Will Your Idea Fly? The 'Rich vs. Right' Masterclass in Market Validation

Okay, Dan. Okay, Dan. So let me do a two-minute intro. Thank you for joining us today. So please save your questions until the Q&A or whenever Craig or Brende ask you to ask questions. And for those of you who have first time with us and wonder who we are, we are ServoVest Toronto started almost eight years ago as a meeting place for functions and service developers. But during COVID, we migrated to online format. And over the time, we realized we could help businesses by working smarter not by sprinting faster and we started to define serverless not just as a tech stack but as a pragmatic mindset a way to focus on business value and so this broad definition of serverless allows us to explore various id topics so you can visit our youtube channel to check over seven years of educational content much of it is still uh technically relevant and and next month the exact date is to be determined we will have our annual birthday event that typically feature three to four short made in canada talks from local pros like julia and uh keep an eye on my email from etab.com for exact date and agenda and hope to see you there and if you have topic you wanted to present mention that in the survey at bitly uh sls uh to and and last but not least a big thank you for money publications they're supporting us as a knowledge sponsor for years now uh the generalists donate the title at every meetup so to enter the raffle do that survey that i mentioned at bitly slash slsto we'll do the draw of the winner at the end and for everyone else money provided is 45 percent code for any of the digital products so scan the barcode and enjoy the saving and before i pass the microphone to our guest presenters let me explain why this non-technical topic at the tech event so as ai handles more implementation the critical skill is uh shifting from how to what and why so that's why we invited brandy and craig from alberta innovates to help us figure out uh if your ideas are worth pursuing before you spend time and money building the wrong things and and they cost hundreds of entrepreneurs since 2021 and i'm honored uh they accepted my invitation to educate tech builders here so craig brandy thanks for doing this uh the floor is yours please uh take it away appreciate this i'm just gonna replace the share if i can and then i already have slide control craig so randy's already got slide control okay perfect so daniel thank you so much for the intro and hosting us um we're gonna take you through what we actually teach founders and i just wanted to double down on what you're saying so craig and i advise entrepreneurs around the world and we see a common pattern happen across our ctos and our ceos and this friction that can happen between should i build it could i build it and what this process looks like uh so for those of you that are deep in development that lens hopefully today will help you kind of understand the language a ceo used i was actually just coaching a founder last night and his brother's a cto and he's like it's the first time he stepped up because i actually invited him to a business meeting i was like yeah no way so we're going to talk to you about how you discover if an idea actually is worth pursuing and what we're going to cover today is something that i've dubbed as problem bingo so how you can identify if you've got a problem worth solving for enough people we're also going to look at how we can focus on icps or ideal client profiles which are very narrow niche customer sets and then we're going to cover something called the say do gap and help you understand how to ask better questions when you're doing discovery or user testing to get more valid evidence and then we'll talk about the difference between customer and market research. I know a few of you have seen some of our stuff before and you know that it's a bit of a ride. So we've got a ton of content we're going to run through in about an hour with you. We try to dump as much as we can. So my invitation to you is number one, hold on, have a good time. And number two, don't be like the kid or be like the kid. Don't be like the dad in the picture here and just have a good time. As Brandy often says, buckle up. So one of the things Craig and I are really good at, and this is that invitation that Daniel was mentioning, interrupt us at any time if you have some questions. We love to do something called fish boning. So we will go off on tangents around any question you might have. We can tailor this session to what you guys need. And I don't think there's been a time in the eight years that we've done all of our sessions that we haven't made it through all of our content. So maybe that's a challenge i can give you today so this qr code will take you to our slides if you want to download it and you'll get a pdf version we have a ton of other qr codes and resources throughout to help you craig are these live they should be live this one is you want to stick it in the chat yeah i'll get you to do that for me for some reason that's not doing it for me on my end. This is the one QR code that rules them all. So if you have this, you'll be able to access all of the other resources that we give you. You don't have to worry about trying to finish across all your tech. And who was it? Raymond. Raymond's seen our stuff and he said, I'm going to beat you to it and put my LinkedIn here. So what I'd love for you to do is go grab your full LinkedIn profile, including the HTTPS, pop it in the chat like Yulia and Raven have done and connect to at least two people that you aren't currently connected to. I think what will be really cool today, since it looks like we've got folks from all over, is just tell us what city you're joining from. And perhaps you can try to connect with people that are outside of your city. Or if you want to be able to do some in-person meetings, you can do that. And while you're gathering that, I have my first question for you guys today. So Daniel, I'll ask you to hold because I know you know the answer. There is one predictor of success that Forbes has identified for any entrepreneur, no matter what stage they are. Does anyone in the group have any guesses as to what that predictor of success might be? Ophir is in San Francisco. Wow. Any guesses? Number one predictor of success for entrepreneurs, especially first timers. not giving up a really good guess michael we sometimes translate that into resilience but it is not the number one predictor you can actually have this before you even start your company kudos for jumping in totally david says knowing the problem that is really massive for the success of a company but it's not the number one predictor of success for an entrepreneur these are all good answers they're great yeah i love to focus on problems we're going to hammer that home today so we're preaching to the choir should we give them a letter to start with brandy sure you want to play jeopardy sure we'll start with the letter let's start with the letter n one word what's the second letter brandy my name E. N as in, I'm blanking. I just want to say the word. N as in new. Second letter Z. E, T are the first three letters. Network. Network. Is the size of your network. So this is why we get you to add each other to your LinkedIn. and once you connect um even just go and do a dm and say hey we met at this serverless meetup because you never know you might bump into each other like two years down the road be like where do i know you from all right so who are we uh i'm brandy as you know i live in lethbridge alberta and i am currently a technology development advisor for alberta innovates by day and craig and i go out say our nine to five is alberta innovates and our five to nine is going out around other ecosystems and sharing the gospel about how to start a company i got started on this track about 10 years ago when i worked at the university of lethbridge building a new student entrepreneurship program and then i jumped ship and headed over as head of operations where i learned some ux design skills and worked with a health tech company prototyping some ai pieces so daniel i love this piece of the garbage in garbage out when we're looking at health data it's really important so that was a fun spin and then i bumped back over into government when i had some folks from the elevate ip alberta group asked me to help them put together their first pilot and craig and i have been doing stuff since the very beginning yeah so my name is craig elias i often describe myself or sometimes described by others as the other half of the brandy and craig show uh started doing computer science as you heard decided i would rather do business ended up as a sales guy uh did an executive mba at one point and had this crazy idea for a tech startup ended up getting funded being down in silicon valley was down there for a while became a dad came back home and started doing coffee meetings helping founders four six eight sometimes ten a week taught entrepreneurship at a university for a while got kicked out because too many students became entrepreneurs uh went on to become an entrepreneur residence at a college in downtown calgary and started doing work across the province not just in my own college and that's how brandon and i first connected and uh we've been doing this for a while and we do this in lots of different places i'm just going to make sure so we've done this stuff all over canada united states australia europe and most recently new zealand where brandy did something for a group queenstown or christ church i forget brandy ministry of awesome christ church christ church uh we take recordings of our most popular session. So this QR code, if you use the first one, it'll give you access to this. You can use this one. We'll take you to a page where you can access all of the stuff that we do. And we would be hypocrites if we don't do what we tell you you should do, which is build this awesome network. So one of the folks we have spent some time with is a guy named Ash Moria. He was the guy that actually created the lean canvas. If you want to learn more about the lean canvas, he did a special two hour session for us. this qr code will take you exactly there other folks in our network heidi neck