CareContent helps health care organizations engage patients online by offering a reserve of customizable web content. Participating in the Chicago Lean Startup Challenge did more than teach us how to validate this startup —it helped something that was just an idea become real. Here are the top three lessons we learned during the Challenge this summer.
1) How to do customer interviews
When this idea first came to me, my first instinct was to go to the library. Sure I ran the concept by several clients—I am a freelance medical writer for hospitals—but I spent more time googling and flipping through journals, not reaching out to potential customers. As the visionary and business development arm of the team, Lean Startup definitely turned on a light bulb to immerse myself in talking to customers. Each interview got more and more refined. We learned which questions to ask and how to recognize patterns in the answers. These answers led to a customer archetype that was so precise, we could pretty much predict mid-conversation which customers had the problem we wanted to solve. With solution interviews, we learned an incredible lesson—that your potential customers will tell you how to build the business. No need to go in a basement and figure things out. It’s just as important to keep talking to them while building as it is before building.
2) The meaning of the word “minimal”
CareContent came in first place in Startup Weekend Chicago in June. We worked intensely on designing and building a demo site, and the prize was to work on it more and present for another competition at TechWeek. But we got carried away. We built a demo site that was just a bit too beyond minimal. Now that our customers have told us how they want to use the site in a different way, we have to do a lot of back tracking. It’s not terrible because we’re learning, but I did get a good lesson in getting over my shame of showing wireframes. Had we been able to show photoshop wire frames of our demo site before building, we could go back and make some of those changes more easily. This time, we are excited about getting our in-progress wireframes in front of potential customers before we write any code.
3) That we truly have a valid business
Ideas are nice, and it’s easy to get carried away. But because of the Lean Challenge, I know this is not just an idea. It truly is a startup, with a solid customer segment, revenue model and channels to reach those customers. Lean Startup methods have become ingrained—I’m always saying “…but we have to test that.” I can absolutely see how following lean methods will keep us from wasting time, money and energy on ideas that should probably just stay ideas.
See our promo video and final presentation:
[video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5lEY5Hw4tU&feature=plcp]
