Most business ideas fail in the marketplace. Even with the best intentions, entrepreneurs often struggle to validate their concepts effectively. The 3-Hour Mentoring Plan offers a structured approach to test business ideas with real customers, generate actionable insights, and make evidence-based decisions about whether to pivot, persevere, or stop.
The Problems Entrepreneurs Face
- The "Founder's Effect": Entrepreneurs tend to cling to their ideas, even when the market is saying "no"
- Lack of validation skills: Many entrepreneurs lack the "scrappy" skills required to quickly and definitively validate ideas with real customers
- Resource waste: Valuable resources are lost in building the wrong thing, or in overbuilding the right thing
- Market failure: Most business ideas fail in the marketplace because they don't solve a real problem people will pay to address
The Solution: Mentoring
- Mentoring introduces an unbiased third party to your idea development team
- The mentor is unattached to your idea and committed to customer-centered outcomes
- The mentor's experience and expertise can help direct you and your team to high-gain activities
- Resources are saved as the path to idea validation, or invalidation, is shortened
Outcomes You Can Expect
- Idea validation against customer problems and observable behaviors
- Insight generation: customer, problem, solution
- Behavioral experimentation with customers using one or more prototypes of variable, minimum, fidelity
- Pivot, persevere, or stop decision based on customer behavioral evidence
The 3-Hour Mentoring Plan Format
Our structured approach consists of three one-hour sessions with specific goals, activities, and deliverables:
Hour 1: Discovery
Goals
- Idea definition
- Customer identification
- Who are they?
- What is their problem?
- Where can they be found?
- When do they experience the problem?
- Why do they have the problem?
- How are they currently attempting to solve it?
- Theory of customer value
- Plan to learn
Activities
- Lean Canvas discussion
- Identify ten potential early-adopter customer subjects
- Plan for interviewing and observation of customers
Hour 2: Insights & Experimentation
Goals
- Actionable insights
- Plan to run behavioral experimentation with customers
Activities
- Affinitization of gathered customer data
- Insight generation
- Prototype building
- Experimentation planning
Hour 3: Decision Making
Goals
- New actionable insights from experiments
- Modified theory of customer value
- Consensus on idea desirability with customer
- Pivot/persevere/stop decision
Activities
- Experimental data interpretation
- Insight generation
- Discussion of evidence-based next step
- Business Model Canvas discussion
Measuring Success
Original Outcomes
- Idea validation against customer problems and observable behaviors
- Insight generation: customer, problem, solution
- Behavioral experimentation with customer using one or more prototypes of variable fidelity
- Pivot, persevere, or stop decision based on customer behavioral evidence
Success Metrics
- Did you answer the question, "Is this idea valuable to a customer?"
- Did you identify a customer with a problem, and a potential solution?
- Did you get unambiguous customer data when you tested your prototypes?
- Were you able to make an evidence-based decision about moving forward?
Commitments and Cost
What We Need From You
- Commit to all three one-hour sessions
- Materials to consider and fill out ahead of each session
- Customer discovery activities (interviews, observations, prototyping, experiments) between sessions
- Willingness to accept data that might be disappointing (e.g.: your idea doesn't resonate with customers, or other significant headwinds may exist that will prevent you from building a sustainable business model)
Cost: $300 fee covers the mentor's time for all three sessions
How to Get Started
- Go to www.coachingup.us
- Scroll down the page to "Coaching Session Options"
- Choose "3 hour mentoring plan ($300.00)"
- When payment is received, you will be contacted to set up the initial session
Ready to validate your business idea and make evidence-based decisions?