teaches entrepreneurship at a place called babson college just outside of boston adam spent some time in new york more now in detroit where he has moved to ravi was the person that gave him my first million dollars when i was down in silicon valley he now runs a an accelerator called the alchemists which is one of the most successful ones on the planet azra runs a super cool program which is a five-week boot camp that we send students down to they give us free scholarships and the students we work with come back on a regular basis out of 125 startups from 25 countries picked as the most investable volta you might hear something called the helsinki model or sort of commons model he's out of helsinki he created this wendy is sometimes described as the third musketeer she's also in alberta and the other person that we get to spend some time with on occasion is It's our friend, David Bland. Randy, who is David Bland? I keep muting myself. Sorry, Craig, I won't do that. David Bland is the guy that wrote Testing Business Ideas, which is literally my business Bible. I have five copies of his book and I fangirled when we were actually able to bring him up from California to Calgary to talk at a tech conference called InVentures. And he got to present to over 200 people a packed room and it made me so happy because we had early stage entrepreneurs who love to build technology and then try to sell it and they learn very quickly that there are many other ways to de-risk your technology and idea for cheaper a lot of my passion comes from the fact that my mom was an entrepreneur and i learned a lot from watching her failures and a lot of times you spend a lot of time and money building something that nobody wants so david did a special session for us as well this qr code will take you to a 45 minute session where he talks about how you can map your key assumptions and de-risk them and we'll go through a little bit of that with you today and then when we're not doing those things we love to go around and teach something called playing lean which is a board game that was designed by a guy named bruno in norway that actually helps people apply those approaches for lean and agile development in a competitive and fun way i am the only trained facilitator in north america and as craig likes to say he doesn't have the the patience that i do to do education like that so he said screw it i'm gonna hop on a plane and go meet bruno and play the game with him in london so we've learned all the different by the way london england just in case people are thinking london ontario perfect okay so before we dive in i'd love to get at least three of you if you want to unmute or go in the chat if we give ourselves a couple minutes um what brought you here today and as daniel kind of framed it of you know we're not talking technical but we're trying to help you learn how to translate some pieces what are some things that craig and i can make sure we really focus on today's to answer some questions you have who's brave enough to volunteer i got one perfect let's hear it yeah so um something that's interesting right now solopreneur using like some of my software engineering background and obviously the explosion of ai to be super productive get some products out and what is your guys's advice or maybe some color you can add to scaling um a solopreneurship that's kind of in that technical realm where the barrier to entry for another employee is kind of high um what would you what would you suggest for scaling that okay let's keep that in mind shall we brandy absolutely good question michael it's kind of you're coming into some really interesting new territory here right we've never really seen artificial intelligence the way it is to help scale ai first businesses in the way that we've seen anyone else looking for two more do we want to pick on anybody brandy see if we can get some answers sure let me pick on i don't want to pick on daryl again let's pick on greg greg what brought you here what now that you don't know about us what can we teach you um we've started a startup last year that became quite successful in at the first minute. So it's in an area that is not my expertise. And what I'm really looking for is how to come up with stepping back, not even validating my idea, but how to find my idea in a new environment. And you already gave me the first great advice. I have to look at the size of my network, but how to find my ideas and how to validate them when And I find them in an environment that's essentially brand new with the new technology of AI included with previous experience in all kinds of IT-related, finance-related businesses. So I'm thinking, Brandy, this is day in the life. Yeah, day in the life could work for me. When I hear this, I'm actually thinking of the pivot table even potentially, Craig, as an option for Greg to start to think about how he can translate his knowledge into a different industry good idea yeah okay last one do you wanna oh we've got nick hey everyone um i'm nikhil and um i'm also a software developer right now i'm in the process of like we we are launching a project product right now um it's in the bitcoin space it helps people with uh like inheritance and saving um their their bitcoin uh but right now like i'm not sure like how it's that's gonna work out. I've already been working in this space for quite some time and yeah, working with people in Australia right now. So they have like similar business already. But I think, as I think Greg mentioned, going into a new field, like building a new launch in a new project, I think marketing it is something that I feel is a little tricky because you don't know. Now you have built a product, but you have to actually now take it to the market, take it to people and understand like what exactly, like what your messaging should be and everything. So yeah, so that's like one of the things and I'm not sure like how this is gonna turn out. So I'm looking for more ideas to build on. So yeah, that's what brought me here. Cool, so this is helpful cause we'll stop all along the way as Brandon talked about earlier, being able to do a little bit of fish boning. will definitely do this. So here's the process that exists. Now, way back when I was down in Silicon Valley, this did not exist. Today, we know it's a process. The first thing is you got to figure out, do you have something that enough people actually want? The second thing you got to figure out is can you actually make enough money at this thing? Or is it going to end up being a hobby? Or sometimes people talk about a boat. It's like it's a hole in the water you sink money in. We don't want to be sinking money in. We want to find a way to take money out. And the last thing is can you make something that's actually easy for people to use because the harder it is to use the less likely is someone to actually use it so the reason we do this is if they don't want it there's no sense trying to sell it and if they're not going to buy it there's no sense actually trying to find a way to make it so i think one of the questions that somebody answered earlier uh was the question to what's the number one reason startups fail but remember the there was an answer given earlier what is the number one reason that startups fail anybody want to guess the product market sorry the product market market fake you build something that nobody wants right so at some point you need to figure out if that's what's happening to you so the whole goal is as you're going through this journey is to understand at some point you might need to pause pivot or maybe you just find a way to keep going and the way we think about this is if you can't find people that want it and if you can't find people that will pay for it then you got to go find something completely different to do or maybe what happens is you find something that people want but you can't find a way to make enough money at it and typically that happens because what is called CAC the amount of money you spend trying to get a customer is greater than the amount of money you would make from the customer. So the first time we did a session like this, Brandy gave me this challenge of like, give me a really good example of someone who did a pivot. And this is my favorite story to tell about what's a pivot. So Raul, and I should put in the year in here, Brandy, next time we do this. He was on his way to the North Pole. He was going to be the first person ever to the North Pole. And he's got this big ship and he's loading it full of equipment and people and food and all the things that, you know, everybody's going to need to get to the North Pole. And about two weeks before he leaves, he gets wind that somebody got to the North Pole before him. So now he needs to pivot. Where's he going to go? If you're going to do a pivot, he went to the South Pole. He was the first person to ever get to the South Pole. So this is what happens to us sometimes. You know, we've got people we're trying to help. They've got all these problems that they might have. you decide you're going to pick one well it turns out that maybe that's not one that is profitable you want to find a way to go do something different and what happens very often is people then try to figure out where am i going to pivot to so our suggestion is focus on the relationships you already have the things you've learned and how do you maybe solve a different problem for the same person or if that's not going to work maybe what ends up happening is you stick with that problem but you find somebody else that has that problem these are the ways that you pivot you get to leverage from your relationships and your expertise instead of starting from scratch all over again so instead of doing this you want to find a way to do this and maybe if you find something that's desirable and maybe you've pivoted and now it's actually viable you can then go on but one of the most important things especially for technical people right we need to to find a way to be flexible you get a choice you can decide whether you want to be rich or you want to be right because you can't be both right so this is why it's really important to get perspective from other people someone mentioned the desire to actually want to find a way to learn how to sell this and