Trevor ahorra US10000 y 6 meses con el validation board antes de Javelin

about four years ago I started a company called campus bike and I spelled three months building a website and actually sourcing a product from China getting it manufactured getting it shipped all the way to Ames Iowa I spent a lot of time on the website I was a website designer I liked built custom e-commerce software I spent at least a week like finding the background at least a week design the copy in the bottom left and at the end of the day I only sold one scooter out of like ten thousand dollars worth of skiers that I bought and I spent the next three months like driving the scooters all around my college campus like one for the engineering building one from the gym and like put a new sign on every day like call me own I like by now like just trying everything I could to get them to sell more scooters and no matter what I could do in six months I couldn't get to work I called it a day and you know the whole time like I thought I was like one step away from being successful but I just wasn't good enough of the sales man or you know I didn't had a business or like my friends that were working with me weren't committed enough and I was blaming all these other things for my failure but not really realizing the problem was the product in the first place recently I actually tried to restart this business because I really wanted to learn how the methodology could change my approach and using the validation board I actually learned more in one day than I accomplished an entire six months of running the business prior so I started off by defining my customer and prophecies my customer people that are actually in the market for Vespa and so I figured Vespas is the market leader they make eight billion dollars in revenue a year huge company huge success and I was actually living in New York at the time so I've seen them all over the place and the problem that I was trying to solve was that Vespas are gas powered and it's bad for the environment so the scooters are imported from China were actually electric scooters so I defined some of my core assumptions being that my customer care about the environment they care about price because my receiver and they cared about the utility of just getting around with the scooter so decide on my riskiest assumption risky assumption was that my customer care about the environment did the exploration method and we defined our minim success criterion is one in twenty just admitting that they have this problem so what do we do we threw a Craigslist ad and I just took about 20 minutes I took the photo from another carcass ad and put it on my credit ad I changed the price to be significantly lower set peep more people would call us and we posted that online every twenty minutes my phone started ringing and people are calling me and when they wouldn't when I pick up the phone I go hey you know how's it going and I'd say what would it why are you buying a scooter they'd be like oh you know I used to study abroad Italy and like I had a really good time there and I wrote a Vespa there so now I want to get one another God be like my wife has one and she's always riding it and I feel left out so I want to get one and nobody mentioned any conservative arm actually ask people point-blank like I've 20 people I said you know do you care about the environment and know every were just like no they're telling a stranger on the phone no I don't care for the environment one person went so far as to say and I'll never forget this all I want to do is wear a skinny tie and ride a Vespa and hat that threw me for a loop and that I never expected that and it kind of shocked me and and it caused me to realize that hey people are actually interested in the lifestyle element of owning a vest but it has nothing to do with the concern for the environment so you're actually after the call I apologized to people because I obviously was the fake ad I didn't have a Vespa land so it's like hey I'm so sorry for wasting your five minutes but I don't have a Vespa and I was actually running experiments at my business people were just like okay it's cool talk to you later I'm going to call someone else and it was weird cuz I hope I expected people to be angry with me but the truth is that we're so bored every day that was something weird happens to us we actually really enjoy it and we actually are glad that happened to us and that we are thrown out of our normal state of being and so you know people are always cool like I'm gonna tell my wife what happened so that whole experiment talking to 20 people posting the crisis had only took 24 hours and I have 20 people it was a clear signal that no one cared about the environment and I and I spent six months trying to push that business and it couldn't be more clear if I destroy my experiment but after that risky assumption was invalid we didn't stop there we spent the next day trying to figure out something that would really work so we pivoted and we redefined our customer problem and solution hypotheses that we noticed by going around the city that there were scooters parked sort of on the on the avenues and the edges of Manhattan because - to get to that area for work it's actually kind of difficult there's not really good subway artists good bus access so it makes sense that if you work on the edges of Manhattan you would buy a scooter to get to work but we also notice that there were people that lived in areas where they worked in areas where they had difficult