Entrepreneurial Mind

[jushkabalagulan]

BLOG # 2: Market Validation and Customer Empathy Map

Hello there!  In this blog I will discuss to you my learning’s about Market Validation and Customer Empathy Map.

What is MARKET VALIDATION ?

It is the process of determining whether your product is of interest to a given market. Put simply it’s finding potential customers, ensuring there’s enough of them to sustain a business, and getting specific feedback on the product or service you want to offer.

Any entrepreneur you talk to will tell you that it is important to validate your business idea before actually starting a business. Validating your business idea can enable you to reasonably predict whether people will buy your product or service, and whether your business will be profitable.

It has been discussed that Market Validation is one of the most important things you can do for your business – whether you’re a startup or launching a new product. This is also crucial in every business because it helps you identify an existing problem that you would want to address and provide a solution, as well as possible competition. It’s important to validate your idea early in the entrepreneurial process to ensure you don’t waste time and resources creating a product that isn’t a good fit.

EVERY CUSTOMER COUNTS! 

OBSERVATION with curiosity & empathy Solicit information through: 

1. ASK – Open Ended Questions 

2. SEEING/SHADOWING – watching people & processes 

3. ENGAGING – participate in communication activities to uncover new patterns of behavior

VALIDATE BEFORE YOU BUILD!

By going through the process of validating your business idea, you can gain a deeper understanding of how your product does or doesn’t meet your target customers’ pain points. The insights you gain can help you create an offering that not only addresses your market segment’s needs, but earns you your first paying customers.

If you want to create a memorable experience for your customers you need to dig a little deeper into who your customer is and what they want. You need to get into your customers head and consider who they are influenced by, what their pain points are, and their goals and challenges. One of the most popular ways to extrapolate this information and begin improving your customers experience is by using a Customer Empathy Map.

What is CUSTOMER EMPATHY MAP ?

It is a tool used when collecting data about customers to better understand your target customer base. They allow you to visualize customer needs, condense customer data into a clear, simple chart, and help you see what customers want — not what you think they want. 

When we look at empathy from a marketing perspective, we’re talking about putting ourselves into our customers shoes, to be able to understand their needs and wants better. And thus, deliver a product or service that not only meets but exceeds their expectations!  At its core, innovation is about solving someone’s problem. To do it right, you need to understand the person and their job to be done better than they understand it themselves. You need to know their motivations, frustrations and inspirations. This ability to understand your customers needs better than they understand themselves

In this lesson, an empathy map is a simple, easy-to-digest visual that captures knowledge about a user’s behaviors and attitudes. It is a useful tool to helps teams better understand their users.

ELEMENTS & STEPS :

The representation of the user is often a large empty head. Around the user, the sheet is divided into sections or quadrants. Each section is labeled with a category that explores the user’s external, observable world, and internal mindset: what the user is doing, seeing, hearing, thinking, and feeling (including pains and gains).

Step 1: Establish Focus and Goals

Who is the person for the map?

What is the desired outcome?

Step 2: Capture the Outside World

What does she SEE?

What does she DO and SAY?

What does she HEAR?

Step 3: Explore Inside the Mind

What does she THINK and FEEL?

PAINS and GAINS 

Step 4: Summarize and Share

Tips for an Effective Empathy Mapping Session

Don’t get hung up on what goes where.

Only explore what matters about the user’s perceptions related to the project goal.

Adapt the map for your situation and needs.

I learned that by understanding what your customers think, feel, say and do you can develop rich insight which helps you to identify genuine issues, problems or concerns that your customer may have right now. In turn, this equips you to create solutions that are aimed at truly enhancing your customer experience. Empathy mapping digs deep into the mind of your customer, it will help you to clearly identify their evolved wants and needs and theme key positive and negative areas for your specific focus.

[jushkabalagulan]

BLOG # 1 : Entrepreneurial Mind to Opportunity Recognition and Ideation

Good day! For this blog I will share to you my learnings for the Introduction of Entrepreneurial Mind to the Opportunity Recognition lesson.

“Entrepreneurs are the backbone of the economy.” - Joseph Schumpeter

The lesson made a promising impact on our own self. It taught me that Entrepreneurial mind-set is important for business success, it is also vital to understand the current level in each entrepreneurial community by identifying which factors are lacking that needs to be improved as a means to foster the success of entrepreneurs that requires particular set of attitudes, skills and behaviors that anyone can use in order to succeed academically, personally and professionally.

Entrepreneurship nowadays is one of the fastest developing and expanding fields in the modern economic settings. It has been discussed that entrepreneurship also develop into technopreneurship wherein it is recognized as a prolific idea in today's digital era. Being an entrepreneur requires skills and attributes that include initiative, risk-taking, and the ability to see opportunities, gather the resources to take advantage of them, and create value.

For assessment, we are assigned to take individual innovation mind-set report that measures our individual's innovation mind-set, behaviors and innovation capability. That helps us to determine the components of our innovation mind-set. The photo below illustrates my personal innovation mindset level. 

In this lesson I learned that business idea generation and opportunity analysis are the foundation building block for launching a new business or venture. In an idea generation process there are 4 steps that can develop an idea for a product these are: 

1.Identify a point of pain in target market

2. Innovate a product or a service.

3. Test Business Model

4. Explore how to acquire customers.

We are tasked to do a presentation venture proposal that identifies the problem, solution, prospect customers and plans to deliver. This activity  help improve the business's chances of success.

It is also important to have entrepreneurial team formation in which founders establish a team to start a new venture this is important implications for team performance and entrepreneurial success. The success of every business lies on the skills, and determination of all the team members. And one should always motivate its team members to achieve its objectives.

I also learned that Entrepreneurship can be described as a creative and innovative response to the environment. Such responses may take place in any field of social endeavor may be business, agriculture, social work and education etc. There are many areas to explore that recognized opportunity in entrepreneurial world. These includes market place, medical, agriculture, climate change, energy, disaster prevention, transportation and education.

In this lesson you can learn the underlying principles of starting a business, avoid common pitfalls, pitch ideas more effectively, validate your product, develop a solid business model, and set yourself up for success in a field where failure is common.