position this this is one of the reasons that Brandon I have a what's called the traction canvas this QR code if you would like to follow along and if you want to be able to put notes in a fillable PDF so you can make notes on your computer as you're going along this QR code I'm gonna copy this QR code brandy I'm gonna put this in the chat hold on one second this this QR code will take you straight to a fillable PDF you can download and then fill in as going along so the first and most important thing brandy is all about what it's about falling in love and being passionate a whole bunch of you are already giving us the answers a lot of times what happened is we fall in love with the wrong thing ash moria the guy that wrote the lean canvas is the one that taught us this and craig and i always wear his t-shirts to help show craig standing up so you can see what it is. Love the problem, not your solution. So what we see often as a problem is entrepreneurs will start with their solution and then try to define the problem based on what they've built. And what we've learned from kind of centuries of work, I guess, is something called Kinlan's Law. And it states that if you can actually really clearly write down a problem and state it, you've already got your solution halfway there. Einstein has something similar. He talks about if you had one hour long, you'd spend 55 minutes really focusing on the problem. So we're going to really talk about how do you actually know you've got a problem defined. And Craig and I worked to build something called a problem statement. That's a couple sentences long. That's a fill in the blank for you so you can figure out specifically what it is you're doing and who you're solving a problem for. And it goes like this. When your ideal client profile runs into a problem after a trigger event, they have these quantifiable consequences. Because of this, they have an emotional impact and they are going to be using alternatives that have some shortcomings, which leaves room for innovation. We're going to walk you through each of these sections of a problem statement. And we're going to start first with this ideal client profile. Craig, how do you find out who your ICP is? ICP. So we use a process called bifurcation to help people understand your ICP. What's really important is understanding what we're looking for is the person who's going to pay for this, not the person that's actually going to use it. So we're looking for the person that pays. But before we get into this whole piece, I want to ask a question around what do people understand as the number one predictor of success for retail? Anybody want to understand what's a big predictor of success in retail? What are the three most important things in retail? Anybody want to guess? Location. Location is number one, says Julia. Anybody want to guess what's number two? The finding hungry crowd. No, starts with L. Second letter is O. Location. Location. What's the last one? Location. Same one then. It's location. Location. So if you're not in the world of retail, it's all about focus, focus, focus. You want to find a way to solve one problem for one customer type and one industry or geography. So the way that we teach this, we teach a process called bifurcation. You all know that bifurcation is when you split things in two. It's like an or statement, not an and statement. So the way we think about this is you figure out who's the whole market, and then all you do is ask three really simple questions to figure out who's the person who you want to focus on. First time Brandy and I did this, it was for Arlene Dickinson's incubator. It was a lady who was making chemical-free cleaners that people keep underneath the kitchen sink. and she was saying that parents are her customer and i said parents are not your customer and this is the reason why you're struggling you haven't identified your icp so the question that got asked is who cares more or who is likely to care more about chemical-free cleaners underneath the kitchen sink in a traditional family moms or dads not dead dads no the data actually says it's moms moms moms tend to be more risk averse than dads are in general that's what the data said so we knew just by asking that one question she should be focusing on moms the second question though is these moms do these moms have one child or more than one child who wants to guess who's more likely to be her customer more than one daniel says more than one which makes a whole lot lot of sense. But here's the challenge, Daniel. When you have your first child, you're super risk-averse. You're super careful. And when your second child comes along, it doesn't mean you love them any less. You just don't worry about them as much. So what do we know? It's moms that have one child. Plus, if they don't change their behavior after their first child, they're probably not going to change their behavior after the second one. So we know it's moms with one child. Last question on this occasion. That mom that has that one child, did she have that child when she was over 35 or under 35 maybe want to guess under or over over Daniel says over turns out he's he's right because if when you have your first child over the age of 35 you're even more risk averse in fact brandy sometimes does this such and she talks about the fact that moms that have a pregnancy over the age of 35 are called geriatrics so what are we trying to figure out all we're trying to figure out is what is that twelve and a half percent of the marketplace, it's more likely to become our customer. Some examples you can use for bifurcation is, where do they live? Do they take public transit? Are they young, old? Do they live in the city? Finding different things. Maybe their psychographics are one of the things that they prefer. One of the things that's really important when you're focusing on the ICP, they need to have money, the authority to spend it, and some sort of influence inside the organization or merge from a word-of-mouth perspective now some of you might be thinking I'm in the business to business world not the business to consumer world so the same thing is true in the business to consumer world it just depends once you've identified the kind of company you now need to identify the actual person this is why we call it the ideal client profile so we're looking for those guys and gals that are more likely can become our customer as we go through this process and what you want to do I'm gonna skip the activity for today but if you want to read something that helps with this the data says that you actually sell or grow twice as fast when you focus on a narrower portion of the markets so once you've got that ICP figured out we want to start to dive into what their specific problem is and And what we see people do is they skip over this or they talk about all the benefits that their solution brings rather than focusing on the things that are taken away. So we know from customer behavior that people are more willing to pay for something that helps them get out of something. So those bold words on this slide are things that we want to be looking at for these value propositions. So when we talk language for messaging and marketing, using those bold words in your messages are going to have a lot of impact to help you position about whether or not your product or offering is considered a vitamin or a painkiller. Anything that is going to be preventative, come in early, maybe make me feel better. Those are all vitamins. And we want to position to become a painkiller where we're taking away a problem. And the way that we can find out if we actually have a good problem is by using problem bingo. So this comes from a book called Founded, where they highlight the six key characteristics of a problem. So we want to try to look to see if our problem is urgent, if it's popular and a lot of people are having it, if it's growing. And I look at growth in two ways. So are more and more people going to have this problem as time goes on? And if I have the problem, does it get worse and worse over time if I ignore it. So think about like a leaky faucet. And then we look at frequency. So we like to see problems that people bump into more often. So if it's a daily basis problem versus a monthly problem, people are going to be more likely to want to get rid of it because they can't put up with it anymore. Mandatory problems are really important in B2B so that we're actually solving something people need and then we talk about expenses and i'll talk about the three layers when we run into that so for this we have an activity that you can look at for yourself so i'm thinking gray for you this might be a really cool tool where you can look at the different problems you're thinking of solving and check off which characteristics they have and this can help you disqualify problems that aren't going to be juicy enough to be worth solving so the resource that i have for you here is founded that's that book that i mentioned so founder fridays that daniel and craig have been talking about in the chat uh if you go to the qr code you'll see all of the recordings and number 14 is where mike rab uh talks about the book founded so as we continue down this path of understanding the problem statement we got this person they have a problem more times than not what happens though is they just put up with what they have and it's not until all of a sudden they have some sort of an event where they decide they want to now actually change and the value of these events is they create dissatisfaction so one of the things that olivia wong talks about is if you're going to try and get someone to become your customer they need to be unhappy enough to actually switch and when she says a three-point difference what she means is that if you ask people on a scale of one to ten how happy are you with what you use today they need to answer seven or less so the whole idea is instead of trying to find a way to go after everybody if you haven't heard the term that's called the total available markets um there are some people though that have the problem so they are the addressable market there are some people you can actually reach that's what's often called an obtainable market but even though they're attainable the challenge is they're