commute but they didn't own a Vespa I thought hey that's kind of weird you know why don't they just get a bus would be really really easy for them to get around and to be useful for them the front of customers people like don't you have a Vespa but I have a difficult commute and the problem we defined as they actually didn't have knowledge of the best book because because we talked a lot of people and they said the reason I'm getting a vest because I have a friend that has one so they had that existing knowledge we assume that these people had never made a written one maybe they didn't know if it was safe or not so it could be as obstacles and awareness and we just find the solution as an opportunity to try it so maybe we would spread awareness about best ways get people to to try it out in the new buy one we defined our core assumptions is that people lacked awareness and that people didn't have a friend the head of us because we found that was a common thread so the risk is some sort of the people did not have a friend that had a Vespa we define that the method as exploration again and the success criterion as seven out of ten must fit this description of of having a difficult commute to work and not having a friend that has a Vespa so we started to interview people we went out to people we had a bunch of reasons why best it would be awesome we had a bunch of research about it and we sit them down and talk to them and it was interesting because people are a little bit uncomfortable with the questions that we're asking them they'll kind of sit with her their legs folded like this and they would they're kind of like move away when you're asking questions we go up and say hey do you know that a Vespa could be really good for you for these reasons you know you'd save money in long term because you would have a subway car you save time you know action people ride vessels have a longer lifespan funny enough have you'll be like you know I don't know not interested you're right but I don't know if I'm a scooter person and we hope we honed enough that comet-like not a scooter person well it's interesting we honed in on that and you know at the basic level that experiment was invalidated so we knew that the friend element was not important to to owning a Vespa and that idea of like hey people don't know if they're a scooter person and these other people are really set on wearing skinny ties well there's this whole life's element that we're not looking at and actually that lifestyle it's kind of like a hipster lifestyle to get comfortable with that you know it doesn't fit everybody and to buy a Vespa is at least 3 grand that's a huge investment if it doesn't fit your lifestyle on the upper end it's could be up to 8 grand to buy a Vespa so we kept the same customer type but we pivoted the problem the problem was not that they lacked awareness about basketligan scooters because they had the awareness but they weren't comfortable with the lifestyle of being a hipster wearing a skinny tie so we redefined our solution as a way to rent a scooter for a month if you could rent it for a month and try it out then you'll be able to figure out if you could actually be that hipster wearing the skinny tie so our core assumptions we're that people were lifestyle challenged and if they would pay at least $250 a month because we figured we had to have a business model on this and they paid to a few dollars a month is what we decided the receive sumption we use the pitch method and we said hey we want to get 15 people assigned on this landing page in two hours so this is the landing page that we designed rent this Vespa for two to three dollars a month and if you love it buy it at a discounted price Cummings Buy Now button that will actually just lead to a coming soon page as you can see we used a Vespa it's starting at 4500 right it's pretty expensive but you can rent it for two new few dollars a month it looks sexy and they click through just go to a coming soon button with filter information and it looked real it looked like a real business I was work that was existing now it's only took us a couple hours to do the response that we got this was incredible we had 50 people sign up at 2 hours and not only that they were typing in all caps in the coming soon page you're like I want this right now give me this like here's my phone number call me right away been looking this forever and we had people tweeting at us everything we got ton of positive feedback we even went back to the person who was crossed was sitting cross-legged and was like turning away from us and we're like hey man you know if if you're not sure this fit if you're not sure if your scooter person how about you just try for a month for 250 bucks and return it if it doesn't work for you we have people jumping others the guy jumped out of his seat who's like wow give me this right now this is amazing I never thought of this and so we had the feedback of 50 people sign up in two hours people typing in all caps on the coming soon forum and if people jumping out their seats so we knew that we were on to something we validated this riskiest assumption and this whole process took us two days to do whereas I spent six months working on one product that was clearly not working I wouldn't listen to market feedback and so at the end of the day this was a learning experience for me and continued to do this business but just for me it showed the power of this process I wish you the best of luck using this process for your own product or business idea