If You Build it Will They Come Book Summary

Posted on by Andy Boyd

Three Steps to Validate any Market Opportunity

If You Build It Will They Come is, in some ways, a precursor to Lean Startup. In the book, Rob Adams lays-out a simple process for launching a new business/product.

Adams simplifies the process with three easy-to-remember phases: ready, aim, fire.

The following lists the three separate checklists as you prepare to launch your product.

The Ready Checklist

  1. Domain Knowledge: where did you get your idea?
    • Based on experience, stick with what you know.
  2. The Market: How big is it and how fast is it growing?
    • Figure out the overall market size and its growth rate for the geography you are targeting. Compare the market growth rate to the economic growth rate. If your category is growing faster than the overall economy, you’re on the right track. If your category is growing slower than the overall economy, you are at your first decision point.
  3. Lifecycles and Trends: how are these affecting your market?
    • Evaluate the lifecycle of the market. If you’re at the first half of the lifecycle distribution, you’re in good shape. If you’re on the declining back-half, that’s a tough decision point.
    • Know the macro trends affecting your market
  4. Your competitors: What are they doing?
    • Thoroughly evaluate your competition. This means direct competitors and substitutes for your product.
  5. The experts: what do they say?
    • Develop name-brand or other highly credible sources to make your business case for you.
    • Don’t forget, establish a relationship with a market analyst early on

The Aim Checklist

  1. Research: learning what you really need to know
    • The key part of market validation is objectively evaluating your market to understand market pain in detail
    • Your metric here is at least 100 of these direct interviews during your market validation efforts
  2. Interviews: Getting to the market pain
    • Your interview techniques should be focused on fact-finding
    • Starting interviews: assess the overall market requirements by understanding usage patterns in your potential target audience
    • Midpoint interviews: focus in on the proposed pain you are addressing and seek to understand how you can deliver an offering with differentiated characteristics to address this pain.
    • Finishing interviews: you are focusing on more successively on your final offering and potential markets
  3. Who are you after: Finding your target audience
    • To effectively know your market, you need to know all the available sources, the quality of the lists, and the numbers of names available in the markets you are targeting.
    • Track the productivity of these list sources while conducting Aim interviews so that you understand what type of lists and productivity you can expect when you eventually launch your product.
  4. Turning data into results: how to practically apply all that you’ve learned
    • Use statisticians and other professionals here, as extensive data analysis can frequently be performed on rudimentary results.
  5. Outside Help: Using research
    • Market research and strategy consulting firms have experience performing this kind of work and can be invaluable around questionnaire development, sourcing names, data analysis, and interpretation
  6. Countdown: preparing the market for your product
    • The knowledge you have developed thus far has provided you with real-time feedback to your sales and marketing efforts.

The Fire Checklist

  1. Sales and Marketing: Budget for it
    • In today’s brutally competitive and crowded markets, customers do not find your product; your job is to find them.
    • If you are working on a fixed budget, reallocate on this 50/50 basis (50% marketing / 50% product development) to assure all your market validation efforts receive proper follow-through
  2. The details: write product specs and schedules
    • Once you have accumulated all the information from your market validation efforts, you need to document how these translate into product features and in turn create a aschedule to develop those features into a finished offering
    • Within these skill sets, the sales and marketing team needs to develop a PRD, or product requirements document, clearly outlining how the Market Validation results are translated into features and functionality
    • Once the PRD is complete, the research and development team needs to break down each of the product features and functions into a development schedule with corresponding time frames.
  3. Fast to market: get a market-oriented product out quickly
    • It is critical to get the product out quickly
  4. Early customers: recruit design partners and advisory boards
    • Create a Design Partners Program – end-users of your product who you keep up to speed on the progress of your development
    • Create a Board of Advisors – put together for commercial offerings when there are many decision makers involved in the buying process
  5. Showtime: launch, market, and sell the product
    • Execute a well-funded launch, sales, and marketing campaign.