not motivated so all of this is around understanding who are the people that are most likely to switch and they switch because they have very specific events something makes them unhappy with what they use today so these events right what ends up happening is people are happy they see no reason to change they have an event they want to change they're now in what is called a window of dissatisfaction they're unhappy enough to start thinking about how do they want to solve the problem but they're not yet starting the process of actually deciding which vendor here's the point where they decide which way are they going to solve the problem there's always more than one way to solve a problem what I want to say to my wife I love you I can spend money on flowers chocolate perfume car shoes purses pets and trips this is when they decide what is the problem how are they going to solve it then they have a second event where now they have more money more time more resources now they start deciding of the way they want to solve the problem who do they want to buy from in the process but just because people want to change and can afford to change doesn't mean they will because they need to have this third event and this third event is how they justify the the decision to somebody else and they justify based upon an acronym called ripes and we'll tell you what these five things are the first one is risk avoidance that's the R the I stands for image how do you make themselves or somebody else look good in the process the P stands for productivity slash expenses how do i spend the same amount of money but get more stuff done or how do i spend less money and get the same amount of stuff done the e stands for environmental social or governance reasons and the s stands for simplicity or speed risk avoidance image productivity slash expenses environmental social governance reasons simplicity or speed the data actually says 37 of the time people choose the person who is easiest to do business with so here's a question i want to ask just so people understand this concept of events what is that one event do you think that causes more people to buy life insurance than all of the other events combined what's the event that gets someone to buy life insurance anyone to guess what's that event probably a debt Not a doubt. Think of the other side of the journey of life. A new kid in the family. Yeah, as soon as they get pregnant, right? So I'm going to go back because the same is true even in the business-to-consumer world. So in the business-to-consumer world, McKinsey's done some data. They've talked to a ton of different people. They realize there's this trigger that gets interest. They create an initial consideration set. people then need some sort of an event where they have more money more time or more resources to be able to then start the active evaluation and it's not until they have this last event or trigger where they can justify the purchase that actually become customer so these events tend to fall in three flavors the first one is what you try we're better we're faster we're cheaper generally doesn't work what happens sometimes people have a bad experience with something they already use very often caused by changing people inside an organization people have bad experience they want to change and they're in a hurry the third one is a change inside an organization so i'll give you an example job changes brandy what did you buy when you got a new job the last got a new car when i joined randy at upboard innovates i gave myself a budget to go to a whole new wardrobe so these are just some of the events and when you think about this even from a corporate perspective it's important so these are some of the examples of what could be a circumstance or a trigger so my question is what is this if someone's unhappy with what they use today is that a circumstance or is that a trigger who would like to guess trigger it's not a trigger they've learned to put up with this thing right they their emotion religious solving the problem has gone down it's called the law of diminishing intent and this becomes the challenge we have with ideas we think because they're unhappy they're going to switch but if they've been unhappy for a while their level of dissatisfaction generally they just learn to put up with it and they'll give you a seven a half or an eight when you ask that question what if there's a change in decision makers inside an organization circumstance or trigger be brave um it's gonna be a circumstance this so this is a trigger that new guy or new gal that's in the job they want to make things different they were before so other events triggers when somebody acquires a new company when somebody launches a new product when maybe your salesperson moves on from a competitor if someone wins a large customer contract they now gotten more money right if someone gets acquired by somebody else all of these are events which tend to create dissatisfaction that make people want to change so when you get the chance the activity we suggest at some point is identifying for yourself what's the first event that makes people want to change makes them unhappy makes them think of what's the problem they have and how do they want to solve it what are some of the events where all of a sudden they have more money more time, more resources, and what are the events that they would use to justify buying from you instead of sticking with what they have? If you want to learn more about these triggers, wrote a book about this a while ago, this QR code will take you to the pages in the book. Right. So you can then have a bit of a deep dive on this whole piece. But just because people have an event doesn't mean they change because they need the next piece of the problem statement. Brandy, what's the next piece? This is where we get to talk about data in the problem statement. Most founders suck at this. I think for you guys coming in from a technical perspective, you might actually be able to bring a really interesting lens to look at what are the consequences or these quantifiable implications of the problems. Craig and I over the years have seen that these come into three different unique flavor types. The first is that people are spending a lot of time trying to solve the problem or going through the problem, they're throwing a lot of money at it, and or it takes a lot of effort. So in order to learn about those implications, because our customers are really bad at identifying the actual true implications, you might have heard the adage of something like, you're trying to sell me $100 solution for a $50 problem. And so what we want to do with these early companies or these early customers is try to find out how to get them thinking that the problem is actually worth more money to solve. So we come up with some questions to help that you can ask either current customers, potential customers, or through your discovery process. Things like how much time does it cost you or your team each week or month? What is the financial impact on delays every quarter? How much manual effort does it take to solve a problem? How many resources are you throwing at this? And things like what's the effect on your customer satisfaction and retention. And I think Julian in the chat was saying, hey, your customer retention isn't very good. So for me, that would be a question I would ask you if you're a potential customer, but you could also go back to your customers and find out, hey, why aren't you sticking around? What's going on for you? So when we talk about implications and you're going through this process yourself, what we'd like you to do is think about what are these consequences and how can you actually quantify them by running some tests to find out how much time, effort, and money people are actually spending in these. A really awesome resource for you to learn about how to go through this process of questioning comes from a sales book called Spin Selling written by Neil Rackham. He gave us permission to share chapter four of his book that gives you scripts and walks you through this whole way of how you can actually dig into these questions for folks. So Brandy, can I just hover here for a second? Just go back. So I've been in sales since I was 26 years old, I'm now 63, 37 years I've been doing this. This, as far as I'm concerned, if you have not read these 31 pages, it is the best 31 pages that you will ever learn about sales. How do you help people understand the problem is bigger than what they think it is, so now they're more motivated to become your customer? Sorry, Brandy. It can also work internally if you're trying to talk to a business unit that doesn't understand the technological problem that you're trying to solve. so the last part that i'll talk about around the problem statement before i hand it off to craig is talking about the emotional impact so there's this kind of phrase out there that says people will make decisions from their heart then their mind and then that's when they pull out their wallet so what we've done in the first part of this problem statement is really look at you know how do we rationalize it but people make decisions based on emotion whether they want to say that they do or not. And the way that we want you to think about this is trying to find out which emotions are going to move people away and cause some of those triggers so that they're actually motivated to change. What we know about emotions is if people are feeling good about something, they're not going to change what they're doing. What we want to do is try to focus on these ICPs or these segments of people that look like this. And we know that they would describe their experience in these kinds of categories. Things that cause fear, anger, or sadness often are the triggers that cause people to change. You might have heard about the jobs to be done framework, and we look at this as a way to apply these emotions to think about how does this problem solve all of these different aspects. We're typically really good at looking functional sides. These are the activities that the product or service does, but we also know that there's emotional side. So what does this do emotionally for your customers? And it also saw some of these social components. And this is where