In March, our team had the pleasure of traveling to Singapore to visit our clients and strategic partners.
It was truly an unforgettable trip!
source: Hu Chen on Unsplash
We had a fantastic day, with plenty of sunshine, and we were thrilled to release two new SaaS products that were the result of our collaborative efforts with our clients and partners.
Apart from work, we also had an amazing time exploring the most modern and environmentally friendly city in the world. The city’s greenery and architecture were absolutely breathtaking, and we had the opportunity to immerse ourselves in its unique culture.
From the food to the people, everything about Singapore was just amazing, and we left with a newfound appreciation for the city-state.
source: Jisun Han on Unsplash
As a team, we were really glad to have been able to deliver such great products that will help our clients go to market, get feedback, and gain traction for the next round of development.
Although there are still many ideas for products in the backlog, we enjoyed what we have so far, and we’re happy to have been able to innovate and create new software and business models for our clients. We strongly believe that these new products will help our clients succeed in their businesses.
We believe that by continuously improving our products and services, we can help our clients stay ahead of the competition and achieve their goals.
Looking ahead
We have more SaaS (Software as a Service) releases planned for this year, and we’re incredibly excited to continue collaborating with our clients and partners in creating innovative solutions that will help their businesses thrive in today’s ever-changing world.
Let’s meet at [email protected] to together we turn on the light for Green innovations. Follow our blogs to catch up on the latest innovative solutions trends!
Do you know what successful products like Airbnb, Spotify, and Uber have in common? They were way different from what they look like today. That’s because these products all started with a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) before evolving into their mature versions as we know today.
So, what is MVP? Why does it matter? How to build an MVP? What comes afterwards? Let’s discuss and figure out the answers in this article.
What is MVP?
Eric Ries, who coined the term, defined an MVP as the early version of a new product that allows a development team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.
As thus, a Minimum Viable Product version consists of just enough features to solve the ultimate problem for which the product is born.
The vehicle example below is a classic illustration of the general idea behind the minimum viable product. It’s important to keep in mind that MVP is not delivering an unfinished product (as in the upper illustration), which would confuse users “What am I supposed to do with a tire while what I ordered is a car?“; but rather a simple yet working product that is able to address the most important, basic customer need. For instance, looking at the lower example, the key customer need is moving from A to B faster. Then a skateboard could be the earliest MVP version that fulfills the customer need while allowing the development team to learn and get feedback. Throughout the evolution from the skateboard to the fancy roadster, all the versions of the products, either sketchy or sophisticated, must be functionable.
source: viblo.asia
The MVP approach plays a critical role in agile development as it focuses on time to market first and makes improvements and adjustments later.
What are the main porposes and benefits of building MVP?
The use of MVP allows companies, especially startups, to avoid typical pitfalls and resolve critical challenges during the initial stage of product development.
The first and most common mistake is adding redundant features while losing focus on the questions that really matter. In this respect, MVP approach supports companies to clarify the core functionality of their product while allowing testing business concept with minimum costs and time. By offering the core set of features, rather than a feature-heavy product, companies can verify from very beginning if their product concept resonates with target customers while having opportunities to change product directions and strategies based on gained insights.
Secondly, another common problem with new products when entering market is limited customer understanding. The MVP approach aims to collect feedback from early adopters. These users will tell you which functions they appreciate the most and which should be pending till next releases. With an MVP, companies are empowered to be responsive to constantly changing needs of a fast-paced market, while quickly leveraging the latest technologies. Instagram could be a prime example in this regard, for having successfully leveraged customer intelligence from its MVP versions to change its business model from GPS feature to a photo-sharing application as we know today.
Thirdly, MVP helps increase the speed to market. In such a breakneck pace world today, if you’re not quick enough, there will probably be another company that can release an equally cool app before you. Therefore, by adopting the MVP approach, companies can save a lot of time possibly wasted on low-prioritized features or expensive bug fixes.
The last but not the least is economic benefits. An MVP could help prevent the product from becoming costly, over-complicated with sophisticated coding, UI effects and features. Besides, several businesses rely on investor buy-in to secure funding. In such cases, an MVP is an effective way to demonstrate the product’s potential to win the market before investors, without building a bunch right from beginning.
What comes after a minimum viable product?
