You will create a storyboard that shows the narrative occurring from the time your customer has the problem you propose to solve up to the point where they are using your brilliant solution and enjoying its features and benefits.
Then you will create some form of low-resolution prototype to test in front of potential customers.
I created this presentation on April 9, 2020, as our world continued to deal with the multifaceted impacts of the COVID19 virus. My intention was for students to have a toolbox of options to use to create prototypes of their ideas to help validate those ideas and in turn improve their pitches.
These two examples come by way of Dave Bailey on Medium.com, April 12, 2017
Something where you can type someone’s name and find out a bunch of information about them.’
‘You push a button and in five minutes a Mercedes picks you up and takes you where you want to go.’
Build a prototype with the minimum set of features you need to test your assumptions about solving a customer problem. Why? Because the information you got from customer discovery does not by itself get you to launch full production and sales.
Customer validation is the process of making sure that you’ve understood your customers correctly, and that you’re developing proper corporate and product positioning. It is tightly connected with the Lean Startup concept created by Eric Reis in 2008. The concept consists of business experimentation based on hypotheses, iterative releases of different product versions and learning based on validation. So, as with Lean Startup, customer validation through creating the least resource-consuming product with basic features (MVP) and gathering feedback from real people helps to:
This is exactly the “work smarter, not harder” approach that prevents you from running out of money, failing and having to integrate costly changes into the completed product (Source: producttribe.com).
What I Learned by Prototyping With no Prototyping Experience: It’s going to be ugly… and that’s OK (Kickstarter Tips, 9/20/16)