Craig, when he talked about ripes, if we look at image, what's our reputation as a company look like? How are you helping validate some of those components for them? If you want to learn about this process, we interviewed Tony Olwek, who worked with Clayton Christensen on the Jobs to Be Done framework about his book on how you can go through some different consulting processes to understand your customer's motivations. And how do you do the last part of the statement, Craig? Yeah, so this is the thing that I find especially technical founders or first-time founders all say, we have no competition! You always have competition. Competition is all the different ways that somebody can solve the same problem. So one of the things we want you to think about is to ask the question, what is our competition not who are our competitors and one of the examples we use is southwest airlines so when southwest airlines first came out it only flew between three cities dallas austin and houston so when southwest airlines first came out what do you think it viewed as its competition you can put it in the chat or you can unmute yourself but if you only fly between dallas austin and houston what do you compete against you drive exactly right cars buses like all the other ways that people can get from point a to point b so when you think about this we want you to think about your competition it comes in three flavors the first one is people that do something similar to you might not be exactly the same that's why it says nearest direct competitor then there is what is sometimes described as the incumbent what is the most commonly used way of solving the problem and then what's the most expensive way that people are solving this problem so what you want to try and figure out is how do you differentiate from the competition not just from direct competitors this is often what is called a blue ocean strategy and i'll share with you in a minute or two a qr code where you can go learn about blue ocean strategies if you don't already know about them one of our favorite examples is a lady named julie angus she is in victoria she makes this ocean going drone she's trying to find a way to position herself against the competition she was actually involved in a pitch competition the national angel capital organization's pitch competition and first prize is a hundred thousand dollars and she had two minutes to pitch and in those two minutes one of the things she focused on was the competition and she recognized that people solved the same problem by putting sensors on all these navigation boys she also realized the governments were spending upwards of eighteen thousand dollars an hour to take a research ship fill it full of food fuel people and equipment she used this slide to help the judges and investors realize she's not going to try and take money or business away from someone who's really similar she's going to try and find a way to be different which is against the people that are most commonly used or a lot less expensive for the most expensive solution so when you get a chance to do this at home we want you to think about not just direct competitors but we want you to think about what other ways do people solve the problem when microsoft money and intuit came out with uh quicken the competition was a pencil and a piece of paper or a tax form and then just think what about the people that have lots of money how would they solve this problem so the resource that we have that will help you understand this we believe the best is a nine-page harvard business review article that is the equivalent of 255 pages from a book that hopefully will help you understand what do you really compete against You're not competing against someone who does the exact same thing. You're competing all the different ways that people solve the same problem. So Craig talks about spin selling being his favorite resource. Blue Ocean Strategy is mine. And I think what I like about it is it helps you prevent trying to out-compete the person that's closest to you so that it's easier to get those initial customers. So if you're feeling like your messaging and your marketing isn't working, it might be your positioning and trying to focus on the way that you compete. So what we did is we covered the entire problem statement where we helped you look at what are the problems and what are those early indicators that people are going to be willing to switch away from what they have. And you can use ways to talk about what the consequences are of the problem so people understand the real implications and getting to the emotions that they're actually willing to change and helping them see that the way they solve the problem today is not as good as it could be. So I really like that moving from pencil and paper over to a digital solution or automations that Craig gave earlier. So what we want to do is focus on how do we actually figure out who the right people are to talk to in this section. And there's a whole bunch of different people. There was a question earlier about how do I educate? And this is a section where I'm going to tell you if you have to educate your customers when you're coming, I'm going to tell you to make a pivot today because what we want to do is find people that are aware they have a problem. And if we have to educate, it means that they don't know they have a problem and it takes way too long. So we learned this from something called the technology adoption curve. And we'll talk a little bit about what the chasm is. So we want to start to focus on selling to this group of innovators. They make up the first two and a half percent of the market. They're the people that pick up the newest technology and are willing to be risky. And I'll talk a little bit about their characteristics. And then we sell into the early adopters. In this segment, a lot of people are talking about it in the startup space, and they make up the 13.5%. Craig's stats at the beginning of the session talking about where most startups fail. That's what's known as the chasm, sometimes called the valley of death. And it takes a lot of effort and work and scaling to actually make the technology worthwhile for the early majority folks. And And then we start to talk about the late majority in the laggard. So Daniel, you talk about Netflix talking about their biggest competitor is sleep. I see this as now they're moving into the late majority in the laggard group of people who take afternoon naps and Netflix saying, don't take a nap, watch our TV shows. Now I have to educate you on how to use it. So what we want to do when we're talking to people is look for certain values and our innovators are very action oriented. They are the color red because they like to go fast. Okay. about their image, they're very competitive, they don't care if the technology is perfect, they'll work with you, they just want to have that I was the first person here to do it. And the early adopters follow along really closely, they tend to be friends with them. And they care about being involved. So they're like, I like community, I like you, all of these pieces. And so who you are as a person, the business relationships you build are really important for early adopters. Our recommendation when you're launching a new product or service is ignore everyone else because it's going to be very noisy and hard to get the message across. If you wanna learn about how to actually do these types of sales and positioning, on-demand sales is going to be really good. Sorry, demand side sales is gonna be really good. Bamba Westa did a special session for us at the Innovation Rodeo talking about just that. So we've talked about how you plan out a problem statement to figure out, hey, do I actually think this idea has enough legs? How do we actually go out and test in the market, Craig? Yeah, we need to validate, right? And what we need to validate is we need to validate, hold on one second. We need to validate, should we, before deciding, could we? Should we build this before could we build this? So in all our work, what we've discovered, there are nine key assumptions that everybody has. The first one is our ability assumptions, right? We believe who will become our customer, why they become our customer, and when they will become our customer. We also believe how much people will pay, how often they will buy or use or pay and how long they will stay our customers. We also believe we know what we're going to make, how we're going to make it and how we're actually going to get it done. So what we need to do to figure out how do we validate this? First of all, we need to figure out which assumptions are our riskiest. So what you do is you take those nine assumptions, you put them on this two-by-two matrix, and if you pick up a copy of David Bland's book, this is on page 38, he talks about the things that we have least evidence of are risky, the ones that are most important are risky. And when you look at the different assumptions that are here, which one do you think is the riskiest assumption which of these assumptions is the riskiest that we need to go test validate or invalidate first any guesses desirability which which desirability okay which one there's three of them which one's the riskiest assumption your who yeah exactly top right hand corner we don't understand who we don't know how much they're going to pay. These are generally our two riskiest assumptions. So what we want to do is we want to find a way to map this out. So this QR code will take you to, Brandy, can you copy and paste this one, do you think? Yeah. So Brandy's going to put this one in the chat. So if you want to do this from your computer, you can go here. It'll give you some instructions and a template so you can then do the exact same thing for yourself. What we're trying to do is we're trying to navigate away from people's opinions what we're trying to find a way is we're trying to find a way to get the strong evidence instead of just weak evidence and when we start this process of selecting experiments because the risk is so high we're trying to find a way to drive it down but because the risk is so high the first experiments we run we want to make sure that the cheapest experiments we can actually run what can we do without spending a whole