By moving along with the project, companies may have several MVPs, each corrected based on customer insights. At the end of this process, companies should have accumulated enough MVPs. They thus manage to figure out the basic set of features that customers are ready to pay for. The version built on this basic set is called Minimal Marketable Product (MMP). An MMP should allow companies to launch their product early at a cost that is lower than which required for a full version. This is a bright strategy to make certain return on investment while further developing and upgrading.
After having MVP and MMP, which focus on fundamental elements, companies might start to develop a Minimum Lovable Product (MLP). It should be an abridged version of what you’re planning by offering not barely basic functionality but also some features that are unique and more enjoyable. An MLP should include attributes that create emotions and make users want to share. Emotion is hugely influential, especially in overcrowded markets, it can be a deciding factor.
What are the differences between MVP & prototype?
Prototype is a prior stage of an MVP. If MVP is a basic but working version, a prototype is the first draft with probably errors or bugs. It is, actually, an early attempt to visualize the working idea, including design and functionalities, to validate the user interface (UI) and user experience (UX). Prototypes don’t aim to be launched but just tested in a small scope with limited and selected users.
What are the main steps of building an MVP?
The process of MVP development generally includes 6 stages.
Step 1: Define problem and scope
Like any product development methodology, it always starts with determining target customers and their concrete problems that the future product wishes to solve. The “scope” here means the aspects of the problem that your product will focus on and which solutions could be feasible given your available resources.
Step 2: Conduct market research
Market research helps ensure that your product idea fulfills the needs of potential users. The more insights you have, the higher your chance of success is.
The market research phase also helps to learn about existing competitors and what they offer. Such learnings will help you to confirm your product’s differentiations – if they are strong enough to convince people to choose your product over other alternatives?
Step 3: Prototype potential solution
The design process is a crucial stage. You may need to look at your product from user perspective to create a smooth user experience. A product prototype allows you to simulate the user experience to make necessary changes before jumping into coding.
Fun fact: Steve Jobs avoided the stage of prototyping while building the Apple Lisa. As a result, this product was a catastrophe and unprofitable.
Step 3: Prototype potential solution
The design process is a crucial stage. You may need to look at your product from user perspective to create a smooth user experience. A product prototype allows you to simulate the user experience to make necessary changes before jumping into coding.
Fun fact: Steve Jobs avoided the stage of prototyping while building the Apple Lisa. As a result, this product was a catastrophe and unprofitable.
Step 4: Define a list of features
Feedback loop plays a vital role in MVP development, and you should start working on it right after showing the first prototype to your focus group. Based on collected feedback, you can have ideas to prioritize features for the next MVP release.
Step 5: Build and launch MVP
Once you have decided upon feature prioritization, it’s time to build your first MVP. Keep in mind that although an MVP needn’t to be a brilliant product, it still needs to be able to fulfill the key customer needs as defined in Step 1 and validated in Step 2. Also, it should be engaging, easy to use and straight to the point so that users can complete an expected user story in the most convenient way possible.
Step 6: Build, Measure, and Learn
Feedback collecting shouldn’t end when the MVP development starts. You should iterate again and again based on user feedback.
How to define features to include in an MVP?
There are varying methods to define features to be prioritized in MVP. Below we are going to introduce three of the most commonly used frameworks, including: MoSCOW, Story Mapping, and Kano.
MoSCoW
MoSCoW is a straightforward method of prioritizing features that categories features into 4 groups in order of priority.
source: productplan.com
Story Mapping
Similar to MoSCoW, Story Mapping also considers the feature prioritization but under each activity of User Journey. This method enables a broader perspective while addressing more granular features than the privious method.
The top most significant features that cover the entire user journey are designated as the Walking Skeleton and have to be included in the MVP.
Kano
Kano method maps the satisfaction against effort and money in order to classify features into four groups, as following:
Basic features: include features that customers usually take for granted. Those are minimum acceptance criteria for the product, the “price of entry” to the market. Any poor execution of basic features can lead to immediate dissatisfaction, while improved execution can result only in neutral satisfaction.
Neutral (Indifferent) features: are those that don’t add much value, and customers don’t care whether those features are present or absent. Their satisfaction level remains neutral under either circumstance. You certainly do not want to invest in their implementation.
