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.

International Opportunities

In addition to the myriad of opportunities TI:GER students have to get involved with the local start-up community, international offerings are a great way to broaden our view of the global market. Our program entered into an exciting partnership with Copenhagen Business School's BBIP program and participated in a week long exchange with 8 of their students. The program involved two teams (4 from Copenhagen and 2 TI:GER students each ) working to commercialize life sciences research. Our four TI:GER students flew to Denmark earlier in the semester to meet the rest of their teams and learn more about the science they would be working with.

After this initial week trip, the TI:GER students kept in touch with their Danish teammates and worked on developing business and commercialization plans remotely. Using video conferencing and collaborative software, they were able to continue their work despite geographic limitations.

In late November it was the TI:GER program's turn to play host as the eight Danish students came to Atlanta for a week to continue work on their business plans in person as well as learn about the local life sciences start-up community. They went on tours of nearby businesses, Georgia Tech laboratory facilities, and even made it out to a Hawks game to have some fun. All the while they were working diligently on their business plan presentations between tours and events. We even got some of them to join us at Mary Mac's to eat traditional southern fare - It was a hectic (but productive) week!

I was able to attend their presentations at the end of the week and was truly impressed by how much work these teams had accomplished during the semester, especially given the challenging distance. Both groups utilized the business model canvass and received feedback on their current go-to-market strategies. They received some good notes from the faculty in attendance and will be incorporating these suggestions into a written business plan in the coming weeks.

This partnership was a great way for TI:GER students to get international experience, work with an even more diverse team, and delve into a new product offering. New opportunities like this keep the TI:GER program fresh and the students engaged throughout their graduate school experiences.

Barriers to Entry

In last week's TI:GER class we were treated to a panel discussion from four local entrepreneurs. They shared their start-up experiences with the class and then took questions for an hour on a variety of topics from funding to the importance of patent protection. The aspect of the discussion that stood out the most to me was their approach to barriers to entry.

As the TI:GER program is based PhD's technologies, our projects are focused on products that are very novel and difficult to replicate. These high barriers to entry give our projects the ability to have intellectual property protection and create temporary monopolies around our technology.

The entrepreneurs offered a different perspective and suggested that founding a successful business was predicated more by finding a large market than finding a unique technology. They believed that our strategy was forcing our businesses into smaller market niches that were not always as profitable as larger markets, even adjusting for competition.

It reminded me of discussions our TI:GER team had last year when we were attempting to find a product to build using our technology. We were searching frantically for competitors and if we found that another group was first to market, we would either cross the idea off the list or, at the very least, strongly discourage the use of that product. We were intensely focused on finding a novel application to fit our new technology.

The panel was very informative and provided an interesting perspective. It is important to remember that there are two components to total potential customers for a start-up company: market share and market size. While it's easy to get focused on owning market share with a new technology, it needs to be balanced with understanding the potential size of the market. Barriers to entry, while important, is not the most important aspect to consider when launching a start-up.