Now that you’ve validated your idea and have a refined business model, it’s time to build and test your solution! Although validation is not the focus of this stage, you will quickly learn that validation is a continuous process and is never truly complete. Throughout your entire entrepreneurial journey it is very important to continue validating your idea, refining your pitch, modifying your business model, and talking to your customers for feedback.

Just because these steps repeat, does not mean that you have to stop moving forward. Once you are happy with your Business Model Canvas, it’s time to take the next step towards bringing your business to market: namely, building the solution to your now clearly defined problem and testing that solution with your customers.

Stage 3 will dive into some key considerations for the prototyping stage, such as what to focus on when building your first prototype, how to test it, and eventually how to move your prototype to the market. Once again, every entrepreneur’s experience with this stage will differ. Some products or services are fairly easy to prototype (software, for example) while others may face extensive regulations, resource limitations, and research barriers. This is the stage where most entrepreneurs get stuck, but, with the tools and resources discussed in this stage, you can limit the barriers, and answer the questions you may run into, while taking this pivotal step in the entrepreneurial journey.

Objectives

By the end of this stage, you will be able to:

• Explain the connection between validation and testing
• Develop a plan for future prototyping and testing of your solution

Activity

Before starting this stage, Pause to think about the following questions:

• What is the product / service you will be testing?
• What is the value proposition you offer to your customer?
• Who will test your product / service?
• How will you reach your customers to initiate testing?
• How will you incorporate feedback into your Business Model Canvas?

Required Reading List

(in order of appearance)

Module 3.1

Quintyn, Rich. “How slack, Dropbox and Spotify achieved product-market fit (and how you can too).”Medium. April 16, 2018.

Module 3.2

Weinberg, Gabriel. “The Bullseye Framework for getting traction”. Medium, September 27, 2015.