This does not stop here: a Reflective Essay

It’s always a good practice at the end of a project – or after each phase of it – to look back and analyse what went right or wrong, figure out the reasons of each failure and success. It helps finding the path that leaded you where you are and usually reveals hints for the future. Failures are my favorite because are those we are going to remember, no matter what. Changing prospective, failures are just experiments and, as Rob Fitzpatrick wrote, ‘What’s best sometimes is learning, not selling’ (2014). On the other hand, Successes as well can reveal themselves as hidden failures after an accurate analysis. We may assume we succeeded thanks to A whereas it was B the real cause, and this assumption can misguide us planning a strategy for the future.

Thinking about my journey with the MACE and the Designing a Business module I have plenty of material for reflection. Looking back, the Induction Week in September feels like 10 years ago, but it was the first impact with the Design Thinking world.

We had a workshop with Dan Lockton and for the first time someone told us ‘don’t try to convince them, listen to them’; shifting from marketing and selling to understanding and adapting sounded awkward for some of us, coming from a traditional academic business-oriented background. The Human Centred Design Approach was already claiming its first victims. During this workshop we have been asked to look for a problem to solve, to find a question before to propose a solution.

The problem-framing phase is very important in the HCD; it is through user research and observation that we can finally understand what people are trying to do and help them doing it better. Analyzing the touch points in the flow of a specific activity towards a specific aim we can then understand how to change the environment to meet needs; and this includes the interaction with anything, from an Application to a restaurant, from a Customer Service to a garbage bin. The reason why observation is such a relevant tool it that usually people are not fully aware of what is going on, but the help of an external observer is needed to frame the problem.

Getting the rhythm of this workflow allows planning those kind of interventions that can actually change behaviours. Designing interactions, products and experiences for the greater good.

Design Thinking has an intrinsic human-centred nature. It is based on empathy, participation and engagement, tolerance for failure and risk taking (Brown, 2009). It sounds like all the opposite we have been taught so far about serious business, right? In such a process many unpredictable and changeable factors are involved and approaching this method with a traditional management flow can lead to a huge waste of money and time.

So, here come the faithful ‘fail fast, fail cheap’, sometimes followed by ‘succeed sooner’, which is the belief of many startuppers and innovators nowadays. The father of this quote is said to be David Kelley (2013), one of the founder of IDEO.

Then, during a meeting held by the Entrepreneurs Society, here at the Kingston University, David Stokes introduced the Lean Startup Method (Ries, 2011) for us.

Detailed marketing researches and long-term strategies are not made to face the high levels of uncertainty typical of the startup business, not even of the business in general, characterised nowadays by a fast ever-changing world. The Lean Startup method just follows this rhythm proposing a loop:
BUILD – MEASURE – LEARN

In simple words, to build a sustainable business without wasting resources, we should not wait to confront our customers and market but give them the first prototype immediately; look and collect their reactions and feedbacks; analyse and then preserve, adapt or pivot the original idea on the basis of our findings. Do it again and again.
Traditional businesses are asked to call into question their usual approach:

 1) Sharing ideas. As David Strokes said ‘Nobody wants your idea, really’. We should overcome the fear of being robbed of our idea, because there is much more to lose from not asking for feedbacks.

 2) Stop fearing failure. As previously said, failure is just the outcome of an experiment. It’s validated knowledge (Ries, 2011).

Well, given this disruptive background we entered the most challenging and practical phase of the module: starting our own business.

TEAM UP 

After just 2 weeks in the programme we were asked to form teams, picking our companions for the rough path of startupping. Obviously we didn’t know each other, our background, experience level and expertise; to say nothing of attitude and collaborative style. This just happened and now I love those guys, but there is something to be said.

The team is the most important part of any Startup. Give a good idea to a bad team and it will go to waste, give an average idea to a good team and it will become great (Catmull, 2014). I love David Kelley’s (2013) metaphor about teammates: they are like superheroes with peculiar superpowers and kryptonites, their capacities should be complementary to cover the shortages of each other and push to the next level the overall team work. This means that a team, to work properly, has to be diverse but balanced. What if the X-Men were all alike? A bunch of Professor Xs. Who was going to push all those wheelchairs around and penetrate into Magneto’s headquarter?

Nowadays companies know that and it is not unusual so see an application for a job declined not for lack of expertise but because the applicant was not the best fit for the existing team. Most importantly, also investors know that. During the first term we had a panel discussion with two finance experts with extensive experience in funding, angel investors and venture capitalists. One of the first things we heard from them was ‘people buy people’, which means that the first focus of any investor, before even considering investing, is the team. If the team is balance and trust worthy then one can start considering the product itself.

THE IDEA 

‘Your business should fit your personality’, this is something else the finance experts told us. It is odd, right? To hear that from ‘serious people’, but it is incredibly true.

