Whether you’ve just successfully closed your funding round (congrats 🥳) or on your path to setting up your campaign (best of luck 🍀) the challenges and risk in starting and scaling a business are always present. It’s important to de-risk your time and investment before finding out too late that the route you’ve gone down was the wrong one.
Whilst customer and product discovery is crucial at all stages of your business journey, it can be tough to know how to explore and de-risk your product or service across different areas:
- The problem you’re solving
- Who your customers are (including early adopters)
- What the solution might be to solve your customers’ problems
- Creating a sustainable business model
- Finding an effective and scalable route to market
Lunos has been created to support early-idea to scaleup businesses, accelerate market confidence and demonstrate traction. The goal being to de-risk key resources and enhance any build, launch, funding or growth goals. We work alongside businesses to run resourceful experiment sprints, engaging with the market to get insights which builds supporting evidence to continue on your path or if needed quickly change the course of direction before any serious impact.
For new businesses
Build an audience of early adopters
Focus on finding your early customers, really understanding their world and the challenges they face relating to your business. Look at how you can add value to them and help solve some challenges before your product exists. As a result you may even be able to get pre-orders - the best form of traction!
Understand your wider market
Look at market and sector trends. Fully understand your competition and alternatives (consider non obvious competitors i.e. Disney+ is the obvious competitor to Netflix but so are non digital options such as reading a book, listening to music or going to the pub). This can help you refine your value proposition and identify areas for differentiation.
Build a landing page
Test how you talk about and present the proposition and solution to drive a call to action such as signing up to a waitlist, downloading a report/guide or registering for a webinar. Over time this page will expand and can become your full marketing site.
Simulate your product or service
This can be a tricky one but the concept is about looking at how you can provide the core value the product or service to customers using little or no tech. Doing this tests the core assumption whilst serving your customers. Keeping it low tech means you get direct market insight on what you need to build.
For existing businesses
Collect customer feedback
Engage with existing customers regularly to gather feedback and identify any new challenges they have. This can help you refine your product and better meet their needs.
Build strategic partnerships
Partner with other companies or organisations that can help you reach new customers or expand your offerings. This can help you build credibility and demonstrate your ability to execute on your vision.
Talk to your team
Understand from team members who deal with customers day to day - sales and customer success teams will likely have amazing customer insights.
Conduct user testing
Create interactive prototypes or proof of concepts and run user tests to help get learning from users before development begins. This can help to quickly highlight any UX challenges or bigger problems.