Performance features: includes attributes that differentiate products from others and directly correlate to customer satisfaction.
Delighter features: are novel features that create unique selling points and encourage users to share with their surroundings.
How much resource does it take to build an MVP?
The development cost varies depending on different factors, like core functionality of the MVP, the developer’s location, the amount of features, MVP complexity, time constraints. However, in general, key influential factors can be classified into three groups: time, money and human resource.
Time: To make long story short, from our experience working with various startups at Enable Startup, we would say 3 to 5 months to build an MVP on average.
Money: Development cost for an average good-quality MVP depends largely on the country of the developer. Check below a rough estimate for different regions.
source: intelivita.com
Human Resource: Depending on specific requirements of each project, the company can decide to build an internal developer team or outsource to external agencies or freelancers. Regarding team structure, fundamental expertise includes front-end/back-end development, UX-UI design, QA and product or project management. The number and seniority of each expertise depend on the complexity of the MVP and will contribute considerably to the ultimate cost.
What are famous success stories of adopting MVP approaches?
A number of well-known applications started small with MVPs first and adopted extensive but expensive features later on over the years.
Airbnb is a prime example of concierge MVPs. With no money to build a business at their early days, the founders of Airbnb decided to use their apartment to validate their idea of creating an online marketplace that offers short-term rental housing. This MVP was not as fancy as its current look, but rather a minimalist interface with photos and general info about their property. The two founders found several paying guests almost immediately. After launching the MVP, Airbnb continuously collected feedback and learned from customers to improve its products. Currently, Airbnb provides extensive features, such as Airbnb adventures which allow customers to connect with local guides and explore local culture.
Dropbox is also one of the best cases of leveraging MVP. It was firstly introduced by its founders in a demo video. This video went viral and now become one of the biggest cloud services in the world.
MVP is meant for start-ups, not established enterprises, isn’t it?
No, it is a misconception. Actually, large enterprises also use this approach quite often.
MVP approach is widely applied in the early stage of digital transformation, when organizations almost building their IT infrustructure from scratch. MVP development in this case is much similar to which happens in startups. The biggest difference is that unlike startup MVPs, enterprises often implement multiple MVPs that are different parts of an entire system.
It is also well leveraged to enhance mature products. Typically, the MVP method is useful when introducing a mobile app version of an existing web-based application. For example, in 2010, after their first three years in the market, Dropbox started trickling out their mobile app MVP instead of waiting until being ready to launch a full-feature product.
In addition, MVP can be effective in validating user perception toward future features or when considering the integration of new features with an established product, such as integrating payment gateways with an e-com website.
Bonus: HBR has four other tips for launching MVPs in big companies.
Rounding off
MVP is an approach that empowers startups to effiently discover their target users, without overspending resources. MVP does not have to be perfect, as Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, said: “If you are not embarrassed by your first product, you launched too late.”
Let’s meet at [email protected] to discuss further about MVPs and much more. We at Enable Startup have a lot of exciting lessons learned, yet-to-be-answered questions and hopefully, advice for your next sofware development projects!
In reality, technology is just one among 3 pillars of a holistic digital transformation strategy, beside people and process. The incompetence in either pillar could results in under-performance of your initiatives, meaning waste of time, money, effort, not to mention the detrimental effect to decision makers’ reputation.
In this article, we’ll walk you through the most asked questions around the topic of digital readiness at both the individual level (a.k.a. user readiness) and the organizational level as a whole.
Digital Readiness – What does it mean?
Digital Readiness represents the readiness level of both organization and its workforce to transition into digitized workflows that are enabled by new technologies introduced during the digital transformation.
How important is user readiness in the success of a digital transformation initiative?
Rushing to either build or buy software without sufficiently preparing your employees, who will supposedly work with those tools on a daily basis, is just wrong. Indeed, this is one of the most common reasons why only 30% of digital transformation initiatives actually succeed versus 70% of all IT projects.
Aon’s research shows that 84% of participants have listed being agile and change-ready as an important discussing topic on the table of their company. Also, organizations that can identify or create a motivating culture towards changes are 4 times more likely to succeed in their efforts to transform, compared to companies that underestimate this stage.
How can companies assess their readiness for digital transformations?
