported NextInput  and (hopefully) was able to provide them with some interesting research that will help drive their start-up forward. As always with consulting projects, the work depends on the needs of the companies, and NextInput did not have enough of the right kind of work this semester to have a TI:GER team on board. Luckily, I was able to switch projects this semester to work with a new medical device start-up! 

My new project offers an exciting change of pace and is my first foray into the exciting (and complicated) field of medical devices. Several of my fellow TI:GER students have been working with a variety of medical device projects over the past year and a half and I'm glad to finally get a chance to do some work in this field. With the added wrinkle of FDA approval and increasing legal regulations, this market should prove to be challenging but very rewarding to work in. 

I'm heading up the market entry plan aspects of the project. The start-up has several potential markets to enter first and selecting which market is critical to the widespread adoption of the technology. Some markets are more fragmented, some are more centralized. Some are large but broad, others are smaller and narrower in focus. Some have high barriers to entry, some are lower. 

Hopefully through our teams research, we will be able to guide our company towards the market that will allow quick penetration and return on their investment. We know the best way to go about this research will involve getting out of the building and start interviewing some key stakeholders within each potential market. I hope to use my past experiences in the program to make this last consulting project run smoothly and provide more actionable results!  

All in all, I'm very excited about my new team and our new project. I've already been exposed to several emerging markets through the TI:GER program and am glad to add another to that list.