lot of money to validate or invalidate our assumptions and if you look if you get a copy of the book on pages 98 and 99 David actually lists the sequence of experiments you can run but what you'll notice across the top is all of them start by doing interviews all we want to do is find people that have the problem ask them questions validate the problem that they have and how they're solving it today even on the business to consumer world it's almost exactly the saying, customer interviews. The only thing that is different is having to use something called it or using something called a day in the life experiment. And Brandy is brilliant at this day in the life. Brandy, do you want to share how you help people do the day in the life? Absolutely. So when we talk a day in the life, this is really sitting down and trying to put yourselves in the shoes of your customers. And what I like about this practice is if you have complicated stakeholders or multiple customer types this is a really good way to get insights across the different layers in an organization so that you can understand all the different need sets and create something that solves problems for everyone and the way that it works is you sit down with your customer your stakeholder you're going to draw a sideways t chart like this and have them describe their activities over a day in their life so this could be over a quarter over a month maybe over a project kickoff or initiation whatever it is where you really want to understand what are they actually going through what's the customer journey through this process and as they talk they're going to tie positive emotions and negative emotions to these activities to tell if they like it or not so positive emotions might look like this and your negative emotions might have words that are explained like this and i'll give you an example of how this could work so uh i like to use my own morning story where i like to sleep probably like most of you and then as soon as my alarm goes off it's like oh crap it's five o'clock in the morning i gotta get up i was up late i'm not super happy about it but what happens is when my alarm goes off my five-year-old australian shepherd gets a signal and he goes it's cuddle time so he comes and hangs out with me while i hit snooze on my phone for nine minutes which really boosts me making me feel really nice and snuggie then i have to go to my closet and figure out what to wear and craig and i were talking about how windy it is in lethbridge was kind of a pain because it can be hot and cold all over the place and it's not the best experience then i go and take my dog for a walk which usually brings up some dopamine for me and then i look at my work phone and all the emails i came in since i quit working so i make myself a cup of coffee to feel like a human again i get in my car to drive to work and sit through traffic and i'm five minutes early for my first client meeting and i go to go in my purse to pull out my work phone so I can log in to my Microsoft Office account and I left my phone at home. So if you're, Greg's laughing, he's like, that's happened to me before, Braddy. So if you were trying to solve the clothing problem and build an AI tool that helps people go through their closets, whatever, maybe that's an okay problem. But if you had something that looked like this across several people, you'd learn really quickly that it's not the most painful problem. The most painful problem is the fact that I can't access my 2FA at work and now I have a lot more implications. So I'm not worried about solving my clothes, I'm worried about solving my access to my computer. The way that we can look at mapping this out is by going through experiment sequences. So Craig kind of gave you the prototype piece that David recommends. We have two of our favorite ways to get you started. So when we talk about a B2C model, we still love the interviews and Craig's going to go through an interview template for you. And then we like to suggest doing online ads where you can do some A-B testing with messaging, all these different things. And what you'll notice in David's book is that these different aspects on the bottom tell you how much it costs, how long it takes to run, and the weight of the evidence. And so when you're doing your assumption mapping, you can tie these experiments to your assumptions as you're figuring out how that works to keep that table up to date. Our favorite B2B process is using a day in the life across several different stakeholders in an organization. And then instead of building a technology right away, using something called a concierge service where you really build a service out. The example that I talk about a lot is Airbnb. When they first started, they didn't build technology. They were actually doing rentals with friends in their own places and renting out their room so they can see the experience of being a host. So when we talk about this, it's really important to get out of the building. You might have heard this before. There's a book called The Mom Test. What I want you to know is we don't want to be asking these questions with people in our network, our friends and family, or our mom, because they're always going to tell us, you're brilliant, you're beautiful, this idea is great, it's going to change the world. We want to find complete strangers that are going to be honest with us. Especially with our technical founders, we know that this is very uncomfortable for you because you're more comfortable in front of a computer. So we know this is pushing you out of your comfort zone, but this is where the magic happens. The first time you do an interview, it's probably going to feel like this. And one of my favorite Founder Friday interviews was with Kristen Hadid, who wrote a book about her absolute complete failure when she started her first business. So if you need some motivation of getting through that i highly recommend giving that a listen oh go ahead greg yeah so um it's funny because what happens is most of us will do something enough to suck at it but we won't do it enough to actually be good at it so when it comes to these interviews you know if you can get past the first 10 it gets a whole lot easier and now all of a sudden you feel like this so it's really important when we start this experimentation process that we find a way to avoid something called confirmation bias it's like when we buy a new car we see all over the road the hard part is that when we start doing this validation work we see all the things that confirm what we already believe and we need to find a way to get around that so one of the things that's highly recommended is to build yourself on a hypothesis statement before you leave i'm going to interview 30 people write down a statement how many people of what type will do what within what time frame for what reasons and you want to write something like this because if you go away and interview 27 people which is the statistically relevant number you need if you go away and you get five people that said oh yeah i think your idea is great you're like look five people said this but if you wrote down when you started i believe i can find 10 and if you can't find 10 you realize maybe i need to rethink this but it's really important to understand that you don't want to do surveys surveys suck you've got to go away and find a way to talk to total strangers who have the problem that you solve and you need to ask them very specific questions because the challenge is if you ask the wrong questions you're not going to get very far so you want to understand the challenge with asking questions is this thing called a say-do gap people will say one thing you're going to build it, they'll do something completely different. So if you want to avoid this say-do gap, you need to have really good questions for part of your interviewing validation process. Questions that you don't want to use are all the questions about the future. When David talks about weak evidence, this is an example of weak evidence. What you want to do, you want to ask questions about the past. So the questions that Brandy and myself, Wendy and Ashmorey have come up with go like this right so first of all you're only going to talk to people that actually have the problem so you're gonna ask them have you ever had this problem yes great can I take a few minutes and ask a few really quick questions first question is when did you start to have the problem what was the event that made you unhappy enough you thought about changing when you went to look for a solution what was the outcome you were trying to get to what were all the different things, different ways you looked at solving the problem. Which one did you choose? What made you choose that way of solving the problem? How much do they spend on solving that problem? Time, money, effort, energy, resources. And then asking them a question on a scale of one to 10, how happy are you with what you use today? And if they give you something lower than a seven then these are the folks you want to try and find a way to get more of remember we're looking for people that are unhappy enough they're actually going to switch and then once you do this you want to understand do they fit within your ideal client profile with those questions that you ask those three questions right so in the case of what we talked about today moms with one child that had that child when they're over the age of 35 and when you get a number of people that answer the questions the way that you want the last question always for us is where can i find more people just like you these are the initial questions but asking questions can be really hard and there's an art to asking really good questions that brandy's going to share with you once you unmute yourself there we go perfect thank you i muted myself because i'm typing and i always get comments that the typing makes loud noises so we want to give you some frameworks to help you actually just ask questions better across everything you do whether it's customers your internal teams or even your friends and family and the first way that we approach asking really good questions if you want to learn more from someone because you don't think answered the question detailed enough is just repeat the last