Assessing your organization’s current status in term of digital capability should be the first and foremost task, prior to setting goals, creating roadmaps or adopting any software.
Apparently, this cannot be done within a rudimentary SWOT analysis or so, but rather requires thorough self-assessment methodologies that are tailored for the organization in question.
While the exact approaches are never the same, most available digital readiness self-assessment tools are making use of questionnaires and interviews that are built upon specific sets of criteria and indicators. After using such methods to collect relevant qualitative and quantitative data, certain analysis, evaluation and benchmarking frameworks will come in place to turn those data into insightful and actionable conclusions.
Let’s take a look at two examples that apply the aforementioned approach and see what you can learn from them.
A/ Digital Readiness Level – DRL tool
DRL tool, first launched in 2018 as a joint effort of several UK organizations, aimed at helping companies to benchmark their readiness and prioritise their DX initiatives and compare their status with other companies of similar size, sector and region.
DRL tool consists of a 1-hour questionnaire, focusing on 3 different pillars namely Leadership, Technology, and Value, along with 10 different competencies, all in all providing a deep understanding about digital status of the company on each of them. The idea can be illustrated through the following framework:
B/ The KRI (Key Readiness Indicators)
In the same vein, the KRI approach is based on a self-assessment tool named “Digital Check” developed by the authors of this research paper. Quite similarly to the DRL tool, the KRI also allows companies, especially SMEs to evaluate their digital readiness level across different dimensions. Those are Strategy, Processes, Industry 4.0, Employees, Information Technology and Data Security, classified as D1, D2, D3, D4, D5 respectively in the following table, that summarizes the combination of interview questions used in KRI:
What are criteria for digital readiness?
After you have accomplished the assessment process, it would be necessary to reflect to what your ideal digital readiness level looks like, in order to determine next steps.
Again, every company should have its own set of criteria, based on their unique business strategy, expectations and resource capabilities. Even though, the framework below, proposed in the book called Digital Economy. Emerging Technologies and Business Innovation, can give a reference to companies who are attempting to set criteria for their digital transformation projects.
How to cultivate a change-ready culture in your business?
Everything starts with the process of listening to what the employees think and feel about the incoming digital changes. In other words, it boils down to the concept of “employee empathy”.
At this step, the whole job is very similar to user research and product marketing in product development in general, in which your employees are target users and the future digital transformation initiatives are products.
With that mindset and approach, you can consider these stages to craft the best positioning for your digital transformations in your people’s perspectives:
1. Identify digital readiness at the individual level
It would be ideal if everyone is on a same page towards the upcoming transformations. However, in most of the cases, that scenario doesn’t happen. Instead, employees would have varying reactions and attitudes towards each of changes. This means the better you segment them, the more effective you will be in preparing them before imminent digital changes are in place.
So, the main question should be HOW are you going to proceed with this step of segmentation in the most efficient way possible?
Often, companies would leverage user research methods like interviews, observations, surveys, combining with some kinds of tests to assess employees’ digital proficiency. Whatever approaches you use, the underlying rationale should be robust and convincing. We would recommend you to structure your data collection methods based on the following frameworks:
#1.
This relatively simple matrix looks at 2 dimensions of individuals’ digital readiness, which are attitude and ability. Different levels within each dimension are then paired with each other to make up 3 segments of employees: Full change-ready, Ready but not capable, Capable but not ready, illustrated as below.
#2.
A more complex approach is referred to by Mercer | Mettl. This digital readiness assessment tool comprises 2 parts: Digital potential assessment & Digital proficiency assessment, that are respectively concerned with future capability and current proficiency of each individual within the organization.
The 1st part thus consists of 2 sub-tools: Mettl Personality Profiler (a kind of personality test to examine people’ behavioral competencies) and Mettl Test for Abstract Reasoning (a non-verbal logic test to assess cognitive ability). These 2 tests would group participants into 9 boxes, corresponding to 9 levels of digital capacity. Whereas, the other part of the tool is a set of 25-30 MCQs that attempts to evaluate people’ digital proficiency based on three subskills: information and data literacy, communication and collaboration, safety. The 3 levels of digital readiness are revealed down the line are Not Ready, Partially Ready and Digitally Ready, summarized in the diagram below.
Source: mettl.com
Whatever tools you use, there are several ground rules to keep in mind during the segmentation process.