After forming teams we had to come up with a business idea, a product quickly implementable in the 6 months we had, and here we faced the first difficulty: not enough constrains. The task was basically: find a problem that could be addressed with a product in any field for any target in the UK (a geographical hint, at least). As Tim Brown said (2009), when the brief is too general the team wander about in the fog. Given that, we brainstormed thinking about the first focus group that came handy: us. We found out that we were all travellers and this leaded to many different ideas: a backpack with integrated push scooter, a wallet with retractable lanyard, a silicon glove to heat up lunch boxes, a diamond shaped tissue dispenser, and many others. So, when we had to present our idea to the rest of the class and work on the business model we were not convinced at all but this is how flI. started taking shape.

BUSINESS MODEL AND CANVASES 

During the Designing a Business Module we have been advised on using many different canvases, such as the XPLAIN Empathy Map, the Value Proposition Canvas (Osterwalder, 2014) and the Business Model Canvas (Osterwalder and Pigneur, 2014).

The purpose was clearly building a proper human-centered designed business model. To create our strategy focusing on people an important step to take was creating a Persona, an imaginary individual that would have been our ideal customer. We named him Gregory, a young newly employed designer. Thinking about his habits and daily life we have been able to keep the focus on more properly business oriented details, such as revenue streams and channels of distribution, in a more realistic and insightful way.

 MVP

As part of the Lean Startup Method (Ries, 2011) we had to start prototyping our product. I have to say that thinking with our hands has been a pivotal practice throughout this experience. Some of our best breakthroughs, such us the bento bag double function and the use of the earphones, were born from cutting, touching and stitching all together around a table. The Minimum Viable Product – to be used in the MEASURE phase – has just to respond to the main valuable feature for the target customer with the minimum developing effort. Prioritize those features though has been and it is still a big challenge for the team. We had to teach ourselves to think small.

What we also learnt from this experience is that building a Minimum Loveable Product is even more important because it is what will guarantee followers and support to your newborn business, even before anyone can get his hands on the actual product.

STORYTELLING AND PITCHING

Talking about MLP and Persona the Storytelling topic can’t be avoided. We had this amazing workshop with Rob Grundel, professional storyteller, and then I realised how important are stories to facilitate communications and change perceptions. The main differences between animals and human being is that we experience life and transmit knowledge through stories. Whereas the Persona is an insight-based story that we tell to ourselves, the MLP embodies a story about the future of our customers, who they want to be. The shared base of these stories are values to which people can relate, the WHY in the Golden Circle of Simon Sinek (2011) that will lead our audience, through the HOW, to a consistent WHAT.

An important part of our business has been pitching our idea during events and contests and the right structure makes all the difference: backstory, explanation of problems and values, then the struggle to find a resolution and finally our product. This was not just an emotional hook; everything was absolutely true.

 FAIRS

‘If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late’, as Reid Hoffman said, and I have to admit that we were all pretty embarrassed with the first version of flI. Its imperfections were so relevant to us to become almost a certainty of failure. We were completely wrong. We focused our display for both the Fairs on communicating an experience, the story behind the product, and how the potential customers could’ve been part of it.

Just letting them interact with flI. we gathered precious feedback, but what surprised us the most was how people and business mentors appreciated the stage of development. We thought ‘God, we have a chance!’, which in our minds sounded also like ‘God, we have a market!’.

FALSE POSITIVES AND THE WORLD OUT THERE

As Fitzpatrick (2014) keeps repeating in his book about how to talk to customers, when you enter ‘pitching mode’ and people see how passionate you are they tent to say nice things just to be polite. However, after getting plenty of compliments we have to accept the possibility that they may be false positives. We still have to dig deeper into motivations and emotions of our early adopter to learn from them.

What I also deeply understood is that expertise, creative thinking skills and intrinsic motivation in a team are the key to succeed (or at least in trying to). A flat hierarchy where everyone has a say in everything leads to conflict, but also to new thoughtful insights on the way things are or should be done in any field, from development to management.

I also have to say that many established practices still are not fit for this approach. As an example, registering a Patent or a Design is incredibly expensive, how can this work for the Lean Startup that throws its product out in the market just to understand that everything has to be changed? Furthermore, the establishment still sees an overwhelming difference between business oriented and social oriented organisations, as if pursuing needs was something completely disconnected from the market.

I believe these are some of the challenges for Design Thinkers because if something is not working are not users, people or the market to be blamed. It is the Designer to have the responsibility to act for change (Norman, 2013).

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References

BROWN, T., 2009. Change by design : how design thinking transforms organizations and inspires innovation. New York: New York : Harper Business.

CATMULL, E., 2014, Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration, London : Bantam Press.

