Harvard i-lab | Discovering the Right Product for Your Startup with Abby Fichtner

hello everybody so like Neil said I'ma be Fichtner a lot of people know me as hacker chick because I did a hacker chick blog on how to develop that our software and better startups and hacker and residents here at the iLab as a developer you could say product development is pretty much my specialty and in getting to work with hundreds of early-stage startups a lot of times I see them struggling with trying to figure out what the right product is to build for their startup there's a lot of talk and theory about Minimum Viable Product and I love this concept in theory but in practice sometimes it's a little confusing how am I gonna build something that's really super minimal and still compelling enough that people actually want to use my product on the other side of the spectrum I also talked to a lot of startups who are like you know startups are kind of in a race we're trying to go really fast and I don't want to mess with Minimum Viable Product I already know exactly the right product to build so I don't want to mess with any of that but what they don't want to do is be the startup who goes off and builds this fabulous product uses up all of their money and time and resources to do it and turns out that nobody wants it right because now they have no resources left and they've got a fabulous product that nobody actually wants so I don't want you guys to be in that position so when I talk about what we can do differently so at the last lean startups conference Justin Wilcox who is the founder of balance got up on stage before the hundreds thousands of entrepreneurs and he said your startup isn't a business it's a hobby I can see why you might get the two of them confused there's a lot of similarities they're both way more fun than having a real job they're both easy to obsess over and they both cost a ton of money especially considering the opportunity cost right but here's the thing with a business you actually make more money than you take give out and so I want to talk to you guys about discovering the right product for your business so they say that the dream team for a startup is the hacker hustler and hipster hacker who's going to build a product a hustler who's going to bring in the business and hipster who's going to make it an amazing experience so I want to get a feel for who's in the room today so who are the hackers that are here today okay some of them we need more hackers out there who are the hustlers that are in the room today okay awesome and then who are the hipsters oh good Wow I think this is the first that I see more hipsters than hackers that's a good thing usually we're really short on that and I'm guessing a lot of you guys are here because you have an idea we're gonna mic this because of course Neal took my mic because we're videoing this is anybody willing to share their idea just give like a 30-second elevator pitch and let your ideas somebody I'm making food out of insects so insects are a lot more environmentally sustainable than other sources of meat and they taste good and we're actually trying to figure out what insect food product to bring the market to convince people that they should be eating insects so that's why I'm here love it you will be the first startup that I've helped with with eating bugs do we have do we have another hi my name is Mackey I'm working for a company called Kelly it's creating a new distribution model for african-inspired fashion in the US so working closely with the designers based in the US primarily to create a new distribution model for African inspired fashion thank you love it and can we get one more one more brave soul I know people have ideas that's why you're here this better this is fun we're not gonna get a third really okay oh here we go thank you hi my name is Jamie Hansen I'm working on cubical candy it's interior design for cubes thank you awesome okay so these were terrific I noticed one thing and that might be happening here too a lot of times when I ask people for their startup ideas they get a little overwhelmed because they feel a lot of pressure to come up with something that sounds really sexy right but that really isn't what this is about contrary to what it might look like on TechCrunch startups are really not a popularity contest so a few months back Paul Graham wrote this great article on how to get started ideas and what he said is the way to think up startup ideas is not to try to think of certify Diaz the way to get great startup ideas is to look for problems and ideally problems that you yourself have because then you really understand them and so I actually want you all to take a shot at this so you've all got three by five cards and some pens in the middle the table I want you all to take one of three by five cards and on the front of it I want you to write down your best idea does not be perfect doesn't have to be sexy just the best idea you have right now and you've got one minute okay now what I want you to do is take that for you I five card I want you to flip it over to the back and on the back of it I want you to write down your worst start off idea what's the worst idea you can think of for starting business okay does everyone have their worst startup idea all right now what I want you to do since you're sitting conveniently at these nice little tables is I want you to get into groups of about three so join up with like two other people at your table and I want you to vote on which is the worst where startup idea okay all right so everyone have their worst idea so I want you guys so want you guys to hold on to those we're going to come back to them a lot of times when I talk to people who are doing tech startups they are really focused on the product and so they tend to be thinking about things in this order can I build it assuming that I can build it can I get people to know about it assuming that I can can I actually make money from it so this is actually probably the opposite way that you want to be thinking about it so before you go drop out of school or quit your job or whatever you probably want to first be asking yourself is this an idea that I can make money from is this going to be business or a hobby and then that should be very closely followed by can I get people to know about it so how am I going to actually acquire these customers