How can you identify customers’ needs when you don’t have any customers or even a product? Formulate an initial hypothesis based on your experiences and test it in the field.
Suppose you’ve already discovered what you genuinely enjoy doing in life (see my previous post: the first ingredient for a successful side project – passion). In that case, you have everything you need to set your first business hypothesis.
- Remember what frustrated you the most while pursuing your passion.
- Imagine the perfect solution to these issues. Is it a product or a service?
My area of interest is programming and robotics. Here are the challenges I faced while trying to build my first robot:
- A lack of a professional no-code/low-code editor for programming microcontrollers.
- An absence of a universal and user-friendly environment for remote microcontroller control.
- No universal construction elements that can be used for building prototypes.
- A scarcity of educational materials for beginners, which would assist in building one’s robot step by step from scratch.
The potential solutions are evident:
- a no-code/low-code IDE for microcontrollers,
- a cloud platform for remotely controlling microcontrollers,
- a construction kit for building prototypes akin to LEGO or Meccano,
- a series of books titled “How to Build Your Robot from Scratch”.
In the following stages, I’ll check if enough people worldwide face similar challenges and if my potential products are what they’re looking for.