Further up
The peak is in sight. Should we continue climbing or ditch the case?
Hey everyone,
Welcome to the 4th episode of our "Builders Expedition" journey.
What's this week's episode about?
This episode guides you through how we started to validate the new business case.
Additionally, we update you on our progress toward our current objectives and share some pictures and vibes from Max's birthday weekend.
Happy belated Birthday, Max!
Short notes before we dive in
About keeping promises
Last week, we did not publish an article in our new Growth Insight Category on Substack.
We shifted our priorities to spend our time validating our business case.
We are optimizing for speed, and we both wanted to gain momentum on our potential product idea.
Cracking three digits
We cracked the 100-follower milestone. Welcome aboard!
Thanks for lots of positive feedback on the writing style and structure.
Keep in mind
We'd love to hear your thoughts on the format and our updates.
What are you interested in hearing about?
Please challenge us entirely!
Keeping a logbook
We follow the following structure in this weekly journal, dubbed "Logbook":
Introduction
Update on goals - how did we move forward?
Update on life - how are we doing, and what have we done?
Builders artifact - what have we found, and do we want to share with you?
Meme of the week - what brings a smile to our faces?
Update on goals
Progress
Validating a new Case
We are looking into a business case in direct mailing & corporate gifting (B2B case).
Throwback to Episode 1 of a Builders Expedition
We outlined our idea-invalidating process.
We followed that process again.
We tried to invalidate the concrete ideas that we had intentionally in two days.
Why only two days?
The goal is to have an efficient process that will invalidate 90% of the bad ideas within two days because you will have a lot of bad ideas.
Day 1 - Listing Assumptions
We'd start by listing all the assumptions we want to address.
Questions were:
What problem are we solving?
What is the impact of that problem?
Who is impacted by this problem? (audience/persona)
Can we efficiently address those people?
Is there any evidence they're willing to pay for that? How much from current alternatives?
We'd spend the first day googling and validating thoughts by studying market competitors and mapping out critical assumptions.
To validate those, we'd schedule interviews with industry experts.
We took most of them from our existing network & through intros to keep the process as efficient as possible.
Day 2 - Verifying known unknowns and discovering unknown unknowns
The second day is mostly about interacting with knowledgeable people.
We would try to leave some time between each interaction to take some steps back on the new learnings and decide which questions to ask.
The goal was to address the assumptions we listed the previous day and go after our unknown unknowns.
The people we talk to (when talking to the right people) should be able to challenge our thinking easily and hopefully make us feel "stupid."
However, not all phone calls can take place on this day.
"Day 2" stretches over several days for us during this case because we quickly gained conviction in the concept's validity.
Here's what the rest of the process looks like:
Create and refine ICP (Ideal Customer Profile)
Map out the market size - TAM, SAM & SOM in G-Sheets
Map out the business case
Create a basic pitch deck to describe the problem and potential solution as simple as possible in concise words
Further outreach to continuously talk to relevant people and refine the idea
Mapping a potential GTM (Go-to-Market) & set open to-do's on a timeline
Pitch Deck Structure
Intro Slide
Mission
The Problem
Addressing the problems with a solution
Numbers/ Facts to strengthen the case
Product & Functionality
Pricing
This is how we envision the upcoming time (if we pursue the idea)
Learnings
Getting insights out of expert calls
Last week we had 11 calls with sales leaders (Head of, VP, C-Level) of German B2B companies.
The first five calls showed us recurring problems companies encounter.
The following six calls proved our findings - again and again.
We realized (too late!) that we needed to pitch our concrete idea - preferably with visual help: a short pitch or a small fake mockup in f.ex. Figma - so that the other person could envision our solution to challenge it in more detail.
Spending more time thinking for ourselves
During our Sunday reflections session, we talked about our progress last week.
We realized that carefully planned our brainstorming sessions had brought us the furthest in terms of gaining conviction on whether to pursue our ditch our current business case.
In these sessions, we'd focus on answering known unknowns.
For example, in our specific case, how to manage warehousing logistics of physical products.
At a certain point, we decided to contact industry experts because we hit roadblocks - meaning - questions we couldn't answer by plain googling our thinking through them.
Challenges
Focus time
Validating a business case next to managing three client projects can be mentally draining.
The credos for our work are quality and speed, but thoroughness is sometimes missing.
Several times we had to come back to tasks, like writing our blog article, when we could have finished it in an earlier session.
Switching from one task to another without completing the first task kills your productivity.
We've all been there - right in the middle of a focused work session when an urgent task demands our attention; this is one of the most frustrating kinds of multitasking and often the hardest to avoid.
It can take more than 25 minutes to resume a task after being interrupted. That's because distractions actively break down your ability to focus.
We especially noticed last week that we should set clear time blockers for our work.
After our daily check-in, we implemented a focus blocker to focus solely on our product discovery process.
So a non-distraction deep work session until lunch.
Update on Life
Highlights
Celebrating Max's Birthday - it was a blast!
It was a legendary weekend. We laughed a lot, partied, and finally surfed.
Surprisingly great Techno at Lux
Three floors. Directly by the bay. Stylish interior. Awesome crowd.
Overall feedback: Surprisingly cool!
Due to living in Berlin for a long time, we are incredibly spoiled by good Techno.
We have been craving a good techno party for the last few weeks.
Lux on Friday evening was a blessing for our "Gemüt".
Lowlights
Too much time on social media
In our opinion having a solid morning and evening routine to start/end the day is key to being mentally grounded.
Spending too much time on socials, especially during these times of the day, can significantly impact your mental well-being.
You get lost in funny but unnecessary reels. You are looking for the next dopamine hit.
Or you feel anxiety because other people's lives seem more attractive.
We had a long discussion on decreasing our exposure to social media and dating apps.
We deleted everything but Instagram now, which we could not get rid of, and started to only use it on the browser to make the experience far more unenjoyable.
Max recently read a book on the topic to improve on this: The Practice of Groundedness
One major Idea from the book
Happiness seems to be a pursuit that everyone embarks on, but few people can describe what they are chasing or why. Additionally, research shows that our attainment of happiness may be more psychological than we previously thought.
In a 2014 study, researchers from the University College London examined people’s happiness from moment to moment. In lay terms, happiness at any given moment equals reality minus expectations. If your expectations are constantly higher than your reality, you’ll never be content.
Desperately trying to be happy or successful is one of the worst ways to actually be happy or successful.
Builders Artefact
Max
Sometimes you find stuff on the internet that deeply resonates with you.
I feel like many people should think more about what makes them happy and optimize for that.
Alex
Tiny thought from Farnam Streets weekly newsletter
The people with the best defaults are typically the ones with the best environment. Sometimes it's carefully chosen, and sometimes it's just plain luck. Either way, aligning yourself with the right behavior in the right environment is easier.
The way to improve your defaults isn't by willpower but by creating an artificial environment where your desired behavior becomes the default behavior.
Joining groups whose defaults are your desires is an effective way to create an artificial environment. If you want to read more, join a book club. If you're going to run more, join a running club.
Your environment will do a lot of the heavy lifting if you align it with where you want to go.
999999999 is coming to Lisbon
We’re stoked.
Meme of the week/funny encounter of the week
We realized on Friday that three people were going to crash at our place.
It got cozy!
Outlook
We’re publishing every week & are looking forward to seeing you back next Tuesday. :)
Until then, we hope you have a great week ⭐️
Cheers from Lisbon,
Alex & Max