and pull them away from whatever it is that they're currently using and only then can you start thinking about can I build it to custom even figure out what it is you need to really understand who those customers are and what you're doing that's going to be so compelling for them that they're going to be willing to take a risk on using your new product so um so that's a little bit vague and abstract to think about so I try to put it into a step 1 step 2 step 3 here so the things that we want to be thinking about the kind of key thing is when we're thinking about what the right product to build is is we want to find a problem that's worth solving we want to really understand the customer that we're solving it for we want to find a solution that's gonna deeply resonate with them and then we want to lunch not when we have like the biggest best product that has every feature in but when we have what Paul Graham likes to call a quantum of utility which is enough that you're sufficiently better than some of the options out there and that some people are going to be really excited about so I put them in a nice step 1 step 2 step 3 but the reality is that the entire process is very messy thank you the entire process is very iterative or messy whatever you want to call it we're not really doing these in a nice neat order we're doing them sort of all at the same time and jumbled together but for the sake of not making this presentation be all jumbled together I'm going to try to walk through them in order cool okay so the biggest problem that I see startups doing is that they fail to do step number one which is to find a problem worth solving and that typically manifests itself something like this we have this great idea for this awesome new product we went off and we built it we put it on our website and not a single person click-through to it so what did we learn from that anybody did we learn anything from that we probably didn't learn very much from that right so the question is was there a faster way to learn that so he kind of just put the link on our website and when people click through to it said oops sorry it's not available yet if we had some analytics to show us the count of zero that clicked through we would have learned just as much without having to actually build the product right and so a perfectly viable tactic for just understanding if there's a need for your product or not it's to build something called a landing page just put a page up there see if people are even interested in it enough to sign up so this gets to starting before we build it asking can I actually make money from it and what can I do to validate that a really great example that I like of this is buffer I mean has anyone ever used or heard of buffer so buffer is this really great social media app it lets you basically create this buffer of all the stuff that you want to share with your friends and instead of spamming them all at once it'll kind of queue it up and send it out for you so easily add great articles pictures and videos to your buffer and will automatically share them for you throughout the day to your social media feeds so this is great this is what it looks like today this is not how it looked when it started so initially they had this idea but they weren't sure if anyone wanted to use it or not so they went to validate that first so all they did is they created this very simple page that explained what they thought was going to be the first version of buffer choose times to tweet add tweets to your buffer buffer does the rest relax just sit back it's gonna handle it for you so all they did was they tweeted this out people came to the site they'd see the simple description if they liked it they click plans and pricing and they get basically an oops you caught us before already but if you're interested give us your email address they tweeted it out people came some of them gave you our email addresses wasn't a billion people but they didn't really need a billion people they just wanted this indication are people interested or not they seem to be interested says anyone want to take a guess at what the next step they did from here was you guys are gonna have to be more interactive it's a very interactive session yeah a survey okay they could do a survey to understand more about the customer okay anybody else China they're positioning to see if they got more response from other positioning yep yeah they could email the people again to get more information these are all good ideas there I see another hand over here yeah found out how much they would be willing to pay for it so I like this guy's idea cuz they're trying to figure out these are all good you want to talk to the customers absolutely but we really what it comes down to do you want to learn if we can actually make money off of it so all that they did was they added one little page in between those plans and pricing and so everything else was the same when they clicked plans and pricing they get three options one was paid free and then two were paid they kept reading it out people kept coming to their site most of them click the free plan but some of them cooked the paid plan and they were like you know what that's enough for us because their first version of the product was so simple they thought they could get it out there in a day or two so you don't to spend weeks validating the idea for if it's worth to spend a day or two building it right in the end software's hard so it took them a week but regardless in one week they got the first version of buffer up they very shortly after had 500 users and we're bringing in revenue so there two weeks old they have a product they have users and they have revenue right out of the gate pretty awesome right so if doing a landing page to validate that people are willing to pay for your product before you build it as good what's even better is if you can actually get them to pay before you build it so are you guys familiar with pebble pebble is one of these cool new smartwatches it's eat paper watch it talks to your smartphone it can do all these apps on it so like if you're cycling it can do a cycling computer if you listen to music and can control Sonos or whatever the problem with hardware is it's hard and they're probably not going to get their first version out in a week right and it cost a lot of money so they said you know we want to