sentence they said with a little bit of an inflection on the end like i'm on mute and this was like yeah you're muted all these things and all i did was just say it differently the next thing we do is second order questions so if there is something that you need to follow up on with them you can ask hey like how did that make you feel i want to dig deeper we also look at something called this six second pause so if you want more details after someone answers just wait six seconds and even with me when i was muted everyone was like you're on mute you're on mute because we want to fill the silence and fix things right craig maybe i should do that every time this is a really good example it is good we learn by doing stuff right the most important thing i want you to remember from this and craig talks about this is always ask past tense questions i have seen so many people build products and they ask people would you buy this from me if i built it and everybody says yes because they're canadian and they're nice and then you launch it and nobody pays you for it you're like you all told me pay me we also like open-ended questions where people will be able to actually give you detailed responses instead of one word answers like yes or no and don't ask why questions try to reframe it and the what or how question so that people don't get defensive oftentimes what happens in our personal lives, as our husbands, our wives, our spouses, our friends, our family, like, why did you wear that shirt today? You're like, oh man, should I change my shirt? So we want to make sure that we're asking nice questions that invite people to share more. Craig talks about the innovation framework. I've got a little bit of a summary for you here. Remember, we want to look at desirability, then viability, and then feasibility. So holding back that prototyping as much as we can until we can prove out the evidence of those things, because if nobody wants to buy it why would you make it when we think about this framework we've got a couple things to do so if you find out that it's not desirable or viable then we probably want to pause and think is this worth pursuing we can think about pivots when we know that if we go you know what it's going to cost us more money to actually get a customer than we'll make over the time of them being our customer we probably need to pivot so you can use a pivot table like what craig shared and we know that we can go forward when all of those work and we talk about slingshotting and slowing down and going backwards so what i will say is if you have built a prototype and you haven't tested desirability or viability yet it's okay we need to just go backwards it's painful i've seen this nobody ever wants to go back and do the interviews after they've got something built but i promise you it's going to help you move forward so that you actually know if persisting is worth it. The next step for you after this is to look at how you can be viable. So Craig and I have built a three-year financial projection template that you can plug in some numbers, and it will automatically generate a whole bunch of stuff for you so you can find out, hmm, am I actually going to make enough money at this? What else have we got from Craig? Yeah, so if some folks are like, hey, I've already done a lot of this. I need to find a way to be able to do a better job selling. Brandon and I are very fortunate. We've spent some time with some really cool sales folks. They've done sessions for us. This QR code will take you to the place where you can listen to those recordings. If you want to download the Traction Canvas, we also have a recording. So if you want to go back and listen to it later, you can then go back and do exactly that. So summary. So the most important thing when you get started, make sure you love the problem. Don't be married to your solution. What you're trying to do is displace the competition. You're not trying to find a way to displace people to do the exact same thing. You're trying to find a way that they do this in a completely different way. And what we want to do is we want to focus on people that are motivated because something's made the problem now more important. Brandy, do you want to bring it home? Sure thing. So we also want to make sure that we're avoiding our confirmation bias and digging into places where our blind spots might be so that we know where not to go and maybe find some cool new places that we could be going that we didn't know about before. when we talk about david's stuff we often talk about how do we validate and what i'd really like you to do is think about how do you invalidate and play the devil's advocate can you actually look for the things that prove this wouldn't work and that helps you deter your confirmation bias so that's what we've got for you guys today but before we let you go we have one question for you and we'd love for you guys to put some stuff in the chat and we get three people to unmute and share with the group what's one thing that is going to actually be a takeaway from the session for you today and then i think pete was asking about a qr code we have a qr code that we'll show in a second pete that we have the beginning and it's for all the slides the link in the chat again for us already so cool so who wants to volunteer what was the biggest thing you took away from today's session i volunteer uh there were about 10 different things that i'm going to take away from this and i need to look at the slides again but the one thing that hit me hard by looking at our business and our models and how we want to build our stuff is who do you compete against the question who do you compete against is something that really hit me hard because i am a solution-oriented person i just want to bring up solutions even if i don't know what the problem is and then even if i have the solutions and who is going to be interested in it? What other problem, what other, yeah. What's the thing I'm solving for them and who else solved it before and how? And so, yeah, sorry, I'm rambling now, but the question itself is going to, you know, I'm gonna take a walk now and think about it. Perfect. Looking in the chat, we've got, actually talk to people that send direct messages, don't do polls. That's my favorite learning all the time someone learns not to do a survey I'm so happy then maybe we'll pick on Daniel because I know he's seen us a few times uh I want to thank you first this is amazing like I was a little bit lucky like my wife was in real estate so I had to get familiar that it was enough not enough to build her website that she shows up first on google until she gets business from that it wouldn't work. And so what I love about Session today, that you shared what I've learned through her journey by shadowing her, that people don't know what they don't know. So it is not technical talk, but you will not succeed unless you learn what was shared today. Another thing that I loved about Session today, I don't know when I was frantically taking so many URLs from the call, uh you didn't sell any new system you pinpoint most important parts from the noise of information and created the mosaic of people uh that that have to learn so so these are my my takeaways i do have a question that is partially related because i've been here like failed some startups mine and others uh and and so it's not like when you look at other activities in life like there so many great cooks but only few will be successful restaurant owners so so there is one thing you know knowing what we didn't know but there is a mind shift that i'm struggling to do with myself to become somebody else or partner with people that complement my skills so what are these mind shifts that we need to go through to make succeed assuming we found a good niche so craig and i talked about the three c's i don't know if that's where you're going craig but we're thinking about are you curious are you coachable and are you committed and i think if you have those three mindsets nailed down everything else follows along but i don't know craig if you've got a different angle on that one well i think you're right the curious and coachable piece is really around you know do i want to be right like people i hear this all the time i know i know i know you don't know you believe when you say i know you sound uncoachable when you say i believe you create an opportunity for someone to say well that's great but my experience is different so yeah being willing to be wrong making the decision do i want to be rich successful or do i want to be right because as someone i think wrote in a different book you can't be king and uh be right at the same time but that's assuming i want to be solopreneur doing everything there is not a dilemma like we have natural abilities we are good in something we're not good in something so there is opportunity like to partner with other people how do you decide how to complement your skills who to partner with there is definition of team together everybody achieves more but making a team uh like pack of wolves hunting together is is different ball game do we talk about the hustle the hipster and the hack brandy yeah we could um maybe you do that and i'll find my co-founder effect book yeah so within any organization there are three different kinds of requirements and sometimes you can wear more than one hat so there's the hustler the guy or gal who's at the front who's doing all the work to try and create interest in what you do the hipster is someone who generally makes something look good right and the hack is the person who actually makes it all work the question is can you do all three and the question is can you do all three at the same time and if you're going to get rid of something what's the thing that you can get rid of that someone's going to be way better and way more passionate than you will be because it takes all three to be successful right so maybe folks here like i am a huge extrovert i am a hustler like if you're the hipster of the hack and you're looking for someone who's a hustler i'm the kind of guy or gal you want to find a way to go and pick out don't ask me to make something look good okay don't ask me to make it actually work but get me to go create interest that's easy for me right oh so