Do you know your client?

Once I wrote "business model ≠ charging mode", there are a lot of people leave a message, the letter said to follow the article interested, and since this MVP has reached a certain harsh fit, then obviously I will continue to cover. So in this article, let's start by deconstructing the "business model" thing, and then let's talk about how to find it.

First of all, it should be the most important part, that is, we have to make clear "who is the customer" problem.

Who is the customer?

Do not know who the customer is, it can be said that this is the first entrepreneur will make the most common mistakes, because most people are often from their own want to cover the product, function, but not from the customer wants what departure. However, entrepreneurship is in the market, not just technology, in selling the product value, not the patent, so you have to clearly know who the customer is, and why customers pay for the services you provide.

Describe your client

You must have a description of the customer profile. You don't need to be precise at first, because you can adjust after entering the market, but you must start with this step. The methods described include their age, sex, marital status, areas of residence, income and water standards, interests, hobbies, habits, other commonly used services, etc. (note: The above options are not used for each, nor is it the only option). In the case of Appworks, our customers are "people who want to start a business on the Internet or Mobile Internet, but need help." Take Mamibuy as an example, their customers are "don't know to buy those infant and child supplies of the novice parents." Take 5945 as an example, it is "home decoration problems, but do not know where to find a teacher's consumers."

List customer issues in detail

Next, you must list the customer's "possible problems", then take Appworks as an example: "Two or three individuals outside the venture, very lonely", "no effective collection of information pipeline", "encounter problems no one can ask", "Think about partners no one", "to find a VC do not know how to communicate", " Want to advertise in the media do not know how to cut, "not familiar with financial planning", "lack of operational, management knowledge" ... And so on. There may be dozens of or hundreds of of these problems, and you have to list all the possibilities.

Identify and clarify important issues

Then you start talking to people who meet the "customer profile" and confirm that every "customer problem" exists. In the process, you will delete many problems that do not exist, and will add a lot of their real problems. You should talk to at least 3-5 people, preferably with 20-30 people. When you're done, you'll have a very preliminary, Scaled-down version of the list of issues. Then you can do a bigger "survey" of what's going on in this shrinking list of issues, and what's not really important. Remember, there must be a "customer description" problem in the questionnaire, which is to confirm that respondents are your target group. In addition, the "willing to pay cost" survey for each issue (which is somewhat paradoxical and must be asked around) is a bottom-up of market size.

Survey Market

When you go through the steps above, you should ideally have a list of "key issues" (if not, you'll have to ham back to the interview steps or choose another guest group). Then you need to start doing some top-down market scale research. Take a look at the market performance of a product similar to the one you are about to replace, what might be competing, whether the market is big enough, the upstream and downstream relationships will be difficult to cut, and so on. Of course, for most industrial blocks, this information is often very bad, so that the big guys to smell the give up, otherwise it will not be our business. So do not be frightened by the result of this step, as long as the industrial industry is obviously inaccessible, otherwise the survey data should be just a reference point.

By completing these steps, you have an initial idea of what your customers look like, what problems they have and the size of their market. Remember, this information is not fixed from now on, the spirit of Business Model Canvas is that when you find new information at any time, you have to update it into your business model. So this is just a v0.1 version, the next entrepreneurial process, you will always update your Business Model.