Mr. Shaik Waseem is a Senior Entrepreneur Educator at Wadhwani Foundation, who works globally in partnership with governments, foundations, corporations, and educational institutes to inspire, educate, and enable startup entrepreneurs. He is a zestful, energetic and goal driven personality. In his young college days, the latter had an amazing startup idea but due to unavailability of complete knowledge of the market he instead decided to be a helping hand to the people who were facing the same issues regarding startups that he used to have. Now, under the mentorship of Mr. Shaik Waseem numerous successful start-ups like 2WheelR, chef @ home and Villotale have been doing pretty well for themselves.
Entrepreneurship is the term that is usually misunderstood by the common masses as unemployment, while in reality, it is an ability to develop, organize and run a business. But the time has changed a lot during two decades with the introduction of Made in India, Start-up India, Stand up India, and Atal Innovation Mission. These innovative steps have been introduced for empowerment of entrepreneurship by the emergence of IT and technology development. These missions help in guiding start-up ideas as well as help in their respective funding to their launch in market. The concept of business does not arise just by selling a product into the market, it arises long before the same. It is the place where entrepreneur plays a part in it. The mindset of an entrepreneur thinks more dimensionally and conceptually than that of a businessman. Entrepreneurship is more about innovative ideas for the betterment of life, it is different from business in terms of taking responsibility and no greed of making excessive revenue from their product, you can also consider entrepreneurship as the first or fundamental step for initiating a business. Business is like investment of energy, resources and technology on the existing model, while, entrepreneurship is the investment of energy, resources and technology on building up a novel product from scratch. While both the ways are joined in the end by launching their product into the market and making a profit from the same.
Entrepreneurship arises by identifying the problem, which is not easy in the first place. Identifying the problem is very necessary as it connects the thinking ability of an entrepreneur from the market to the consumer directly. He needs to understand whether the problem is worth solving or not, as not all problems require a solution.
Identification starts by observing the root cause of a problem by stating the problem, it should be detailed, clear and specific about the circumstances, behaviors, and social and emotional impact which is making it a problem. This could be easily achieved by taking customer’s polls, surveys, and perspectives on the problem. Direct connection with the customer is very crucial for finding the root cause. It could be achieved by analyzing the subsequent market according to the demand, resources, investors and technology.
Analyzing the market is a very crucial step when it comes to solving the problem and choosing right market for your product is a tedious job in itself. Market is generally not that simple as we have observed it, it has its various components which includes investors, demand and technology which decides future of any certain product. As entrepreneurs have limited resources, hence segmentation of market is required which can be demographic, psychographic, geographic and behavioral. This process of segmentation helps the entrepreneur in order to modify their product which is needed by the consumers. Here, comes an important criteria for testing some assumptions regarding the product which is sometimes termed as testing risky assumptions.
Testing risky assumptions is another way to dig the market in correlation to your product as we had identified the root cause of problem. It simply includes the various hypothesis which could affect the product performance, it could be either over estimation of the market size, lack of product performance or under/over estimation of competitors. These assumptions help to get a better view of market as sometimes the assumptions are neglected while sometimes they are not. There are three buckets that your main assumptions are going to fall under:
- Product
- Market
- Business & Execution Capability
Product building and performance is decided by three circles ie; Desirability, Viability and Feasibility, their intersect creates a sweet spot which makes the product to be effective. Entrepreneurs build a product which is beneficial to the customer in a specific way in which he had analyzed the problem statement. While describing the value proposition of the product, above mentioned customer surveys comes in handy. They help in describing what are the actual pains of the customer they want to eradicate, and what are there expected gains from the product. Evaluation of these surveys helps in designing the product more accurately and leads to its launching into the market for testing.
Launching a product into the market doesn’t generate revenue, but regular feedback from the customers is also required to modify the product so that it will be always in a demand. Creating a customer persona is the easiest way to connect to customers for complete feedback. These customer personas include various driving forces like early adaptors, they easily adapt to any new product from the market even if it is required by them or not just for the sake of technology. Later the product is analyzed by the majority of the consumers.