actually see if people are willing to pay before we build it so they set up a Kickstarter they basically used it as a pre-order system and they set up a they set up a goal they said if we can get a hundred thousand dollars in pre-orders then it's worth it to us and we'll go forward with this if we can't nobody pays anything and all is good so they put it up there not only did they hit their goal of a hundred thousand dollars but they actually hit ten over ten million dollars and became one of the largest Kickstarter's ever what I love about this I don't know if you can quite see but doesn't even quite fit into this the UI the number is so big that they raise so this again was really awesome right out of the gate they have ten million dollars in revenue so something to just think about when you're thinking about things like landing pages and Kickstarter's these are really great tools never underestimate the value of video you saw pebble had a video probably one of the most famous examples of someone who did this as Dropbox people have probably heard of the three-minute video that they put up just really like not even high quality 3-minute screencast that drew Houston the founder put up showing what Dropbox looks like put it up on Hacker News and overnight you went from 5,000 signups to 75,000 signups so it's really great to think about okay here are some tools that we can use to validate if people are going to be interested in our product they're going to give us money or not but when we look at some of these numbers like 75,000 signups overnight ten million dollars that pebble raised from sixty nine thousand backers which I don't know what the math was but if you assumed even one in 10 of the people who showed up pledged then that's 690 thousand people they drove to their site right and then the question you have to start asking yourself is how do you actually get people to your site so you can Ben validate if they're interested or not which brings us to step number two which could very easily be step number one which is to know your customer so I think what this really gets to is understanding what is the vision of what we're trying to do with our startup and this is a place that startups are really different than big companies right because the companies we already have an existing product we have customers that we can go out and talk to and say what do you want this always kind of reminds me of the Henry Ford quote that I'm guessing you guys have all heard which is that Henry Ford had asked his customers what they wanted they would have said a faster horse yes and so if we fast forward a hundred years or so to today's automobiles this is Travis kalanick he's the founder of uber and uber it's kind of disrupting taxis sort of like Ford disrupted the horse I guess you could say and it were stemmed from the founders frustrations of taxis so they saw that there was a problem with taxi so they did step number one they found a problem worth solving but if Travis kalanick had just gone out and asked people what they wanted you might envision something very different than what Ober is today so if you imagine him kind of walking mr. to Boston and asking people what they wanted from cabs I'm gifting a they would have said I want to find a cab at 2:00 a.m. when the t's closed and everyone's getting kicked out of clubs and bars right and for any of you who've actually ridden in a cab in Boston you might say I'd like to be able to find one of those rare Boston cabbies who's not a completely insane driver so I can increase my odds of getting home alive maybe so you might envision a mobile app with with a map and you cannot see icons where all the cabs are maybe like a standard e to insanity rating above their head and that could be useful maybe but the question is would it have earned uber the three point five billion dollar valuation they just got last month and I'm guessing not and the reason is because Calla neck like Ford had a much grander vision of what could be and so when you're thinking about your vision I don't want you to get caught up with what my product can look like today I want you to be thinking of how things could be different and therefore better and then when you take that to what your product looks like and we should just start from this big vision of how you want things to be different and better and identify where that intersects with what reality can accommodate today because this slice is where your product is going to be that's gonna be successful today so you're not gonna want to be building this whole thing from the get-go that is not a good idea you'll probably split fall on your face if you try to build everything but you want to be building the small slice that's still part of this much grander vision and that's how you're getting people really excited about what you're doing so when we're looking at startups and we're trying to figure out which ones are gonna make it big and which ones aren't there's usually three dimensions that people consider and really look at for whether the startups gonna kill it or not right one is team so who's on the startup one's market once product so I'm just curious what you guys think hoop thinks that when you're looking at a startup that they're gonna be successful or not that team is most important okay good amount of people actually mark it all right and product okay so most of the people team and then mark it and then product so I think I would often say team as well I think I could probably make a good argument for any of these three but I think Marc Andreessen makes a really compelling argument for a market and why market Trump's all is what's most important because what he says is that in a great market you can have a great market people are so desperate for a solution that you can have a product that isn't very good in a team that's making all sorts of mistakes and you're still gonna be okay right but in a terrible market you can have the best product in the world and you can have an amazing team and you're gonna fail and so the most important thing is to understand who your customer is and really understand what it is that they're looking for so I think someone that startup has done a really good job with this is Pinterest it's kind of funny because we look at Pinterest and we think of them as like they've launched and boom had this overnight success but is it