We started working on our business idea with the only purpose of making money. It seemed obvious, like the natural thing to do, but in the end we wasted a lot of effort building a product no one needed. Since then we have focused on uncovering the problem we are helping our customers to solve as the first step of our startup.

My brother Diego and I had already spent some good twelve weeks formulating wireframes and estimating costs for a digital marketing tool when the awful truth hit us: customers didn't really need what we were building. The realisation came from early interviews with prospect clients. Over and over the results showed that, although some of them might be interested on our product, it was perceived as a bit of an unnecessary luxury. It made us discover that if we wanted to make something good, we would have to do a more diligent work on understanding our clients’ problems.

Nice idea, but does anybody really need this?

All we know is that we don’t know

And so we put ourselves to the task. We decided to continue interviewing customers, but this time with a twist. Diego converted one of the tools he developed as a strategic consultant into something that could help us learn more from our clients, basically an interactive exercise to help businesses visualise how good they are performing online and what areas need attention. He calls it a “Digital Diagnosis”. The idea was to offer prospects a free digital diagnosis in exchange for an interview.

The results were great, not only clients were more open to answer our questions but also there was a lot of information we could gather from the digital diagnosis itself. It was scary to find out how little we knew about our clients; every revision of the interview notes were like revelations to us. We kept popping ideas to solve the new perceived problems, but this time we knew it was better to wait.

The MVP — And our lives changed

In the process of looking for ways to understand our customers, we stumbled upon the “Lean Startup” method from Eric Ries. One of the core components of his methodology relies on learning the most with the minimum effort, so you get to understand your clients before spending a fortune building a product they don’t need. To do this, he proposes an iterative approach to a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), which roughly consists on the following:

List out the hypotheses you have about your client,

Create a test or experiment that would validate those hypothesis, and

Put that test in practice in real life.

It’s iterative because once we review our hypotheses, we would formulate new ones and create a new test to validate them. It was exactly what we were looking for: a method for discovery. We didn't realise back then that the digital diagnosis was in fact our first MVP.

Soon we also realised that interviews are not enough to understand our clients’ challenges. Finding their problem is not as easy as asking them because they may not know what it is either. Henry Ford famously said “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses”.

We are now on our second MVP. It consists on being the digital partners of a small number of clients. We want to understand as much as we can about their needs and the tools that already exist on the market to help them do what they need most. As simple as it sounds we actually struggled to formulate that MVP, but I will expand more on that on my next post.

What really kept me thinking was the importance of a well identified problem. Having the business idea allowed us to devise what we wanted to do and define a rough a path for us, but building a product without a defined problem is like swimming purposeless in a sea of ideas.

A final thought on purpose

On one of the very first planning sessions we had, my brother and I were discussing what should our business do that would make us feel this is worth it at a personal level. We came up with the following:

We want to create something that has a positive impact on society,

It has to be in the digital industry because that’s what we are passionate about, and

We want to have fun while we do it, and

It has to be profitable eventually and allow us to grow

Six months later we have dismissed possible courses of action on our business simply because they wouldn't meet one of the conditions above. Startups are full of frustrations. Having purpose and passion for what we do can help us keep our motivation on the most difficult moments.

I am documenting the experience of creating my startup in Colombia. It’s full of learnings and mistakes, so I hope that sharing these will help others in the same journey. Follow me on https://medium.com/@camogomez