A Minimum Viable Conversation

This article is written by Munira Hussein, a Contributor Author at Startup Istanbul.

Adam Berk is a lean entrepreneur, lean teacher, and Serial Entrepreneur. He is one of the more intrepid experimenters. He is currently an Implementation Coach at Pearson and Entrepreneur-In-Residence at The Entrepreneurial Science Foundation.

For a startup to exist, there are two things involved, a product and a market. To make sense of these two, the reasonable thing you can do is to run an experiment in your potential market, try and identify if they like your product and how much they are willing to pay for it, what improvements they would like done on it and generally experiment and find out if your product is creating value and solving real problems.

Lean startup is about running experiments. The first question you have to ask yourself is what problem are you solving? What risks are you foreseeing and how do you design the experiment around that? The only thing that matters eventually is traction and product market fit. You have to have a viable experiment that will enable you get the traction. When you bring an improved and already tested product to the market, you stand a higher chance of getting traction and even funding.

You should be able to show evidence for why your business model is viable. To prove this, you have to start by making one person happy. Create value for one person and see how you did it. Get someone through the funnel on purpose and see how you got there so that you can create more value. You don’t know how you did it until you can do it again. You can do this by asking the happy client or customer how better you can serve them. Then double down on it.

Entrepreneurs are a little delusional. They want the evidence why this is true. So you have to present to them what matters. Lean startup is the way to get to the thing that matters. If you understand your customers’ needs, you can fulfill that need.

You can also use revenue, retention and refer as evidences. Focus on retention even as you try to scale. This will show you that your customers are fulfilled with your service and it gives you a guarantee of a certain amount of income. You can observe and improve on what keeps your clients coming back. Then use these tactics to gain new clients in order to scale.

It is all in paying attention to little details. Pay attention to feedback, seek it if it is not given.  

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