Workshop Outline:
Any well developed business plan is in reality just a list of assumptions. We are as humans are very bad at predicting the future and can easily be caught by surprise when things don’t turn out the way we expect them. However it hurts so much more if you are a solo entrepreneur and have already invested plenty of your own resources into a new product development. Would it be nice to know earlier than later of the things that could kill your idea or business? Good news! There is a methodology for that.
In the world of entrepreneurship assumptions belong to the domains of market, business and technology, but the deal breaker ones are always related to customers. There is no need to waste resources in developing freelance service or product if now one buys it in the end. Getting to know your customers, through testing the market assumptions first, can help you to uncover customer needs, which can be later translated into valuable product features or service offerings. To run these tests you don’t have to be a marketing expert or have a big budget. During the workshop you will learn how to write, sort, prioritize market assumptions and prepare experiments to test them cheap and easy, so you can faster kill a bad idea or develop a product or service your customers will love and pay for.
Instructors:
Yulia Smotrova
Yulia has 6 years of international experience in developing and implementing of internal and open innovation initiatives for small and large organizations combined with 5 years of providing IT consulting services. Currently she runs an innovation consultancy “Time To Leap” in Berlin and is the official Lean Startup Ambassador of Europe. In the past she was a Corporate Innovation Manager at Philip Morris International for EMEA region and before that a CRM, BI, ERP Consultant in New York. Yulia graduated from Finance University – BS, Bloomsburg University – BS, MBA and Stanford University – Innovation & Entrepreneurship.
Mario Schwery