(2024-06-15) Maurya Don't Rush Outside The Building

Ash Maurya: Don’t rush outside the building. "Get outside the building" is one of the battle cries of the Customer Development/Lean Startup movement.

This is really a call for validating the riskiest assumptions in your business idea as early as possible with evidence-based facts you gather by interacting with customers.

While it’s possible to get outside the building. uncover customer problems, and even build an MVP that gets some traction, the danger is getting stuck with a sub-optimal business model that doesn’t match up with your vision or ambition — a zombie startup.

I. Focus on problems worth solving.

How do you prioritize which problems or which customer segments to tackle?

II. Problems worth solving are shaped by business model design constraints.

every business model can be deconstructed into key metric assumptions. Do these assumptions hold up your definition of success?

Start by deconstructing your big idea into a set of key assumptions using a 1-page Lean Canvas:

Suppose you can prove with a high degree of certainty that a given business model cannot deliver on your definition of success, even in a best-case scenario. Would you spend weeks running customer discovery or months building out an MVP?

you can stress-test the viability of any business model using a simple five-minute Rapid Viability Test (RVT) I created.

If your business model passes the RVT, you’re not guaranteed success, but realizing your business model is now within the realm of possibility.

The first objective of the RVT should be obvious: To eliminate sub-optimal business models from consideration.

The more important second objective is to surface key metric assumptions that inform your "outside the building" validation activities.

One of these key metrics is pricing.

Most founders come up with pricing after a solution is defined. This is backward.

Your target pricing comes from your business model design, and it constrains the size of problems and the number of customers you need to find to make your business model work.