AMABILE, T., 1998, How to kill Creativity, Harvard Business Review. Available from: <https://hbr.org/1998/09/how-to-kill-creativity > [20 April 2015].

NORMAN, D.A., 2013. The design of everyday things. Revised and expanded edition.. edn. London : The MIT Press.

FITZPATRICK ROB, 2013. The Mom Test: How to talk to customers & learn if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.

OSTERWALDER, A., 2010. Business model generation : a handbook for visionaries, game changers, and challengers. Hoboken, N.J.; Chichester: Hoboken, N.J. : John Wiley & Sons.

RIES, E., 2011. The lean startup : how constant innovation creates radically successful businesses. London: London : Portfolio Penguin.

KELLEY, D., KELLEY, T., 2013, Creative confidence: unleashing the creative potential within us all. London: William Collins.

SINEK, S., 2011, Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone To Take Action, London : Portfolio Penguin.

OSTERWALDER, A., PIGNEUR, Y., 2014,Value Proposition Design: How to Create Products and Services Customers Want, Hoboken : John Wiley & Sons, New Jersey.

MVP vs MLP: the Web Design prospective

The main principle of the Lean Start Up approach is to build a Minimum Viable Product, which means something that is not perfect but which embodies the main valuable feature for your target customers with the minimum developing effort. This is the key of testing your business idea without going bankrupt basically.

Put let’s go one step further, what is a MLP then? It’s the Minimun Loveable Product. Meaning? It’s something that can bring back the maximum amount of love from your audience with the minimum effort. Does it make any sense? It should and I’ll tell you why.

We are shifting from materialism to experientialism. As James Wallman wrote in his new book ‘Stuffocation‘ we are apparently sick of buying useless stuff. Owning the last trend product is not a real status symbol anymore (someone should tell Apple though..), what is important for us are the experiences we made. Where we went on holiday, which event we took part to, who we worked with define us. If you think about it that’s also the reason why Social Media have been so disruptive in changing our habits.

Looking at this phenomena from the Web Design prospective it can be easily seen how the User Experience gets more and more relevant. This is Functionality marrying Emotion. People remember and reiterate because they felt something, they loved.

Google came recently up with the concept of Material Design. In the released guide is included a list of Web and App design principles that make interaction and depth its strongholds.

This proves that Real and Virtual are more and more fading into each other, it’s what people ask and The Internet of Things – or I’d better say The Internet of Everything – is already there knocking at the door.

Considering that, a first MLP can be easily (or at least in an easier way) build online.
Building a physical prototype is not even needed, you can build a 3D model or just draw your product or service on a piece of paper, it is how you will tell the experience that counts. Yeah, I’m talking about Storytelling. Again.

Building a landing page, a website, able to illustrate your MLP and lead the potential early adopter through an emotional experience will tell you if it worths developing with the minimum waste of resources. Moreover, online one can reach thousands of people in a few days just with the word-of-mouth  – especially if the experience you built “surprise and enlighten our users in equal measure”, as Google says – the equivalent of a huge and practically free ‘focus group’.

As an example, have you seen INCEPTION? Here comes a Website explaining everything you missed.

Are we hunting Dragons?

Here we go. Dragon’s Den came and passed, it was not that bad.

On the contrary, it was quite exciting. After working that hard on our idea and on how to handle the team work, then our product and prototype, materials and costs, the brand and experience, finance and price strategy – from stitching to Excel let’s say – we have been given the opportunity to speak in public about our vision. The purest and simplest thing ever if you believe in your product.

A Pitch is made of a mix of good objective arguments, like marketing  strategy and figures, and an emotional story; and to be honest my biggest fear was not to be able to connect with the audience, that the Dragons wouldn’t get how we feel and how we believe people would feel about flI. (this is the name of our “resting device”, you’ll have a whole post introducing our creature in a while).

“I don’t have kids but I would never spend money on something like that!”, this was the feedback from one of the Dragons as regards the LITTLE STEPS team‘s product “Ella”. A mattress for kids, targeting – obviously – concerned mothers traditionally willing to pay crazy amounts of money on their children well-being.

The question  – and it’s a pretty scary one – is: What if your investors are not your target?

You can still persuade them with great figures, a team with an untouchable reputation and an accurate market research, but where is the Magic then? And moreover, it would be much simpler to convince them if they could perceive the experience, the added value, behind the actual object.

As creatives we don’t do what we do just for money, there are things we value sometimes more then that, such as reputation, recognition  and attention. The Psychic Money is what makes our business OUR, it’s our motivation.

Probably, in the current scenario, we should look for investors that can appreciate and understand what we are doing, that are willing to be part of the team, not just part of the business. I guess it’s one of the main motivation to choose crowd funding on a traditional investor, but then you could miss the opportunity to have a mentor or just someone with a different background and expertise that can help your product and idea grow.