you're practically inviting people to partner with you if they are going to say craig be careful there's a whole bunch of people asking you to be their hustler find people just like me right that's the that's the thing and where do you find folks like me you find their places like this networking events the network is one of the best ways to go find the guy higher gal that you want to have to complement what you do today. The other resource that I'll share if you're looking for co founders or have a co founder is a book that was written by Matt Jones. We just had him for Founder Friday in December. He talks about how to navigate the relationships of being a co founder because it can be very complicated. He actually talks about sometimes the discrepancies between CEOs and CTOs in here, which I found very interesting. Alan's got a question. How do you find people to interview? So something you can do, hang out. So in Calgary, the C train stations are places where people have some time, right? You interview enough until you finally get to somebody and say, where can I find more people just like you? You can find people just like them. One of the examples we give, and I'm watching time. One of the examples we give is a guy who makes equipment that helps hockey gear drive faster. And he realized it was moms that have teenagers that play hockey three times a week or more. And the question always was, Where do I find more moms just like you? And of course, his assumption was all the hockey games. Well, it turns out they're called hockey dads and soccer moms for a reason. So the moms don't go to all the games, but in one of the conversations Brandon and I've had like this, there was a mom who had a teenager that played hockey three times a week or more. She's like, right, I don't go to all the games, but I sure go to all the tournaments. And we've got someone who's just identified as a Zoom user with their hand up. Francis yeah I don't know how to change the name it didn't let me this time but um yeah I was just gonna say like with the last um like zoom meeting with you guys I had a coffee meeting with somebody and um I think it validated the point that you know you'll meet somebody there that you know shares the same problem as you and you know you can connect with them it's good yeah I like that Francis the worst thing you can do is try and they say no. The second part to Alan's question that I just want to cover really quick, and then I'll get to your question, Nick, around and even just maybe highlight your takeaway. So he's like, how do I know? Like, I know 30 people is the right thing to interview, but then how do I know if it's time to move into an MVP? And so this is the value of that hypothesis. And Craig and I are of the opinion, in the example you give, if only eight people out of 30, if you've got a really focused icp said that they were interested that means that there's like 22 people that said this isn't a good idea and only eight that said it is so our guess would be look at a different problem look at a different icp try something different so that you can get at least 20 maybe 18 people out of that group that says yes i'm interested so amazing i could stay longer i don't know about others so keep going i thought there may be a question in the chat there daniel but i think it's just some takeaways educating your customers if you have to pivot i love that you have that nick it's a big thing and it can kill a lot of startup momentum because you're so excited to get it out there nobody's interested and then mike's just saying i really need to make sure i've got a strong network so craig has taught me the value of linkedin i was on it at 17 so that i could get scholarships and now it's like so important for business growth even across different careers and different pieces so we have adam that we talked about we'll actually share on his linkedin with the founders he works with to help him find or help them find people to interview so sometimes if you have people in your network that would be willing to do that you might find folks that way so swita well maybe get you to unmute or do you want to explain a little bit more about what you mean by how how to get paid while you're doing that i think my long term for you would be as you're doing your discovery typically it's not paid but i'm seeing people are undervaluing my services i had this happen all the time when i worked with students and i had this student entrepreneur group that was building a marketing company and they kept selling to non-profits and they were running to the same problem their customers were underpaying them and they went brandy we're working our butts off and people have all these really high expectations of us they want us to have websites built and copy and campaigns and they're only paying us two thousand dollars so when we talk about customer segments what i would maybe suggest for you is to start to look at people that actually have money so the undervaluing of your services might be that you're talking to customers that don't have the affordability there and they need to really like look at serving customers that are maybe a little bit further up or further along their process that might have more money i'm just putting the slide link in again because someone was asking for it thank you thank you so let's keep chatting i'll share the screen with will of names because money wants to give a free digital product we are not as generous and you are sending hundreds print books around and i still have them from the last couple events so thank you for that uh keep going uh until i so money raffle wow one two three four five only six people did it good odds let me share share you know it's funny as you were talking before i i can you see my screen yeah so so you were talking about empathy that's the first thing this is my process like it's not ten commandments it's five commandments how i do consulting services and and this is effectively double diamond methodology from stanford uh university that google is practicing now so that resonated another you asked me takeaway empathy i did not know that's related to business growth now uh is there anybody else who did not do the survey who wants the name in here okay why not you give us so much maybe you get lucky too here and it doesn't have to be a ebook it could be any of the courses they have uh or i think you have live books as well anybody else i don't see the chat any other name no okay francis yeah francis francis francis okay so good luck to you oh let's spin wow zaran i didn't do anything good luck so the fact that i know you it was accidental choose any of the products i'll share with you 100 coupon off and then you go to your mining dashboards and put anything you want to learn and i'm stopping sharing so so that that's for me like uh any other closing thoughts uh i hope to see you guys again at this meetup and is it from the founder of fridays or alberta innovates you go on the two names in the college you teach where do you question something yeah so founder Superfridays.ca is where people can participate in these free Zoom calls where we buy 100 copies of an author's book. The Zoom call is free. And if you participate somewhere around the 45-minute mark, we'll share a link. And if you live in Canada and give us your mailing address, we'll ship a free copy of the book anywhere across the country. The next author is this lady here, Move Fast, Break Shed, Burnout. And it's really all about how do you find people just like yourself, like in this community, that you can find a way to collaborate with so you don't burn out. So Brandy and I do a lot of stuff. And I'm reading the introduction to the book, and I'm like, it's me and Brandy. And if you don't have those folks that you can find a way to connect with, collaborate, or commiserate with when things just don't go your way, life gets a whole lot harder. So this is another one of those build your network with like-minded people. thank you so much john do you have any other closing thoughts that was like a whole course in an hour and a half there's lots of great information i was scribbling some notes but i also look forward to reviewing some of the slides there from the the links and that no excellent guys thank you and good luck everybody starting your own businesses like i know you feel empowered but having ai to do your coding isn't enough so let's keep running good luck everybody stay healthy have a great weekend happy friday thank Thank you. See you. Thank you so much. Bye. Thank you.

As AI handles more implementation, the critical skill shifts from HOW to WHAT and WHY. That's why I invited #startup mentors Brandy Old and Craig Elias (who've coached hundreds of entrepreneurs since 2021) to help technical builders figure out if an idea is worth pursuing before spending time and money building the wrong thing. Dive into this 80-minute Masterclass in Market Validation and learn to evaluate if your idea will fly. This session helps you understand an idea's "desirability" so you avoid building something nobody wants.

KEY RESOURCES MENTIONED:
- Testing Business Ideas – David Bland
- SPIN Selling (Chapter 4) – Neil Rackham
- Founded – Mike Raab
- The Mom Test – Rob Fitzpatrick
- Blue Ocean Strategy (HBR Article)
- Move Fast, Break Sh!t, Burn Out (Founder Fridays feature)

FRAMEWORKS & TOOLS:
- Problem Statement Template – A formula to articulate the pain you solve
- ICP Bifurcation – Narrow your market to the top 2.5% (Innovators)
- Problem Bingo – 6 characteristics of a problem worth solving
- RIPES Framework – How customers justify purchases
- Say-Do Gap – Why you must ask past-tense questions in interviews
- Day in the Life – A customer discovery exercise for hidden friction
- Hustler / Hipster / Hacker – The 3 co-founder roles (and why technical founders need their complement)

LINKS:
- Founder Fridays: https://helpastartupout.com/fridays/
- Alberta Innovates: https://albertainnovates.ca
- Traction Canvas: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/gd06gbr2hbb60pavhgk0e/Traction-Canvas-Notes-Page-Fillable-Oct-16-2025.pdf?e=1
- Lean Canvas: https://leanstack.com
- Serverless Toronto Meetup: https://www.meetup.com/serverless-toronto/

#MarketValidation #TechnicalFounder #FounderFridays #Cofounder #ServerlessTO