often the case it wasn't quite that smooth Pinterest launched they were out for a few months and they had like 3,000 users not great for a social network but worse was those 3,000 users weren't actually using the product so what happened was the team had this really great network their founder Ben Silbermann I think had been in YC and they were just really well connected they were able to reach out to their friends and their friends reach up to their friends able to very quickly get 3,000 users but these were people like them right they were probably techies and entrepreneurs who lived in major startup cities who are probably guys in their 20s or something probably not the target market for Pinterest right not sure what the target market for Pinterest is but I'm guessing it's more like moms in the Midwest and that was not so they said okay how do we find our market they didn't even know how to find these people and so what they did I thought was really clever is they started these meetups called pin it forward so these were in-person meetups crazy idea I know like online things in-person meetups they bring people in they did please I don't know these vision boards where people would post up their images and their collages that inspired them and what they said was not very many people came but the people who came loved it and so they started using the app and they were so excited about they started telling their friends and now three years later they've gone from 33,000 users to 70 million so the takeaway from this and what I want you to really think about when you're thinking about what your initial startup is is that you want to be thinking about those 10 users who love you right it is way better to have 10 users who love what you're doing that 100 users who are math or even 3,000 because if they're not using your product then you're gonna fail so it's very counterintuitive but when you first get out there when you're first thinking about what's my product who's the market that I'm going after you won't just start small you want to go super niche because the smaller the market that you go the more niche that you go the more you can really precisely pinpoint who these people are the more you can understand like what problems they have what solution is going to resonate with them these are the people that you can come up with a product that can be really minimal and yet still compelling to them and so your goal when you first get out there should not be to go really big your goal should be to go small and dominate a very small market so you get your name out there and then you can build upon that success and there's great examples of this but we never think about it right so obviously right here at Harvard Facebook they started Harvard only twenty thousand users that's not a big market Bill Gates started with the basic compiler for the Altair I don't know but I can't imagine that was more than a few thousand Altair is out there so I kind of free is this first think about your problem then think about your customer but I think the reality is that when you're thinking about what's my product Who am I going after you really want to be thinking about both of these at the same time and that should be your foundation from which you start so I'll pick on something that not many people are doing anymore but a couple years ago like everybody was doing recipe apps does people remember that like everyone you talk to is like I'm doing recipe app like okay so I asked them I'd say okay what who's your customer and they say anyone who cooks and I'd say anyone who cooks and they say yeah I want to get as many users as possible I feel like okay well I guess I can't argue with that logic um what problem are you gonna solve for them and they say I'm gonna help them find recipes so let me just ask you guys how many people in here cook okay and how many you can't find recipes so there's something called Google you should try it's really awesome okay good was yes but then if you want good ones and you're probably going after people who are more specific more niche right I'm so trying to just help anybody in the world who even who cooks even macro and cheese in the microwave right fine recipes is just not compelling I kind of liken this to the people who get out there and they want everybody to like them and so the result is that they're just kind of boring right so you don't want to be that person and you don't want your startup to be that company so instead I feel like you can approach this from a couple different angle if I start on the customer side I might say okay Who am I really passionate about who are my people right there might be people there's probably if I'm interested in being in the recipe space or the cooking space is probably because there's a certain type of people that I'm really excited about helping so maybe they are amateur gourmet chefs they're people who really love to cook it's not their job but they do it for fun awesome then what's a problem that I can help them with well maybe they just want to make fabulous food for their friends and family is that a problem for them I don't know but now at least I've got people and I've got a problem that I can go out and talk to them about right the other approach that I can take is what's a problem worth solving if I think about food and I think about problems I think about we're always talking about this obesity demmick and everybody wants to lose weight everybody's on a diet so the problem is that we need to lose weight right great so who's the customer that I want to target there I can say dieters but if everybody's trying to lose weight then that's kind of like saying anyone who cooks that isn't very interesting so since we're at Harvard I'll say dieters who are in college and as soon as I do that I can get so much more interesting just like with the recipes right because now instead of just being one more diet app there's already like a billion out there I can say what are the specific problems that students have at college who are trying to lose weight and maybe they're stuck eating in the dining halls right which is like really limited in food and so I can adjust that and maybe their school schedules are really tough and so how can they find time to work out at gyms so maybe I can do things like compile databases with calorie information specific to their dining halls or