DOs
Make use of open-ended questions
Give your employees time to complete the test and the segmentation process. Nothing of good quality can be done overnight.
Show a great willingness/eagerness of listening and understanding what your employees think and feel towards the digital changes
DON’Ts
Adopt other companies’ segmentation methods without carefully adjusting and adapting to your own case.
Jump into assumptions. E.g, Young millennials employees are not necessarily digital natives by default. Indeed, people who can be considered as digital natives are those who embrace changes, relentlessly seek novelty, and are willing to think and act outside the box.
Stay objective and realistic. Sometimes you need to admit the current not-yet-ready-to-change status of your organization, thereby having appropriate strategies to improve this status prior to implement desired digital transformations.
2. How to incentivize employees to develop their digital skillsets and mindset?
Along with organizing relevant trainings, management should understand employees’ mentality and preference to make the most of these efforts. We suggest the top 3 principles that could help increasing the likelihood of employees’ engagement in trainings and digital transformation initiatives as a whole:
No extra-time commitment
Changes and training are concrete and well communicated to all employees and beneficial for their current roles/jobs.
Changes are explicitly associated with specific benefits for employees’ personal and professional growth and ideally their remuneration.
Rounding off
Just like any other kinds of transformations, digital transformations can never done through shortcuts. To transform successfully, your organization needs to be ready from inside out. During these efforts, always put people front and center, adopt technologies for the sake of people, not the other way around. Such thorough preparations take time but would pay off and last long.
We at Enable Startup have a lot of exciting lessons learned, yet-to-be-answered questions and hopefully, advice for your next digital projects! Let’s get in touch at [email protected] if you are interested in DX or any other tech topics.
The concepts of green business and green tech startups in particular are not new in the US and especially Europe yet relatively nascent in Asian countries. Despite that disparity in current status quo, the awareness and consciousness of individuals and organizations about climate change and other environmental issues are growing globally, implying that eco-friendly technologies and business models would be a promising land that Asian startups and entrepreneurs should prepare to tap into.
This article will walk you through interesting insights into this emerging vertical.
Let’s get started!
1. What is green tech?
Definition of green tech
GREEN TECH (abbreviation of green technology) is an umbrella term that represents the category of technologies that serve the ultimate goal of reducing or reversing negative human impacts on the natural environment. The term green tech is often used interchangeably with “clean tech” or “environmental technology”.
Green Tech encompasses a wide range of scientific disciplines, including energy, atmospheric science, agriculture, material science, and hydrology.
Climate change, carbon neutrality, the depletion of natural resources and sustainable development are among the main themes that green tech is currently concerned with.
Main categories of prevalent green tech approaches
We can often classify different trends and major approaches of green tech companies and applications into these categories:
Energy Efficiency: Sciences and technologies that are applied to facilitate saving power at household level and in industrial workflows
Energy distribution and storage: Technologies that boost the performance of processing and storing energy from power systems before converting back to electricity that is ready to use.
Transportation: Innovations that help reducing or cutting gas emissions from transportation activities, ultimately contribute to decrease pollution rates. Green transport significantly relies on renewable energy sources such as wind and solar energy, hydroelectric, and biomass, among others.
Information and communication Technologies (ICT): This category stands for a set of initiatives that organizations undertake in order to reduce carbon emissions and their carbon footprint produced by their ICT systems. This type often includes dealing with people, processes, and technologies related to the environment. The ultimate goal is to use computing resources efficiently and effectively with minimal or no impact on the environment.
Agriculture and Food: Enables climate-smart agriculture and food services. Green technology needs in agricultures fall in these subcategories: energy, water, farming techniques, plant breeding, and forestry. The goal of this concept is to use optimal technologies in order to increase productivity, improve resilience, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, reduce vulnerability to climate change and guarantee more regular access to safe, nutritious food in sufficient quantities.
Chemicals and Advanced materials: Focuses on technological know-hows that help reducing the the use of hazardous assets in chemical merchandise or materials.
2. Why does green tech matter?
An urgent call from the planet
It’s no secret that humans’ industrialization and consumerism have been causing alarming pollutions of air, soil, water, putting natural resources and many species on edge.
