theredhype

“Struck gold” is not usually a phrase we use in the ideation stage of business development.

Businesses? Most artists have no concept of business. It’s common for artists to have a deep disdain for the economic side of their world.

Those that succeed are usually the ones who take the time to understand and experiment with a variety of business models and monetization types. Micro patronage. Crowdfunding. Art merchandising. Making their art accessible at various price points. Creative partnerships. Dipping into corporate partnerships or publishing. And of course the traditional… art fairs, gallery shows. And the more recent… constant social media, bts videos, mailing lists, events, classes, retreats, etc.

Either that or they’ve got some truly insane unique talent. But I know plenty of insanely talented artists who have such a toxic relationship to money and concepts of value that they will always be starving.

Source: was once a starving artist; still know many starving artists.

Before spending 2 weeks building an MVP, you should spend 2 days (or more… however long it takes) doing customer discovery through conversational interviews with early adopters.

Early adopters are people who:

• have the problem you’re solving
• know and care that they have the problem
• are actively trying to solve the problem
• have spent time and/or money to solve it
• ideally… they haven’t totally solved it yet

The “customer discovery” phase / method accomplishes many things, including answering your specific question.

While validating the problem, you experiment with locating and engaging “early adopters.” If you can’t manually successfully find a few dozen passionately interested early adopters to interview, then you’re gonna have a very difficult time selling something, because you simply don’t know what channels to use to find them or how to speak their language.

The customer discovery method is useful for far more than exploring product ideas, features, etc. You should also be learning from early adopters:

• what other types of solutions they’ve tried — how successful those have been, the good and the bad
• how they feel, think, talk, and behave about the problem and solutions — giving you insights that inform Your marketing messaging, imagery, stories
• where they look and what they search for — insights for where to put your ads when you launch
• how much time and money a solution is worth to them, based purely on their past behavior and how much they’ve invested
• what related problems might arise when they try to fit your solution into their life

Even though you’ve built something, it may be very wise to go back and just try to find and interview people who fit the description of early adopters. If you can’t find any… shrug emoji.

The alternative is to simply keep trying to get people to interact with your MVP. But you won’t learn nearly as much that way as you would just asking questions face to face.

It’s easy and common to do customer discovery wrong and get bad results. Don’t waste your time! Study these first.

Resources:

• Steve Blank’s website / blog
• Justin Wilcox videos on YouTube
• Rob Fitzpatrick’s book The Mom Test
• David Bland’s book Testing Business Ideas

Usually, you can’t sell an app or website. You sell a business. The app might be part of the product. But without customers and revenue you have little to no proven value.

Similarly, investors don’t invest in ideas. They invest in functional business models, based either on actual sales or some other tangible form of traction that goes well beyond your idea, passion, and confidence that it will work.

In short, you have to prove it will work before anyone is going to give you money.

Definitely. It’s huge set of tools. A whole corporate tool stack. But it costs years and many thousands of dollars. Whereas the typical first time entrepreneur can acquire more relevant skills much faster.

An MBA is generally not preparation for entrepreneurship. Most “masters of business administration” are going into the corporate world to participate in large companies with well established business models.

That’s probably a bad idea. But the answer to your specific question is that it depends on where you’re based.

The correct place to find this answer is probably on a web page posted by the local or regional government wherever you live.

The answer to the question you should be asking is something about doing things in the right or best or most efficient order — which IMHO is the lean method. It’s a waste of your time and resources to register things before you’ve even figured out what you’re doing.

Also, this subreddit is a good place to ask, and it’s great that you’re asking for advice so early in your journey. Keep that up.

Email Octopus leverages Amazon SES for solid deliverability.

https://emailoctopus.com/mailchimp-alternative

You usually have to reverse engineer your marketing strategies and tactics based on where your customer’s attention is. This is certainly true for a coffee shop.

Where do they go? Put your advertisement there.

How do they get there? Put your messaging in their path.

What are they looking at? Get into their line of sight.

Personally… I find coffee shops on google maps and yelp. Then I look at the customer pics on google maps and the shop’s instagram to determine if I’d enjoy being in there. Then I look at the menu, wherever I can find one, to see whether they have what I’m after, usually light roasts and pour overs. So to easily capture my business you’d want to support the customer journey I’ve just described at each point along the path.

But I’m just one person. You need to understand the customer journey across a wide range of your customer types.

For coffee shops and event heavy orgs you’re probably going to lose the battle to technology. Because you actually have a twofold challenge: Not only do you need to complement your customer’s journey, you’re also in competition with any other cafe or event which is leveraging the media and channels your potential customers are consuming.

My suggestion is that you put some guidelines and systems in place which help you only use tech in a creative way, and not a consumptive way. For you, it’s a tool. Leverage it. Schedule and limit the time you spend using it. Keep it in its proper place and it won’t consume you.

You usually have to reverse engineer your marketing strategies and tactics based on where your customer’s attention is. This is certainly true for a coffee shop.

Where do they go? Put your advertisement there.

How do they get there? Put your messaging in their path.

What are they looking at? Get into their line of sight.

Personally… I find coffee shops on google maps and yelp. Then I look at the customer pics on google maps and the shop’s instagram to determine if I’d enjoy being in there. Then I look at the menu, wherever I can find one, to see whether they have what I’m after, usually light roasts and pour overs. So to easily capture my business you’d want to support the customer journey I’ve just described at each point along the path.

But I’m just one person. You need to understand the customer journey across a wide range of your customer types.

For coffee shops and event heavy orgs you’re probably going to lose the battle to technology. Because you actually have a twofold challenge: Not only do you need to complement your customer’s journey, you’re also in competition with any other cafe or event which is leveraging the media and channels your potential customers are consuming.

Start by becoming the world’s leading expert around all the ways people experience the problem your idea solves. Then you’ll see clearly what to make, and perhaps discover a path from the current state of things to your “10 years from now” goal.

Or, you might discover it won’t work. But if you approach it from the problem first, you’re likely to discover other compelling needs and ideas along the way

99% of the cold emails I receive have obviously done zero pre-qualifying. They’re simply using a shotgun approach to see if anybody bites. By externalizing the work of determining if there’s even an apparent need/fit, they create so much noise and digital litter that I’ve almost become completely inured to it. Almost. It is still annoying.

It’s extremely rare that an email shows any evidence whatsoever that the sender has even looked at my website or profile(s) to see whether their offering or ask is relevant to me.

I consider this approach disrespectful as it attempts toaster the time and attention of thousands of random recipients, and it leaves a bad aftertaste, which I associate with the sender (person and brand).

On the extremely rare occasion that someone has actually bothered to determine whether I might need their product or services, and simply mentions why they have a reasonable suspicion that they’re a good fit, I do respond.

But this requires them to spend time looking at my work and understanding me, before asking me to look at and understand theirs. Almost no one does this. All of the tactics people use to appear like they’ve done their homework (without actually doing it) are painfully obvious. And if you’re looking for people who are easily fooled, I definitely don’t want to do business with you.