find exercise options on campus and I'm surrounding City and now this is much more interesting and much more compelling to that market so I want you guys to give it a try now so get back in your teams and I'd like you for your worst idea to figure out what problem you're solving and who you're solving it for R and I'll give you a few minutes okay does everybody have their problem and the customer all right so hold on to those because we're going to build upon that so now that we know who our customer is or at least we think we know who our customer is we think we know what problem we're solving for them the next thing to do is to actually go out and talk to them and the thing that I like best for understanding a problem that someone has is to tell a story probably not a story of how to conceive a child because that would be awkward but a story about what you think the problem is that you're solving for them so if we go back to the dieters in college you might tell them about Kate who is an undergrad here at college she gained some weight in her first year and she wants to lose it and she knows how many calories she should eat but she's stuck to dining hall food she has no idea how many calories it is and it's frustrating right so she's not losing any weight she's frustrated so if I go out and I tell us to someone who's totally not on a diet or not a college undergrad eating at dining halls then that's not gonna work they're just gonna be like whatever words right I'm not even listening to you so you want to make sure when you go off and you talk to people they're definitely people in your target market and then if they really have this problem that you're talking about even if you have some details wrong something is probably going to click because as humans we relate to stories right and so when you tell this story you want to ask does this resonate with you and they'll say yes or maybe they say no and you can say okay well does it remind you of anything and if you're in the right ballpark then chances are it does and then get them to tell you the story in their own words and so as you go and you talk to several people in your customer segment then you keep tweaking the story over time to the point where it's really using the word your customers words and things that really resonate with them about this is the story so they're all to the eventually nodding their heads that yes this is my problem this really resonates with me this is a really a big problem I'd love you to fix it so you work on the problem and then the next thing that you do when you're talking to them is you say okay given that general problem what are kind of the top three problems within that so maybe it's that I want to lose weight I want to I'm frustrated that I don't know the calories at the dining halls and I'm I don't know tempted by the junk food of the dining halls right get them to tell you what there are three problems are because they might be very different than what you think they are and get them to prioritize them because that's going to help you when you build your product to figure out what the right order is and then where I want you to spend the majority of your interview this is the most important part is to have them walk through each of these three problems and talk about what they're doing to solve them today and this is gonna do two things for you one is if they say yes this is a really big problem and you say okay what are you doing to solve it today and they say well nothing then that's not really a big problem right because if they're not doing anything today to solve it what's going to make them start using this app of yours that they've never even heard of said and leanest solve it it's pretty unlikely so that's kind of a criteria to understand if it's really a problem or not but then if they are doing something now you know what they're doing to solve it and so you know what your product needs to be better than so I want you to go back into your team's and I want you to do two things one is I want you to figure out what your customer interviews story is and that's like a little bit vague so the three things you want to be thinking there are who's the persona so who's your Kate the undergrad in college what's the problem scenario that she wants to lose weight and what isn't working that she doesn't know the calorie count in dining halls so think about those three things and kind of put it into a story and then think about what you think are the top three problems that your customers are having here what am I going to do during the day if I just saw my home well there's money people on a film okay um it sounds like people are wrapping a verb does anybody need another minute you guys are good okay awesome so how long to these but hopefully what you can see now is we're starting to hone in on understanding who our customer is that we're going to be able to figure out what the right product for them is so the great thing about when you get to this point is you not only know who your customer is which means you know how to reach them but you know what messaging is going to resonate with them because you've gone out and talked to them and so when you do have your product and you're ready to reach out to them you know how to find them you know how to get them to come to you so now we can start thinking about okay what is the right solution for them which is step number three to find a solution that's going to resonate with these people so an approach that I really like is called concierge service sometimes people call it Wizard of Oz for a man behind the curtain and the idea is instead of saying okay what can I make for these people by building a product the question is what can I actually manually do for these people to see if this is the right solution for them or not so a really great example of this is aardvark which does social search out if you guys have heard of this before but the idea is that there's some questions that you really need to ask a person not a search engine so I don't know like what the coolest or like the weirdest iLab startup right is probably six foods eating right but you might not get that out of a search engine you might want to ask an expert so um how do you build this I don't know but you know what I actually don't have to worry about that initially I just want to see if anybody's actually interested in