Remarkably, food waste and fast fashion make up a large source of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to our atmosphere. Precisely, fashion production makes up 10% of humanity’s carbon emissions and is responsible for 20% of total industrial water pollution worldwide. In addition, an estimated one-third of all the food produced in the world goes to waste, which could be enough to feed every undernourished person on the planet. Also, about 6%-8% of all human-caused GHG emissions could be reduced if we stop wasting food.
The fact that a lot of people have experienced natural disaster and extreme weather conditions due to humans’ long established capitalism calls for initiatives from individuals and organizations. In such context, green technology appears to be one of the most promising approaches.
New market opportunities
Globally, the market size for green technology and green business as a whole was valued at $8.79 billion in 2019, and is projected to reach $48.36 billion by 2027, growing at a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 24.3% from 2020 to 2027. This would mean more potential for entrepreneurs and startups who are conscious about the environment-related issues and wish to contribute to tackling them. The increasing eco-consciousness represents opportunities to pursue both environmental and economic goals without necessitating a trade-off in the pursuit of one for another.
Similar to the global trend and potential of green technology, Asia Pacific would exhibit a CAGR of 25.6% during 2020-2027, which is probably the highest growth rate comparing to other regions.
For ASEAN market in particular, a promising signal is that the Asian Development Bank also invested $20M into clean technology venture firms in Southeast Asia in 2011 with the ultimate goal of boosting the green development in the region. Additionally, to improve the renewable energy capacity and revive the pandemic-hit economies, ASEAN governments have laid out an aspirational five-year sustainability plan under the second phase of ASEAN Plan of Action for Energy Cooperation (APAEC) (2021-2025). Under this, ASEAN energy ministers agreed to set a target of 23% share of renewable energy in total primary energy supply in the region and 35% in ASEAN installed power capacity by 2025.
All in all, these figures imply large opportunities for startups, or companies to grow and thrive on green tech and green business in general.
Next, let’s delve deeper into different innovative green tech ideas by category that have been developed and achieved certain success in the market.
3. Innovative green tech ideas out there and implications for Asian startups
Agriculture and Food
Too Good To Go
Too Good To Go is a free smartphone app that help stores and restaurants sell their surplus food through our free smartphone app. When browsing through the app, customers can choose a restaurant or store, order a “magic bag” of surplus goods at a reduced price, then collect it from the store during a pre-set collection window. Since its release in 2016, Too Good To go has created a solid user-base of 7.1 million users, helped saving 99.2 million meals all over the world, and attracted 1200 “waste warriors” fighting food waste together across 17 countries.
This idea could be absolutely compatible to apply in Southeast Asian countries, given that more than 50% of the total waste in the region is food waste. Besides, consumers’ awareness of the issue is getting better, especially within Millennials and Gen Z.
Energy Efficiency
Verdigris Technologies
This is a cloud-based SaaS platform that leverages AI to help clients optimize their energy consumption. The solution makes use of smart sensors to track energy use in one particular building and then send data to the cloud. These data is aggregated on dedicated analytics dashboards, which display intuitively the energy use status of that building. With these insightful data in place, users can make smarter decisions to optimize energy consuming during peak hours, identify motor problems that could be using excess energy, detect equipment failures before they occur, etc. Leveraging AI, IoT technologies and data analysis, Verdigris Technologies has allowed their customers to reduce their energy spending by 20-50%. It was awarded the “Sustainability product of the year” in the Business Intelligence Group’s 2021 Sustainability Awards program.
Sensorflow
Sensorflow is a cleantech startup that focuses on hotel energy efficiency. The platform uses wireless sensors to collect real-time data from hotel rooms, thus automating room temperature according to guest behaviors. These data-driven adjustments have enabled hotels to save up to 30% in energy usage. Last year, they raised $2.7 million USD for business expansion throughout Southeast Asia and globally. By 2022, they hope to have 800,000 smart hotel rooms up and running around the world.
Energy distribution and storage
Third Wave Power
Third Wave Power‘s goal is to empower people around the world by creating portable power solutions. Their renewable energy is useful for fieldwork, emergency backup situations, and outdoor environment, to serve the needs of both rural-urban areas in ways that improve lives and increase productivity. Backed by IoT and solar technologies, their key products consist of solar charging solutions, solar home and outdoor lighting solutions, solar microgrid power, and UV-C solutions. In 2019, the company received a special Sustainability Award for its contribution in energy distribution.
