14 Products in 14 Days - An Experiment in Product Discovery

Hello! I'm Kirsten. Welcome to 14 Products in 14 Days - an experiment in product discovery, and a trial run for a process I developed called the Product Discovery Sprint.

Objective:
Through a process of rapid-fire product-market testing of 14 products over 14 days, I hope to discover a strong(ish) market need and launch a productized service that fills a need. Through doing so, I hope to create a side stream of income while building something cool that helps people.

Motivations:
I've worked on a bunch of different software startups, but none of them experienced the fiery product-market fit that they'd need to generate lasting revenue. While I loved working on fast-paced, VC hungry teams, I fundamentally want to build something that I know is going to solve a market problem and generate scalable revenue without being reliant on VC. This entails taking a different sort of approach to designing a company; one that is less focused on being a hyper-innovative unicorn and one that is more concerned with intimately understanding and solving client/user problems from day one. This was the motivation that drove me to launch this project: 14 Products in 14 Days.

The Product Discovery Sprint was designed to help me ideate on, evaluate, and validate potential product offerings across various markets through experimentation. The core goal of the Product Discovery Sprint is to hone in on a strong market need that is currently underserved, and launch a product that is proven to fulfill that market need. I hope to innovate through replication, with slight augmentation - that means examining how others are making money serving a market need and replicate/improve on their work. This provides a higher degree of certainty of a market need being there than starting with an idea of your own and attempting to validate it.

I'm not going to be full-on building 14 products in 14 days. Rather, I'm going to be creating 14 MVPs in 14 days. I am intentionally going to focus on productized service model offerings, as these offerings are super easy to develop no-build MVPs for and build teams for.

The Product Discovery Sprint was inspired loosely by the Agile Methodology. Each week, I will conduct one full sprint (outlined below). If I find a strong market need after the first sprint, I will consider just pursuing that product as opposed to managing a second sprint. I'm thinking I should have found at least one strong product after the second sprint.

After this project is complete, I will compile takeaways and lessons learned (and hopefully walk away with a new company)! I'll be posting these takeaways on Medium, Twitter, IndieHackers, and perhaps Linkedin.

More About Me:
I run a consultancy that helps tech startups develop go-to-market strategic partnerships. I love consulting, but I (as many founders do) have an itch to scale something with an even bigger impact and even stronger revenue. I hope to scale whatever comes out of this experiment alongside my consultancy to provide another stream of income and a greater impact. "

Timeline:
June 1st - June 19th (2 Sprints)

Criteria for Potential Offerings:
Productized service. Quick-start. Can easily hire talent to help execute. Location independent. Preferably B2B. Preferably serving software/tech businesses. Must be in a growing market. Must be in a pretty decent sized market. Optimally would be in a depression-resistant market.

The Product Development Sprint:

Step 1 - Plan (Day 0-1)

• Organize when you'll be working on what, when
• Set deadlines for accomplishing each "step"

Step 2 - Ideate: Generate a set of ideas for services within a set period of time (Day 1-2)

• Two two hour blocks worth of generating ideas for offerings, with a focus on observing what problems other companies are solving, in what markets as opposed to ideating off the top of your head
• See "Tips for the Ideation Phase" in the "Resources" tab

Step 3 - Evaluate: Is this idea worth building a landing page for and validating based on key data points? (Day 3-4)

• Two three hour blocks of evaluating and narrowing down the ideas from the ideation session
• See the "Product Ideation and Evaluation" tab to see what my criteria for evaluation are

Step 4 - Validate: Talk to target market customers, try to sell, gain feedback (Day 4-5)

• Landing page. Whip up a quick landing page and stick it on a random domain I own.
• Cold sales. Connect with businesses in the target market of the offering. Cold sell (phone/email), with the help of a landing page. Record responses for evaluation. (Even though you hate doing cold sales, it's hella effective, I'm telling ya!)

Step 5 - Draw Conclusions: Determine whether a project is worth scaling/pivoting slightly based on market response (Day 6)

• Fix the Sprint! If there are any ways that I felt the sprint could be optimized based on my experiences, I shall tweak the sprint accordingly. I'll keep this initial version of the sprint visible on another tab, and paste the other updated variation here.
• Determine if a project is a go! I will look at the responses I got based on my outreach and do some rudimentary napkin math to determine if the market is worth servicing. If you have business evaluation napkin math theorems that you'd like to donate, please slide into my DMs: @kirstenrpomales

I'll be posting updates daily. Here's today's update:

June 1, 2020:
Today is launch day! I finished writing the "Read Me" document for 30 Products in 30 Days, finished polishing up the Product Discovery Sprint, and re-listened to episode 362 of Tropical MBA all before 12:00 PM, ET. I finished the ideation phase for this Sprint, and have a list of 40 ideas for productized services (both good and bad). Next step is identifying which of the 40 I want to test out this week in the "Evaluation" phase of the sprint. Looking forward to determining which ideas are the most resilient tomorrow!

-KPL
@kirstenrpomales