Square One

Many of us don’t have a burning problem we want to solve and yet still want to build a startup. In today’s world many of the startup ideas come from a process called “ideation”. But what does ideation really mean and how do you do it? 

For anyone less familiar with the term, ideation means the formation of an idea or in the startup world, the process one goes through when trying to come up with a problem and a concept for a solution - or just what people refer to as a “startup idea”.

Around this time last year my partner Ofir and I started exploring a realm we were both interested in. One of the things you’re always told when approaching ideation is focus on the problem. And so we did. We set out to find a grand problem that we were interested in solving and not less importantly a problem we had an “edge” in solving. By “edge”, I’m mostly referring to how you would answer the question “Why us?”.

In my view, there are two fundamental questions that should be at the top of your mind with any “startup idea”. They are probably also the first two questions you will be asked when pitching your idea so you might as well start by asking yourself those questions. These questions are “Why now?” and “Why us?”.

Why Us?

Founder-Market-Fit as they call it, which roughly means “why are we best for the job?”. 

1) A problem that happened to us - we are the customers.

2) A solution that we are best fit to solve:

• Relevant expertise
• Relevant connections

Why now?

1) The solution can now exist

• New technological innovation - (e.g. new opportunity that can now technologically exist)
• New economic availability - (e.g. cheaper supply)
• New regulation allowing the solution

2) A problem that didn’t exist before/foresee a growing trend in adoption

• New technology that creates new challenges that didn’t yet exist
• New regulations that creates new challenges that didn’t yet exist (e.g. CCPA)
• Change of norm/preference/behavior in the target industry

3) Shift of your customer industry dynamics 

• Change in qualification (e.g. new customer segment)
• Change of regulations (e.g. allowing government to move to cloud)

Returning to our ideation process

Anyone who has ever gone through this process knows what a roller-coaster of feelings it involves. One day you might have some great feedback from customer discovery interviews and you think “Hey this is it!” and the next it’s worthless in your eyes and you’re back to square one.

After going through about two months of exploring problems in the realm we had chosen to focus on, we realized a few things:

1. This process is mentally tiring and very exhausting. 
2. The way we are ideating doesn’t seem to lead anywhere and feels like we are going in circles.

We decided we need a structure.

The structure we wanted to create was meant to help us avoid some mistakes we were making in the way we ideated so far.

Moving from series ideation to parallel

One of things that struck us as a problem with the way we were ideating so far, was that once an idea we explored fell through we were always back to square one. Sometimes it was an idea we explored for a month and sometimes only a day. 

As long as we were exploring the ideas consecutively (one after the other) we couldn’t move forward with more than one idea at a time and having one fall through meant returning to square one. More importantly what it meant was that we were “wasting” potential customer interviews along the way. Potential customer interviews that we could have utilized for exploring more than one specific problem.

Our Ideation Process: A funnel of refinement and validation

In addition, we recognized that over one idea we might conduct potential customer interviews right away, while over another we would first spend an extended amount of time learning about existing solutions, finding our technological edge, categorizing the market and so on. This brought us to realize we needed a flow of well-defined steps. 

The process we came up with is a funnel that could help us see the progress we are making on an idea and keep us from moving too fast or too slow.

So without further ado, this is the structured ideation process we created and refined along the way.  

Step 0: Idea generation (Backlog)

• Define the problem
• Define the solution

Make sure we have at least two ideas in the backlog before moving to step 1.In order to make sure we are ideating in parallel (explained previously).

Step 1: Refinement I

• Define the vision
• Use cases - refine the solution
• Hypothesis
• Identify the target audience

Step 2: Validation I

• Preliminary technical validation
• Competitive landscape
• Market size validation (i.e. Could this be a 1B company?)
• Meets our goals (i.e. Do you see yourself working on this idea for the next 7 years?)

Let it sink in - don’t go straight to step 3

Step 3: Refinement II

• Why now
• Why us
• Build the story
• Refine the vision
• Create first validation questions from the hypothesis

Step 4: Validation II (in parallel to Step 5)

• Validate with “close” friends.

Take into consideration they may be biased.

Step 5: Refinement III

• Technical review
• Create customer discovery deck
• Create wireframing
• Customer discovery questions from hypothesis
• Practice deck with friends
• Go back to steps 1 and 3 and refine them where needed

Step 6: Validation III

• Pitch to / validate with potential customer → obtain potential design partners

Step 7: Refinement IV

• Refine steps 1,3,5 (story, vision, problem, solution, target, use cases, hypothesis, questions, presentation)
• Go back to step 6
• Market refinement
• Competitive analysis refinement
• Build investor deck

Step 8: Validation IV

• Pitch investors

We used Trello but you can use any task management app you like to help structure your process.

Within the steps I went through in our structure I used many terms like “use cases” and “hypothesis”. I won’t go into explaining them here since I’m not an expert and there are many good resources about them out there, one of them being “four steps to epiphany” by Steve Blank. However, we did specifically define two terms that we felt were the essence of an idea. The terms were - “why now?” and “why us?” which we defined previously.

Final Thoughts

What’s more important than finding a great startup idea is finding a great partner to embark upon this journey with. Every stage of this journey comes with it’s challenges and we may just be at the beginning, however as long as I have my partner with me I’m certain we’ll tackle each challenge as it comes.

I would like to add that this structure we presented is just our personal view and I’ll be more than happy to learn about different processes you might have gone through in your Ideation. 

Feel free to comment or message me.

Rom Carmel