Hey everyone,
We're back. We - Alex & Max - have set the sails into the unknown - into the unexplored territories of deciding what company to build.
What's this article about?
In this edition, we review the first 3 weeks of our expedition into the depths of product discovery; honest and loaded with learnings.
What does it mean to set sail?
For us, it means:
To embark on a journey
To have a clear goal in mind
To travel as a team
To show great diligence and to make every effort
In the sailors' language, this figure of speech is to be taken literally. Before anyone sails, the sails have to be set by hand. It requires hard work.
Sailing for Lisbon
The preparation is done; we have hoisted the sails and are off to Lisbon.
We decided to move in together and wanted to do it in a different place then Berlin.
Reasons for moving in together in Lisbon:
Leaving Berlin routines behind
Get more sh*t done by living together
Test the Co-Founder relationship
Keeping a logbook
We dubbed the structure of this and future articles “Logbooks”.
The design is as follows:
Introduction - what do we cover in this article?
Builders insight - deep dive into a topic
Update on goals - how did we move forward?
-- Continue reading 4-6 if you’re interested in personal updates --
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?
Why did we choose this structure?
It's a simple structure that makes content creation easier for us.
To present you, the reader, with a simple, digestible format.
Builders insights on Product Discovery
There is no “real definition” of how you run a product discovery, but here is an attempt to define it.
On “Product Discovery”
In short, product discovery is a process that helps product teams (or founders) identify and refine their ideas by deeply understanding the problems of real users or potential customers and then landing on the best way to solve them.
“First, you need to discover whether real users want this product… Second, you need to discover a product solution to this problem that is usable, useful, and feasible.”
- Marty Cagan.
Cagan identifies risks in product management:
Value risk (whether customers will buy it or users will choose to use it)
Usability risk (whether users can figure out how to use it)
Feasibility risk (whether our engineers can build what we need with the time, skills, and technology we have)
Business viability risk (whether this solution also works for the various aspects of our business)
What can we learn from it?
Product Discovery mitigates these risks and ensures we build the right products for users.
It helps your team laser-focus on the problems and needs of users
So after giving you this explanation, here is an attempt to give you raw on how we ran it during our early expedition.
Week 1
Both of us sparred a lot of ideas together back in Berlin.
But we started the discovery process on a blank sheet of paper.
Going into the process, we wanted to use the time to identify if we both could imagine founding a company together - which feels like a marriage for us.
We started to talk about spaces we were passionate about.
Mapping out verticals
We initiated a "Bock" session.
What's a "Bock" session?
We both align on the urge to build something in a space where we could identify spending 10+ years, so a general interest in the topic and passion for solving problems should be given.
We tried to quantify our results by rating it by "Bock" (which, we admit, worked for us but probably isn't the sole determinator of our decision.)
To give some context; for us, “Bock” (kind of the german word for passion) includes thoughts around:
Current and historical industry trends
Growth of industry
Competitiveness of a particular industry /vertical; edge we have in the space
Unique market insights
Cases we found interesting:
Committing to Education Tech
We decided on Education Tech (EdTech) since both of us share a passion for lifelong learning and have strong convictions about the flaws of how current systems work.
Studying at CODE University in Berlin, we know what disruption in education looks like. We were both highly dissatisfied with our regular university experiences before joining CODE in 2020.
We decided we didn't want to build a new university, but the B2B EdTech space seemed interesting.
Especially the bad user experience of old-fashioned enterprise training programs sparked our interest, and we quickly developed assumptions about what was missing in the market.
Week 2
After committing to a space, we mapped out the validation process.
We decided to go with an approach of proactively invalidating ideas.
The idea we started with was a Cohort Based Learning platform for B2B Growth Education - targeting pre-Series A founders as a beachhead market.
What does our process look like?
We were trying to invalidate 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 easily 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.
We'd spent time validating thoughts by studying competitors in the market and by 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 so we could take some steps back on the new learnings and decide which further 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”.
Insights we generated
Do interviews with a minimum of two people
This will enable one person to go deep with questions and another to do excellent note-taking;
as well as calling one another out for biases when asking questions →
Book recommendation: "Mom Test”
Prep your assumptions - Your priority at this point is to learn quickly, and you can't do that without being clear about what questions you need to ask.
Talk to relevant people - We talked to irrelevant people (irrelevant to achieving our goals). Always have a clear agenda and learning goals for a meeting. If you can’t come up with those, you shouldn't take the meeting to respect the time of your interview partner and your own.
Record your calls - We'd do this with Grain for Zoom or Supernormal for G-Meet; you never know when you can re-use content, and we'd re-watch some parts when synthesizing our insights.
Don’t focus on doing interviews only - A call with industry experts isn't the only option to invalidate assumptions.
Example
We thought it would be a great idea to ask participants of Reforge to do calls with us to learn about their platform experiences.
Looking for reviews and asking in relevant slack groups was way more insightful and time-sensitive.
The reforge channel in Lenny's Newsletter was pure gold. This might not be replicable (and a bit of random luck), but our point is: Be creative about finding efficient ways to invalidate your assumptions quickly.
Ditching our first idea
After 14 interviews, we invalidated our idea.
It’s always a mental burden to do it. But it had to be done.