it so aardvark put up this website there was really no tech behind it when somebody would fill out would ask a question what's the coolest weirdest startup a Thai lab an email go to the founder the sound of a go find an expert which is maybe like a resident at AI lab who can know about the iLab teams and they'd say six Foods definitely there are feeding people bugs it's kind of weird and cool at the same time right send it back to the founder who then email the person who so once you get to the point where there's enough traffic coming to the site where you're like hey this is an actual business idea then you validated your idea and now you can go off and build it it scares me to death a little bit as a software developer because I think oh my god once you get to the point where you need to scale like you need to be able to flip it on the next day and you haven't started building it yet but the truth is aardvark actually took a year to build this out I don't know all the details but I can imagine they did it very iterative ly kind of addressing the most manually intensive parts first and Google wound up acquiring them for fifty million dollars so it sounds ghetto but it works something else that I really like a lot is called a concierge test hang a slide is kind of creepy sorry couldn't figure out what a concierge would look like but the idea is to actually just sit down with people so I'll keep going back to my bad college diet example but if I think that what I want to do is provide personalized meal plans for college dieters that are based on what's available in their dining hall I might actually go up to people who are my potential customers people who I mark it and say will you pay me to sit down with you and give you a personalized meal plan I'll be your nutritionist and the idea is that if they're not willing to pay me to do this in a highly customized fashion like I'm gonna sit down with you walk you through it we'll go to the dining halls together you can tell me what you like what you don't like if they're not willing to pay for that what are the chances that they're willing to pay for this very uncut it's gonna be developed right and the thing that I really love about this most is that it gives you an opportunity to sit down with your potential customers and really understand what's gonna work and what isn't so you can walk through the dining halls with them and things can come up that you hadn't even considered right they can say well I'm allergic to this okay I need to think of allergies and this is I don't know my favorite food so I want to get it in there and I like this format and I don't like this format and this works and it doesn't you don't get that if you just try to go build the product then you have to wait until they've used it to get that feedback if you can do something on manually with them and kind of figure out what that should look like in conjunction with them it gives you a such a clearer picture of what's going to work so that when you do go to build your product it makes so much more sense like I notice that calling what questions I need to be asking about allergies I know exactly what the format should be looking like so um so I've talked about these first three steps finding a problem knowing your customer and finding a solution that resonates in sequence as if they just happen very neatly one and then the next and then boom you know what you want to build um of course startups aren't like that right you're doing it you think you know what the problem is until you talk to customers then you realize that's wrong and then you realize your customer segment was wrong so you want something different one who has a different problem and you think you understand that come up with the solution and they're like no we don't actually care about that solution we don't like it so you're constantly iterating on these things and so when I think about a start-up I think about a start-up as sort of the search for an alignment of these three how can we find the right three of these that fit together and make sense a lot of times this is referred to as product market fit it's a term that Marc Andreessen came up with which basically means we've identified who our customers or a market is what product is going to resonate with them to fix the problem that they have and what Mark says is in a great market a market with lots of real potential customers the market pulls the product out of the startup in other words when you finally nail it it takes you a few tries but when you finally nail it customers are gonna be so desperate for this solution they're gonna be screaming for it and it's gonna be clear what it is that you should be building and so now finally you can ask the question am i able to build it and the truth is what I'm seeing with most tech startups with most software startups at least is the answer is absolutely yes because the things that we're thinking of we're thinking of because we've seen that text before we know that this is going to work and even with hardware so many more options are coming available that's a lot of times if we're thinking about solutions we're thinking about things that are built with existing technology so can I build it is not even a question so finally once you do build it how do you know when to launch it and again I'm going to say this is all very iterative even when you're going through those first three steps a lot of times you're building things to put them in front of the customer and see how they react like buffer built the first version of their app in one week so that were able to see how customers actually used it but when you really feel like you know what the real product is and you want to get it out there you don't want to wait forever you want to be able to launch it fast and you want to launch it when pilgrim calls it a quantum of utility he says when you built something that's sufficiently better than the options that are out there and but at least some people are gonna say I'm really excited that you built this because now I can finally do X and so I'm gonna put you back in your team's for one last time to take your worst idea to conclusion what I'd like you to do is unfortunately we're not able to go out and talk to customers because we don't have any customers for things like glasses windshield wipers on your glasses wait okay you could talk to me so