Information & Communication Technology
Ecosia
Google is not necessarily the only option for people when searching for something online. Alternatively, they can turn their searches into something good for the planet by using the search engine Ecosia. Like other search engines, Ecosia’s income is generated by ads. The difference here is that the company spends that income on climate actions, including planting trees, investing in renewable energy, regenerative projects and pro-environmental grassroots movements.
So far, they have planted nearly 140 million trees in more than 30 countries around the globe and have helped conserving more than 500 native species with 60+ green projects. This was made possible by a user base of 15 million.
Transportation
Duckt
Duckt.app provides the infrastructure to help organizing public spaces, increase safety and security, provide a more sustainable charging solution, all whilst supporting micro-mobility innovations in urban communities. It helps turning cities’ available furniture into a smart charging network. Customers can use their MaaS (Mobility-as-a-Service) app as the best last-mile option to follow the DUCKT locations. Whereas, cities are provided with end-to-end transport solutions comprising plug and play universal as well as IoT charger.
This idea would be particularly potential for Asian countries, given that 80% of households in Indo, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam own motorcycles, which represents a major problem since conventional motorcycles is a major source of air pollution. To combat these problems, United Nations Environment Programme are encouraging drivers to trade in gas-guzzlers for electric motorbikes. This suggests large room for electric transportation and smart charging solutions to thrive. Additionally, since most of ASEAN countries are developing countries, their traffic infrastructure will be subjected to a lot of evolutions in the upcoming years, meaning large opportunities for smart and eco-friendly city solutions to tap into.
We’re thrilled to hear what you think about the topic as well as your green tech startup ideas.
If critical thinking and solution seeking are your nature, you might probably be able to come up with new ideas easily and frequently. It’s a gift but sometimes a curse, as between an idea and a successful product is such a long (and in 90% cases, sad) story! Indeed, many startups failed because they were so excited in their initial idea that they overestimated its potential, thus rushing into development without sufficient considerations, preparations, in other words inadequate product discovery.
In this article, I’ll walk you through some common mistakes and respective lessons learned in retrospect of more than 20 startup projects that I’ve had the chance to work with. This would not intend to be a comprehensive list, but rather a personal pick from my first-hand experience.
And it’ll be focusing on the very early stage of Product Discovery.
Let’s get started!
1. Wrong timing
Many product features or product ideas as a whole are just awesome except that they are released too early or too late.
Talking about timing, I think there are 2 levels that startup founders have to be conscious of and figure out during product discovery: Startup timing and Feature Release timing.
The first level depends on both objective factors (mostly about product-market fit) and subjective readiness in terms of human, financial, expertise and network resources.
In this part I’d like to go into more details about the second level – Feature Release timing, since it is what I have more solid experience with.
This is a fact: A majority of products thrive because they always focus on the right features at the right time, rather than having a bunch of best-in-class features at once.
Such a right timing and focus are particularly crucial in the early stages because startups have not yet had abundant resources then.
Now, how to know when is the right time to focus on what?
In my past consulting projects, I always try to have founders asked themselves these kinds of questions:
Which stage is your product at: Proof of Concept, Minimal Viable Product or Official Version 1.0?
How many users are you targeting at the present stage? Is this feature noticeable and helpful for them at this level? Let’s say you are building a P2P marketplace for secondhand clothes. At the very beginning when you have only 50 users, is it necessary to elaborate too much the feeds or recommendation features?
At the present stage, what kinds of features are most effective to convey your product’s core user goals without complicating user perception and experience?
What would be the opportunity costs of developing this feature at this time?
There exist a number of prioritization frameworks that are really helpful in this decision making. It will take an entire post (or more) to properly analyse them, but below is a quick review:
MoSCoW (acronym of Must Have, Should Have, Could Have, Won’t Have this time): suitable for small-sized product projects that have relatively simple interdependences between sub-teams.
Kano: based on the effect of a feature to customer perception (To include: Basic, Excitement, Performance; To avoid: Indifferent, Dissatisfaction). This framework is especially relevant when it comes to limited resources or when a wow feature is in need.
