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Your Startup's Customer Development Hypothesis
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Version1.0
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Date6/27/2019
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Kind of HypothesesResponseComments
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1Product Hypotheses
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1.1Product Features<2 Line Summaries of the Top 10 features of final product>
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1.2Product Benefits<List of all percieved benefits to consumers>
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1.3Intellectual Property<Refer to Subquestions>
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1.3.1What all is unique about what we're building?
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1.3.2What all IP of ours is Patentable?
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1.3.3What all Trade Secrets do we have which need to be protected?
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1.3.4Do we infringe upon others' IP? What all patents are we potentially infriging?
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1.3.5Do we need to license others' patents? Which ones?
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1.4Dependancy Analysis<For us to be successful (that is, to sell our product in volume), here’s what has to happen that is out of our control.- technology infrastructure, changes in consumer lifestyles, buying behaviour, new laws, changes in economic conditions, etc.>
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1.5Product Delivery Schedule<Best estimates. First pass only. Not used for customer commitments, only to judge reactions>
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1.6Total Cost of Ownership / Adoption<Include not just financials, but also cost of adopting the product. Will they have to change their lifestyle, make obsolete something they use today, change purchasing behaviour, and so on>
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1.7What are the cabilities and limitations of what we're building?
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2Customer HypothesesDescription - Initial Assumptions on Customer
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2.1Types of Customers<Fill out columns below. For Consumers, have a hypothesis about their emotional needs and wants>
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2.1.1End Users<Who shall be using the product?>
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2.1.2Influencers<Who all think they have a say in the sale and will be influencing the purchase?>
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2.1.3Recommenders<Influencers to a lesser extent>
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2.1.4Economic Buyer<Who has the budget for the purchase, can be same as End User>
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2.1.5Decision Maker<Who is the ultimate Purchase Decision Maker, can be the Economic Buyer>
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2.1.6Saboteurs<Who can sabotage the sale?>
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2.2Customer Problems
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2.2.1What is are the biggest problems the customer faces in her life, in context of the business we are in?<Summarize the customer's problem, and the impact of the problem in the customer's life>
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2.2.2What is the impact of this / these problems in her life?<Impact emotionally, personally, professionally>
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2.2.3What is the customer doing about the problem? Is there any way he / she is solving for the problem?
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2.2.4If they could wave a magic wand and change anything at all, what would it be?
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2.3Day in the life of the Customer<How does a typical day of a customer look like? Outside our context, as well as inside. What products do they use? When do they use them? How do they solve their problem today? How would they solve them with our product? What will motivate these custoers to buy?
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2.4Customer Influence Map<Refer to https://expertprogrammanagement.com/2017/11/influence-mapping/>
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2.5ROI Justification<How would the customer justify the cost to herself? Include intangibles also>
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2.6Minimum Feature Set<What is the smallest or least complicated problem the customer will pay us to solve? Example: Superhuman got tons of people to pay, and right now they don't even have the ultimate product>
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2.7What kinds of food do our customers eat? What kinds of food do they want to eat?
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3Channel / Distribution and Pricing Hypotheses
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3.1Where does the customer currently buy similar kinds of goods from? Why?
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3.2How will my product reach the customers?<Directly from our website? Directly from our store? From a partner store? Amazon? Why>
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3.3How much do customers spend on products / services that solve similar problems fot them as us?
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3.4In light of the problems the customer has, what can potentially be her LTV to us?
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3.5What price would our customer will be willing to pay for our product?<Ask them, if the product was free, how many or for who all would you get one? Now if I charged you $ like $5000, would you buy it? This should help them speak out the number they have in mind>
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4Demand Creation Hypotheses
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4.1How would we create demand to drive customers into our channel?<Advertising? PR? Retail Store Promotions? Cold Calling? Website? Word of Mouth? Etc.>
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4.2What all places do our+B50 customers here about new products?<What media do they consume? What publications do they trust? What sort of conent do they watch? What sort of fairs or stores do they come across new products? Where do they purchase from?
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4.3Influencers<What all outside influencers can affect my customers' opinions? Analysts, Bloggers, Journalists, Celebritities? Social Media Visionaries?
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5Market Type Hypotheses (Q's below Assume New Market)<Is our company entering into existing market, resegmenting an existing market, or creating a new market? Refer to http://tiny.cc/n1n68y>
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5.1What are the market adjacent to the one we are creating?
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5.2What markets will potential customers come from?
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5.3What compelling need will make customers use/buy our product?
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5.4What compelling feature will make them buy our product?
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5.5How long will it take for us to educate potential customers to grow a market of sufficient size? Also, what is that size
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5.6How will we educate the market?
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5.7With zero customers currently, what are years 1-3 sales forecasts?
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5.8How much financing would we need to soldier on while we educate and grow the market?
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5.9What will stop a well-heeled competitor from taking the market once we have developed it?
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5.10It is possible to define the product as either a resegmenting a market or entering into an existing one?
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6Competitive Hypothesis
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6.1Market Map<Include companies who potentially might move into our market some day. Probably the ones closest to us right now>
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6.2How have the existing players / closest competitors in the market defined the basis of competition?<Is this product attributes, service, features or something else? How is our company different that way?>
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6.3Why would customers care about our solution?<Do we have better features? Better performance? Better Price? Better Channel? Are we allowing them to do something they were not able to do earlier? What is that something?>
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6.4If our product was in a retail store, which products would be shelved next to ours?
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6.5Who are our closest competitors today? Who does the customer go to in order to get the equivalent of what we offer?<There can be different competitors for different features we give. For performance, for price, for channel, etc.
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6.6What do we like most about each competitor's product? What do / would customer's potentially like in our competitor's product? If we could change one thing about the competitor's product, what would it be?
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6.7How are competitive products used today by consumers? What is the workflow? How much time does a consumer spend on these products?
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6.8Since our product does not exist, what do consumers do in the absense our product?<Do they not do something at all, or do they do it poorly?>
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