Applying the Lean Startup to a boring Marketing Plan
Howdy, it’s been a while since I last posted anything on our blog. We were suffering slightly from the old adage of working on urgent and non important ‘stuff’ until I read a great article from Seth Godin to shock me into action.
Behind the scenes I’ve been busy really getting deep into the lean startup processes and particularly thanks to The Startup Owners Manual by Steve Blank.
We’re currently in the process of completing a much overdue Marketing Plan against our Business Model Canvas to start to test some of my assumptions about our target customers.
The challenge we’ve had at GGA for some time is that when we initially started out, I shouted about Web & Mobile, then Mobile Apps, however, as a team our real passion is “Product Development”.
We relish the opportunity to help take a person’s idea to market developing lo-fi prototypes against their assumptions to test with real users and iterate accordingly.
When we shouted about Apps it was too focussed on the technology not the actual goal or vision of the founder. We often ended up having conversations about the wrong things, the latest big idea and a definite lack of reality in terms of funding and investment required to scale.
So we are repositioning GGA as a product development team first and a technical team second. We are using customer discovery to do this against our ‘service’ based offering.
As part of this process and in the spirit of customer development, we are “getting out of the building”. We’re testing our assumptions about what interests our ideal customers, their pains and frustrations by interviewing founders of existing products about their challenges at the very outset of their idea.
If i’m honest, we have no traction in the marketplace and awareness of GGA is zilch. Trying to find business owners, entrepreneurs and innovators in organisations with an idea today (our ideal customer profile) is proving difficult in this early stage, so we’ve jumped 2 steps ahead.
We can easily identify products that have been developed by founders using agencies. As a result, we are embarking upon customer interviews to understand their needs and wants.
This series of blog posts will report back on the process, the lessons and outcomes.
Til next time,
Paul
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