This is just one more question to add to the crowd of questions we already have about starting a creative business and I’m more and more sure every day that there is no right answer. We are living in the world of Today trying to follow the rules of Yesterday. How Money and Creativity can coexist is the biggest challenge and finding at least a path to follow – not a magic formula – will leads us closer to a Brand New Economy.

Today is as close to Yesterday as it is to Tomorrow. Just choose a side.

Would you give me some money? I’ll make my unicorn dance for you.

Almost two weeks ago we had an interesting panel discussion with two fundraising experts. My impression was (and may be more than just an impression) that one of them was there to embody the capitalist side, the banker, while his counterpart was the start upper, one of those went through the fundraising mechanism – crowdfunding, Angel investors, Venture capitalists etc. – happily surviving at the end. But still looking for £ 2,000,000 I’m afraid.

I have to say something strong: I hate money and talking about money. I’ve never been that good at maths – It could be related to that – , but I think that when money is involved everything become stricter and unclear. Everyone starts worrying about profits, deadlines and how to make the investors happy. There is no more space for Creativity and it’s easy for your Idea to get lost in the effort to make it come true.

Yes, in my dreamlike vision ideas are unicorns.

I may should have said that I hate the money environment as I experienced it, not the money itself. It pays for broadband internet and this Masters after all. And raising some money in a creative way it’s one of the better chance we have to pursue the career we dreamt about, to think about our job smiling.  As young entrepreneurs that dream could be manage our own successful business for the most of us.

In a seeding phase, when it’s too soon to take the risk and establish a company, the best way to gain some weight and confidence, without getting lost (or ruined) I believe it’s crowdfunding.

First of all because It’s about relationships (again) and real people. It’s not just about getting your idea out there and wait but introducing your self and your idea with a story – a good one – to the right community. Secondly, It helps to research your market and discover whether or not there is a consistent market for your product.

There are different types of crowdfunding:

– Reward: your are giving rewards (little object, wallpapers, handwritten cards etc) in exchange for small/medium amount of money, or even pre-sell your product.

– Donation: this works for no-profit and social cause only.

– Equity: you are giving away shares of your business.

– Crowdlending (peer-to-peer lending or debt crowdfunding): many people lending you some money. It’s like a loan that you’ll have to pay back to people that invested on your business.

You can find a detailed explanation on the UK CROWDFUNDING website.

Reward crowdfunding is my favourite for two reasons:  1) You can feel less pressure from the stakeholders and have more freedom; 2) People are investing in your idea because they really love it and because you convinced them with your passion. This is an investment that could last longer then money: it’s pure motivation that will fuel your business.

As regards crowdfunding platforms, we all know Kickstarter, but there are many others less popular but effective. Sometimes you have to think smaller, let’s say locally (you local virtual community) , to have a bigger impact. The are some of my favourite:

KAPIPAL (Capital + Pal)

This is one of my favourite: “You friends are your Capital”. You can raise money for basically everything, from birthday present to business projects. They are not charging anything for this service, you can keep whatever amount you’ll raise and you can even not give any reward. Sounds crazy? Just try.

CROWDFUNDER

This is based on rewards and it’s one of the most popular after Kickstarter. They explicitly wrote on the website that “Crowdfunder loves projects that benefit the community, not just yourself”, which I believe is truly creative-economy-oriented. They also have a well-written guide on ISSUU about how to create the perfect crowdfundable project. There is a 5%+VAT fee though, and they also have a small charge on transactions.

CROWDCUBE

It’s Crowfunder’s younger and – let’s say – more ambitious brother. Our guests mentioned it, Crowdcube it’s based on equity  and lending funding. You’ll have to measure carefully the value of your business to sell shares (has to be a running business or have a detailed business plan) which – in my opinion – is difficult in an early stage. I used EQUIDAM for this purpose sometimes, it’s nice to play with that.

Funding Tree

Pretty similar to Crowdcube. Did I mentioned that they both have a pretty nice blog and events section? If your business is listed on one of this websites book your place, grab a glass of wine and go to meet some investors.

FundedByMe

This is a swedish platform (I love swedish people, could you believe that?) that offers both reward, equity and loan funding models. They are incredibly transparent and you can find the explanation of nearly everything about how their service works and what crowdfunding is on the website.

Our Friday lecturers mentioned also Funding Circle as loan-based platform and, even though I don’t know much about their service and I’m pretty scared about loans and banking stuff in general, I couldn’t help myself from being moved by the first sentence on their website: “Funding Circle was created with a big idea: to revolutionise the outdated banking system and secure a better deal for everyone”.

All this makes me think that we may have a new era in front of us; talking about money could be more human… so, maybe I’ll keep gathering information and start a conversation instead of running away.