When we have created our first hypothesis of a business model and described it on a lean canvas, we have a state we call HYPOTHESIS ZERO. This is the first articulation of the model in its riskiest state – where we don’t yet have evidence to support it.
What do you do next? EXPERIMENT ZERO of course!
Here is a template for EXPERIMENT ZERO. You can create your own using our free template for EXPERIMENT DESIGN.
In these first customer interviews we are not asking customers what they think about a specific vision for the solution. We are just talking to them about the task they are trying to get done. When we create HYPOTHESIS ZERO we have written something specific in our CUSTOMER cell on the canvas and we have fitted that to a PROBLEM description that matches.
If you co and find a customer that matches the description and talk to them about the task you think they struggle with, surely they will talk about the PROBLEM without you prompting them?
This is a fantastic way for someone to find a problem that they may eventually be able to deliver a solution that creates value value for these customers and possibly a viable business. However, at this stage I suggest the person shouldn’t even think of themselves as a founder of a startup. This should just be a project to find a real problem worth solving for real customers. This is harder than one may think. If the person just thinks of this as a project they hopefully won’t feel like they have publicly committed to building a startup to solve a possibly non-existent problem. From my experience, a lot of founders seem to commit publicly to doing a particular startup and often even build (or pay someone to build) a solution before they have even confirmed the problem. They then may feel trapped by their public commitment and sunk costs into developing this startup that has liittle chance of taking off if there isn’t a real problem for real customers. It seems to be hard for people to back out of a startup, so I suggest people keep the search for a problem as just a project.