Remember: Most of our ideas (and probably yours as well) are not worthy of being pursued long-term.
Time is your most critical asset and should be of extreme value to you!
Why did we do it?
We focussed on B2B Growth education in cohort-based learning courses for founders of Seed/Series-A (venture-backed) companies.
We learned Growth is a huge problem but:
Founders usually don't want to be experts in the field (they hire someone to do it for them)
Founders of venture-backed companies are highly time-sensitive and would probably not attend live cohort-based lectures
The business model is very ops-heavy
We think there is a huge need for business models (education formats) like these, but not for our target audience.
Cases like Reforge and Junto make sense since they focus on mid-level managers of Scale-Ups & Mid-Market companies. They focus on the goal of helping those people to be excellent at their jobs and manage the messy middle of their careers.
Founders don't have this problem.
Week 3
Ditching our process
We challenged our approach to finding a problem worth solving.
The idea of intentionally de-validating our thoughts is prominent with companies that need to find a case when going a venture-backed route quickly.
Why we think it didn’t make this to continue running this process:
Many peers of us try to dive deep to uncover "ununcovered problems," but this usually doesn't work; if problems are not uncovered in broad markets, they are probably not worth solving - unless you are in fast-growing markets where new issues occur.
Most of them never worked in companies and experienced relevant problems in real life, so it’s hard for them to resonate with their target group.
Young founders like us often have no trust or network they can build upon in their specific niche.
You need conviction to go into a space and potentially commit for 10+ years; how will you ever build confidence in your thinking process if you ditch ideas and also spaces you are learning about quickly?
For us, the idea of committing to a space and to explore that one sincerely made a lot of sense since we want to focus on these things first;
Understanding our problem space deeply
Understanding our buyers deeply
Build leverage with our target group to get trust and have an easier GoToMarket later on (meaning; easier time selling our product)
What process made sense for us?
We committed that we want to build a scalable tech product long-term, but for now want to learn, create an audience/trust & have fun while doing it.
We committed to focussing on the growth problems of fast-growing tech companies.
We do this via a process we called Consulting-Led-Discovery, elaborated further visually with our Figjam-Flywheel.
Being (& getting more) excited about Growth
During our interviews, we saw immense pain in doing proper Growth. We decided that we wanted to stay in the space (ditch EdTech).
Primarily because we were highly exposed and passionate about the topic.
We tried to map the first goals we wanted to reach to kickstart our flywheel.
We defined a "temporary mission"
Creating the most compelling products to help companies grow.
Our current focus:
Close high-quality clients and support them on their most pressing problems, like implementing a new business model or building growth funnels.
Writing highly relevant B2B Growth content on the side to build trust and a highly engaged audience we can build upon (leverage media and network)
Learn about relevant problems
We mapped out a pitch deck to get concise in our thinking process.
Status quo - 25th of October
We closed our first two clients and started working on the first project.
There is still a lot of uncertainty involved in everything we do, but we learn something new daily. This is extremely exciting to us.
What’s our biggest challenge at the moment?
The biggest challenge is prioritization.
We are focusing on finding a big bet. The bet is building a scalable tech product for our target audience.
Simultaneously we’re operating profoundly in the trenches, helping early-stage founders grow their businesses.
We implemented a simple mental framework in every decision we’re taking, to keep our long-term focus.
“Does our next action contribute to our top-line goal - if not, what then?"
Update on life
Weekly structure
We’ve set ourselves a clear working schedule.
Work from Sunday → Friday | Saturday off
Highlights so far
Lisbon - Martim Moniz
We love it here.
It's a very honest neighborhood
We love our cafe - placed 50 meters from us. Fresh soup for 1,60€. Lunch: starter, main course, drink, nibbles, and espresso for less than 10€ per person.
We love Jardim do Torel (the park photo we shared last week. It's our daily after-lunch-walk-spot)
Beach parties at Costa Caparica
Good vibes - everyone wants to have a fabulous time.
Our competitive Sports Olympics
We play for the honor. 9 disciplines. 1 winner. We'll update you on this every week.
Current standings:
Max [2 wins]: Push-up competition (his form is debatable) & basketball (11:9).
Alex [0 wins]: Ouch.
Lowlights
Sun - where are you?
→ We're in Lisbon. It's warm, but the sun has been scarce in the last few weeks. It rains almost every day. What a pity!
No running water for 2 days
→ We had no running water in our apartment (toilet, shower, everything) for 2 days. We had to get a bit creative.
Standing desk & comfy chair to work on
→ A big lever is to have a standing desk and office chairs in our next flat. And a view from the window over the Lisbon countryside wouldn't be bad either ;)
Note: Nevertheless, we are satisfied with the setup.
Tipp: Alex took the big screen with him in his suitcase wrapped in clothes, which worked well.
Builders artifact
Alex fell in love with this track;
Max, with this set.
Smile of the week
Are you online?
We shout "online" every morning and "offline" in the evening. It's the opening and closing of the working day which pumps good energy in the morning and sets the free time for the evening.
Outlook
We’re publishing every week.
We haven’t decided on a topic for next week yet. So, stay excited ;)
Until then, we hope you have a great week ⭐️
Cheers from Lisbon,
Alex & Max