Is entrepreneurship worth it? The question is, can you afford not to try?

I have ben interacting with many start up founder of my age who are in thier early stage. And also met many successful mentors who are still running thier own ventures including industry leaders like VP of product and engineering in well known companies ,from many years having positive cash flows .

I was deeply inspired by the commitment and dedication on thier ventures which I feel it's like a brain chield. while I talk with my own friends,they also sometimes express that building a start up is deram is a dream for them so this post is.

In this blog I am going to share my own experience , doing hands on building a new product initiatives and the hard learnt experiences that I have gathered for myself after getting mentored from few successful entrepreneurs.

I am not sure , how many software engineers have not tried some thing of their own and made their hands dirty in new product development for themselves and tried to give birth of a digital product. I was also one among them may be.

I started with building various mobile products to solve my own problems, like application like GPS tracking app to locate a rider's live location while WhatsApp was not even released for thier location sharing features; a parsing app to filter banking transaction related messages to calculate your transaction history from your SMSs...ans the list goes on till I learn the structured way of developing a successful product that usrs love and at the same time you can make revenue. I am assuming you are one of them who want to build a product or service in a sustaninble way without much trail and errors.

Finally , what I have learnt is that , its not only about the solution, but the problem you solve. The dollar is in the problem that peple wants to be solved. And here is a structured way of solving a real problem.

I was passionate in running, and it was buoyed physical. The reason I love is , because it taught me resiliency, meditative mind and a structured way of living a life. Now let's come to the real story.

I have been around their running community in various places in India and abroad, and I observed the struggles of a runners in various stages of their running experiences and running goals. so I wanted to help the people who want to improve thier running pace or distances with respect to thier goals. Someone just wanted to fininsh his first 10k, someone wanted to continuoiusly run5k without a break, and someone even who wanted to beat his personal best in a running event.

As suggested by my mentors I started researching about thier deeper pain points and unique need of running and made couple of one on one interaction with the runners; shared across 500+ surveys to understand thier needs. Formally we mention it as JOB. TO Be DONE. Many a time we think that getting insights from a use's conversation is anormal activity, but still there is structure to be followed .

The hundreds of response coming from the survey and filled in the google sheet, next we need to do is to find some commonality . The commonality may be of any kind, it may be based on the people who have certain running goals to be accomplished, on geography as I received responses from nation accross the world starting from India, Singapore to Western world of Europe and so on. willing ness to pay was another factors to be considered keeping in mind to validate the sustainability of the product as well as the pricing.

The survey response helped me to prioritize those segments which have willing ness to pay and have a bigger mass of users. It also helped to branin strome about what unique vale can I provide based on the runner's need.

I assumed, deciding a market segment is easy, however , You need to consider lots of factor before deciding segmentation . I consider myself it be milestone itself. My mentor even helped me to come up with a right marklet segment segment that has the potential to earn revenue, and as a business leader or enterprenure this decision makes a critical role.

In my practice, we have decided 2 segment like people who are busy in thier life and also feel the necessity to be fit and healthy. And all this were derived from the responses those we have collected from the survey responses.

We created Value proposition after brainstrming the Empathy Map and Job to be done.These also helps in your messaging in our Go TO Market strategies.

The next step was to actually assume few hypothisis on the problem, market segment and also Willing Ness to Pay.

This is a cricicasl step as skipping this would make you to spend lots of effort and resources uncecessarily(Money, developement time, effort and attention).

We tried to create a Landing page, mentioning the Value proposition as different packages corrosponding to Willing NessToPay. I can tell you building and sharing this LAnding page is a milestone :) and I can't express the happiness you would get to see you prototype as a webpage that you are going to see , wherether your problem has actually real value in the market or not :).

Aniother fasconating part was to integrate with some user tracking tool like Microsoft , whre you can recopord and visualise real users usages fottages on your landing page. Believe me this was exciting for the first time for me :).

I was quite excited to notice the users, clicking the sigh up button and going thoiugh the blog and the most fascinating part was , I could se people from across the wold to see my landing page :)

It proved a realistic measues whether your value propeision is alighed with te users problem or not.

Parallel to this activity, you also keep in mind about Positioning statement. this is very critical. Again derive your positioning statement form your survey responses.

While brainstorming about positioning, its also involves what users consider about other competitors products . Ideally you should have got to know from the customer interviews.

In GTM there is separate topic called Positioning Canvas. In a advanced way, you can even use data analytics to come up with a positioning canvas that we call as a perceptual map. In a perptual map, you consider users rating to know thier ideal brand in in thier mind, and you would be amazed how can you utilise this to make yourn own competetive positioing .

We will talk about GTM in a separate topic as it iteslf a major activity in your enterprenual activities.

One thing what excited me most is , seeing the users signed up my landing page and showing intrest to use my product.

While usages of your product, the next question will come, are your going to give it for free . If that's the case how will you survive. How will you bear your software development cost, marketing cost, leaving aside the cost of your time as a founder :)

The Pricing is another critical factor of any product and many product gets revenus in a in efficient way due to inefficient pricing models .Let's discuss this also in separate chapter.

Displaying pricing is important as you need to showcase upfront in your landing poage to see how many users actually have signed up in those various priced packages. There are various pricing tactics like 199 instead of 200 and many more :), Giveving away another product instead of offering straight discounts.

Once you have some traction in your landing page or prototype, you need to start thinking about validating how are you going to serve to the users. Its ok not to build the actual product right away and so experiment in a non expensive way. The way we did while building our health tech product to share the offering thorough whats app and receiving the responses in Whats app messages. It looks very funny, but thats how you will get the first hand initial feedbacks from the users. And these responses are extremely valuable to give a direction to creating and evolving the roadmap.

I used to still visit to meet marathoner or fitness enthusiasts to get feedback from my real prototypes mobile app that was built on Android. And surprisingly what I have realized that they want this application ore on Ios devices rather than Android device, which eventually altered my planned existing technical roadmap, and changing the roadmap baed on the customer feedbacks is a important aspect of product building.

Now I build this mobile app in React Native as a cross platform technology rather than investing individual time separately both in IOS and Android to faster go to market.

While writing this, one key aspect of GTM came to mind is that, you need to try with different channels to reach to the potential users. I collaborated with marathon organizer's of various sizes, published many blog posts and Instagram videos to get to the usr's hand. In this activity mentioning the right message to the right users is very critical, failing to which your product will make no value for them. So understanding the Messaging Pillers are critical to be learnt and understood.

While I discuss about GTM , I should also mention the different unit economics of your product. Customer Acquisition Cost, Life Time Value are the few terms you must consider while experimenting various GTM channels. May assumes that GTM only cobers about digital marketing, even I used to thoughts like that. however, it it to expericemt all possible channels and decide based on the channel economics.

At this point, my mentor also emphasized is that Cash flow is everything for any business and forecasting cash flow is very important, even from investors perspective. You are need to understand the Cash flow statement, Net Present Value, Internal Rate of Return etc.Lets talk in separate Financial forecasting topic specifically. for now, just understand how do you spend each quarter (Like adverting costs, fixed cost life office spendings and machenaries etc ) and how much revenue will you earn quarter by quarter. A statistical visualization would be helpful if you want to present to higher stockholders like investor-pitch to get buy-in :)

This is enough to get a overall importance of various aspect to try a new product for your start up of trying some innovation in an organization.

Hope this helps, Kindly write in the comments if you are willing to learn deeply on any topics to help your entreprenural or intraprenural or new inovation journey.

Good Luck !