Questions and answers

Last week, I interacted with a group of management students, a number of whom had got the entrepreneurial itch and were looking at starting up soon. In the last two columns, I talked about the “nature” i.e. certain behavioural patterns that aid in creating entrepreneurs, and also the underlying systemic factors that it takes to create entrepreneurs. These students had these both down pat.

But what this also meant was that they were rather unbridled in their conviction of how awesome their startup ideas were. While I did not want to dampen any of that enthusiasm and self-belief, what I did talk about was how to put their idea through a few hoops, so when it gets through those hoops they can be even more gung-ho about their startup ideas.

This is not just about defining your startup’s target audience correctly, defining the problem statement correctly, and making sure that there is a product-market fit — those are all critical of course, and any would-be entrepreneur who is not doing these should not be starting up in the first place. So when it comes to these, follow the textbook and do them all.

An important step after you are done with the basics is a thorough understanding of how your target audience currently behaves in the area relevant to your idea. Let’s say your startup aims to solve the problem of last-mile connectivity in urban commuting. And this is where I may be in some sense donning my quizmaster’s hat. Ask yourself the following questions and know the answer thoroughly. What do commuters do today to reach the metro/train station? What do they do today once they get out of the station? Do they stick to the same pattern every day, or does it change based on some factors? For example, what do they do on days it rains? What do they do on days when they are in a hurry?

What is wrong with whatever they are doing today? Is your idea better? Can you convince commuters that your idea is better? Even if they are convinced, what will it take for them to change from whatever they are doing to your idea? Will they get others to use your idea too?

These questions are just a small indicative list, and ideally the entrepreneur should come up with dozens and dozens more that they ask themselves and find the answers to. And of course, each idea will have its own set of questions.

More importantly, the entrepreneur finds that the answers to these questions keep evolving, and they need to make their startup idea either malleable enough to such changes, or something that works despite all those changes. It is not enough if you are a natural entrepreneur, or have other underlying factors that help you with starting up — the more answers you know to questions you ask yourself about your startup idea, the higher the chances of success that you will have.

In this weekly column, we discuss the startup workplace. Thejaswi Udupa heads product and technology for an online building materials marketplace.