Mitchell Harper
Mitchell Harper co-founded Bigcommerce in 2009 and started PeopleSpark in 2015. He is a self-taught entrepreneur with a passion for finding large business-to-business markets that are underserved by existing technology providers and then bringing to market solutions to help those businesses be more successful. He regularly blogs about productivity, leadership and company culture on his personal blog.
Fall in love with the problem, not your ideas or solutions.
The ONLY WAY to validate an idea is to get credit cards (money).
Try and kill your hypothesis, if you can’t, you have validated it.
5 KEY QUESTIONS TO ASK YOURSELF
1. Why would someone NOT buy your product?
2. What are all the reasons why it WOULDN’T work as a product?
3. Why wouldn’t people use it?
4. What could cause this to fail, or not get traction?
5. What are the common objections your future customers might have?
Once you’ve written down these answers, go ahead and rate each of those deal breakers on a score from 1-3 that it’ll kill your product.
* 1 = low probability that it’ll stop the product or idea from working
* 2 = medium probability that it’ll stop the product or idea from working
* 3 = high probability that it’ll stop the product or idea from working
If everything is a 3, it’s probably a bad idea.
If everything is a 1 or 2, you’re on the right track. Move forward!
