How design thinking will help you come up with great business ideas.
Starting a business or a startup is tough.
But…
It’s worth it.
Many people don’t start businesses because they don’t have a higher risk appetite.
Some of them start but fail because they start without a framework, and the result is that they lose most of their income and time to build something useless.
They work on a problem they think is a problem, but it doesn’t exist.
If you are starting a business, consider that their needs are a demand and a market need for that business.
If you start without researching, seeing trends, and analyzing the market opportunity of your product and service, then the outcome will not be favorable for you.
The main tenet of design thinking is empathy for the people you’re trying to design for. Leadership is exactly the same thing – building empathy for the people that you’re entrusted to help.
– David Kelley, Founder of IDEO
Now, would you like to start a startup?
If your answer is yes, then read the whole article until the end.
Here are the steps in the process:
Step 1: Empathize:
You can conduct interviews so that you can get a fair idea of what people care about. Just dive deeper into their pain points and desires to understand their goals and objectives and what they are looking for.
Understand their situation and what they need in life but can’t find anywhere.
Step 2: Define the problem:
Deep dive into all the problems you identified during conducting interviews and focus on common words and phrases they used again and again.
Step 2: (1) Problem Statement:
Write a short description of the specific problem that needs to be solved. Make sure you write as descriptively as possible and highlight the specific portion. Use bullet points and format it so that it feels good to read and you can quickly scan through whenever possible.
Step 3: Ideation:
Now you need to focus on the problem statement and come up with ideas. You might think that you need to come up with creative ideas.
No…
Just come up with as many ideas as you can. Create a rough document or sketch, which can be digital or physical, and show it to the people with whom you have conducted the interview.
Ask them if they can pay for it if the product is available on the market.
Listen to them carefully and take notes.
Step 4: Prototype:
It’s time to get your hands dirty to launch your product on the market.
Now, you need to ask yourself: How can your idea fit into the context of people’s actual lives?
Focus on combining the ideas with information and resources you think can be useful, or what is already being used, and connecting the dots. Then you need to select the final solution to build a real prototype.
Step 5: Test:
You need to try the product with real users.
Learn what’s working and what’s not working, and make notes of everything.
If the feedback is great, then review your prototype and apply all your learning to launch your product on the market.
Conclusion:
Start with a simple conversation.
Understand your potential buyers or customers better than anybody else.
Define the problem and identify the ideal use case.
Research the ideal solution to solve the problems of those people.
Create a prototype and get feedback.
Work and refine the solution until you get the best outcome to create a finished product.
You have the blueprint to start a startup; now it’s time to work.