you're gonna have to guess what people would say but um think about what solution do you think is going to resonate with these customers that you came up with and what do you think your initial product is going to be so I'll give you a few minutes okay does everybody raise your hand if you still need a minute we have one okay I think we're going to I think we're gonna get forward but all right this is the fun part so if anybody is really daring in here is anybody willing to share their worst idea and what they came up with I've got a mic for you so you can be you and I so you want to come up here so they can grab you okay so your worst idea who your customer is when I'm going to the story because I guess cut along what problem you mean problem you think you're solving and what your initial product is so we basically came up with a website for people who live in the United States and have illegal pets so in like if you have a pet monkey your pet you can go on our website and basically you know the people who are harboring these pets right now they're going on google and they're saying okay what do I feed my monkey but our site would be would have specialized food plans and also have health benefits you know stuff that's really healthy for them to successfully raise they're illegal okay okay and our customers would be all over the United States maybe all over the world we would be able to test the site as you suggested beforehand to see how many people would sign up we we prided ourselves on three problems sorry I'm cheating basically are three were raising guidelines I'm finding good and healthy foods for them when sort of having a it would sort of be like a Facebook connection like if you go on Facebook you can socialize there too so they'll be able to socialize also on Facebook for illegal pet owners oh nice and and you can um you can also you know advertising would be helpful like we'll have that link for pet shops that maybe sell these foods but not necessarily like if my lion likes to eat meat then then I can go on the website and you know meat companies can go on our website and average oh now I like it so you have like you have a whole business model you like what above and beyond thank you okay do we have any other daring souls who want to share their terrible idea and what they turned it into all right you guys you're being pointed to so I think you're being volunteered by your so he created a windshield wiper for glasses and our customers are college students in cold areas because they are very they could want the convenience factor they may not want to take time to clean their glasses when they're dirty so a couple of the problems that we were solving were when the glasses fogged up that you could actually they would just clean them off for you you wouldn't have to worry about so often people are walking around with dirty glasses you wouldn't have to worry about kind of cleaning those off what else am I oh it if you're with disabilities and you have difficulty I'm kind of cleaning it would make it simpler for you you would never have to take your glasses off and actually clean them our initial product would be a piece that goes on your glasses that like swipes down and cleaned your glasses we really thought about this so I think I covered all bases you know I think I could actually be used when you're skiing if you try to wear glasses under goggles right right if you're like in a Jeep and you didn't put the top up you you're gonna get all that oh okay all right see it could be alright any other takers coming a third yeah can you cut do you want to can you come up here so we can I'll see you and your glory and your with your worst idea thank you so our worst idea was a lemonade stand and I guess we were thinking about our customer we figured they'd probably be thirsty tourists and the problem we were solving when we thought about it was it's really a factory convenience and not really knowing where to get the lemonade so then we were thinking well how about some sort of distribution system how may be GPS location-based app that allows you to order the lemonade on the go so you don't have to disrupt your experience as a tourist I like it so it could be almost like a task rabbit or uber for a lemonade very you should call Travis awesome okay you guys are like the shyest bunch that I've seen here really anybody else going once Oh so we decided to do a social networking application for people who are albinos and the idea and don't don't laugh please it's just that it was a worst idea initially because it was such a small sliver of the population but as we started breaking it down our customer would obviously be people who are is a very small population but they're looking for connection they're looking for a sense of community and then the problem that we're solving is we didn't want to say loneliness but definitely like some sort of affinity and maybe guidance on other people who are facing similar issues that you are and so our initial product then was kind of like a big brother big sister to to look for say if you were in college to look for someone who's in the business world who's already been through the sort of experience that you've been through or if you're in high school your 16 year old kid and and you're kind of dealing with all the problems that a normal 16 year old does but now you've got this added issue of the fact that you're very different and so it offered that connection from the older generation to the younger generation nice thank you very cool okay um we can do one more if we have any more takers or we can turn it over to two questions okay that was all that I had I know it was a little bit torturous I made you guys go through a worst idea I thought about having people do it with their own ideas but I do realize different people came in with ideas or every not everyone came in with an idea I didn't want people forming teams where some people had like really given a lot of thought to it then they just dominated it so I thought this might be a fun way to do it um so thank you for participating in this that is all that I have um so thank you

Channel: Harvard Innovation Labs

Views: 11,994

Rating: 4.7377048 out of 5

Keywords: Harvard Innovation Lab, Harvard i-lab, Abby Fichtner, hackerchick

Id: MiEdsK2zv8U

Length: 45min 36sec (2736 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 05 2013