Course review

Lesson Details:

This course is brought to you by Appy Pie as part of our academy series congratulations on making it to the final section of this course now we're going to take some time to review everything that we've learned so interject congratulations on making it to the final section of this course now we're going to take some time and review everything that we've learned so in the introduction we talked about why the lien method is more effective than the traditional way of starting a business with the lien method we aren't spending weeks or even months preparing this great idea in our head and then trying to get funding right away to build it instead we are talking to customers directly to find out the pains that they're experiencing now and then we're building an MVP to see if we can provide a solution that people are willing to pay for and finally with that knowledge we can build a solution that's our full scalable business and we know that customers want what we're offering so there's no guesswork anymore and if possible we learned that it's important to avoid outside investment because you don't want to give up equity of your company if you don't have to and this makes it so you lose a lot of control and you have outside influences that determine what you do and then we talked about that great idea myth which is as soon as I have an excellent idea I just have to go and protect it right away and we learned that the truth is it's all about the execution and not the idea itself and for every great business that had an excellent idea there are likely thousands of people that had that idea but no one took the time to execute it or they did and they didn't execute it well and just by talking to customers you already have such a leg up on the competition when it comes to executing an idea because you're solving a problem and you know what the customer is looking for there's no better source for of information than the people that are actually going to be paying for your product or service and then we talked about the importance of getting started somewhere so it really doesn't matter where you start as long as you get started we also talked about failure and how failure is actually really great because with failure you don't lose anything you really learn so much in the process that it's worthwhile then we talked about customer development and here is a great opportunity for you to find out exactly what problems your customers are having like I said just a moment ago there's no better source of information then from the people that are going to be paying for your solution we talked about how interviewing is a skill that you can develop and why it's really important to listen and not pitch a solution so we never want to ask would you buy this because that's a form of pitching finally we talked about pain points and why they are the foundation of your business and a pain point is simply a problem or frustration that your potential customer is experiencing and this is something that we want to build a solution to help solve then we moved on to the MVP and an MVP is used to find out if you can provide a solution that people are willing to pay for using the least amount of time and monetary investment possible we talked about how it's important to build an MVP that doesn't scale and you can be really creative when building this MVP and as an example we mentioned Groupon and how they started as a wordpress blog that provided a two-for-one pizza deal so really don't limit yourself on the possibilities of your MVP the important thing is to make it realistic and see if you can prove or disprove your assumption about the pain your customers having and the solution that you can provide then we moved on to building a product and when building a product we mentioned how important it is to keep interviewing your customers you want to keep getting feedback from them to make sure you're building a solution that they really want we also talked about releasing new updates often and that's all based on what your customers are telling you so the idea of interviewing your customer and releasing new updates often go hand in hand and that's what's known as the iterative process where you learn more from your customers and then you apply it to your business and repeat then we talked about testing everything and when you test everything you can dramatically increase your sales because you can see what's working and what's not working and then you can focus your time solely on the things that work and stop wasting times on marketing channels or other points your business that just aren't effective at all and finally it's time to protect your idea because now it's been validated with an MVP.