Walking Skeleton: This method is particularly for PoC and MVP , in which you map out all desired features corresponding to each step in your user flow, in the order of high to low priority, then pick only the minimum combination of features that cover the user flow.
RICE (Reach, Impact, Confidence and Effort): This is one of the most comprehensive approach. However it’s more relevant in the later stages of product development rather than for MVP.
2. Inadequate Prototyping
Just in case you are not familiar with technical terms, it’s worth distinguishing prototypes and MVPs. There are 2 most important differences:
Prototypes are much sketchier than MVPs and should take you very little time and effort to build;
Prototypes are meant to test different ideas or approaches in order to pick the best one to go, then MVPs are built upon that chosen idea.
Now, back to the mistake I’m talking about.
While prototyping is a compulsory step in large product organizations, many startups omit it.
In most of the cases, the reason is that the non-tech founders do not know about such technique, and their tech team is not strong enough to give advice.
In other cases, the founders are aware of the prototyping step, but underestimate its importance. By one way or another, I think the root cause is that founders are a bit overconfident about their initial idea and rush to turn it into their dream product with all the beautiful UI and features.
This is a costly confidence though. Prototypes take you only 1 or maximum 2 weeks to finish with very little resources needed. Production-quality products, even MVPs, require at least 2-3 months and thousands of dollars to delivery.
More dangerously, after months and dollars poured into this product idea, startup founders often feel that they have gone too far to draw back. In such cases, failure is just the matter of time.
Remember, you should never rely solely on your gut-feeling when it comes to product idea. The obvious reason is that you don’t build it for yourself but for others. Self-reference criterion should be the 1st trap you have to be aware of not only at the product discovery stage but also during the entire development cycle.
I sum up below 3 key takeaways about prototyping that you should keep in mind so that hopefully you will never overlook it:
Conducting a series of experiments using prototypes will help you test user goals, user usability, technical feasibility and business viability – the 4 factors that make or break your success, in a quickest and most inexpensive way possible.
A strong prototype is sometimes just enough for you to present to investors, co-founder candidates or attract talented team members.
You should not hesitate to kill your ideas as soon as they are proven to be problematic during the experiments. Remember, to make one big thing you have to have courage to let go a lot of things along the way. Also, the earlier you admit you’re wrong, the more time you can save.
3. User persona is not articulated and validated
As you may noticed in the previous part, “user” appears twice among the 4 success criteria of a product. “Do users need the product?” & “Will they love to use it?” are two crucial questions that you should keep in mind not only at the product discovery stage but throughout your entire product development.
In this respect, a mistake that I often see is that startup teams assume their user persona without validating with thorough user research. In some cases, this step is done even more roughly, that users are defined as a broad group that is almost impossible to figure a realistic person out of it.
It is therefore tremendously important to define your target users as early and specific as possible, then conduct continuous user research and establish feedback loop with them. During your customer discovery efforts, some of the most common pitfalls that you should try to avoid are talking to the wrong people or talking too much about dream solutions without examining the problems sufficiently.
For products that are supposed to be used by a company’s employees in digital transformation projects, this task is relatively obvious and convenient. It becomes much more challenging though when it comes to products for public users. In either case, you have to know exactly who they are and try to communicate with them as much as possible.
4. Founder/ investor-centric instead of user-centric
As a successive outcome of the mistake mentioned above, when you do not work properly on user persona, it will be likely that your resulted product is meaningful for no one except founders or investors.
While many teams have to cut down on product backlog because of limited resources, I know a few cases in which founders are encountered with such a pressure of planning new features frequently so that their developers have something to do. This is especially popular in projects that are funded by external investors.
If this is your case, I believe it’s much wiser to spend your money on user research and usability testing right from product discovery stage, given that a lot of bootstrapping startups can’t do this step properly just because they can’t afford.
Some fundamental tasks you should take in this regard:
Recruit users and set up a robust feedback loop with them right from the product discovery stage
Try to collect and process user data to a unified system so that you have quantitative clues for decision making later on
Always define and stick to concrete user goals in your every release.
Bottom line
You might have known but I’d like to remind a fact: Market and Product Discovery is the very phase that is done very seriously in most of the large product organizations, but often side stepped in early stage startups. I believe this is one of the biggest reasons why 90% (maybe more) startups fail.
Let me wrap up this series in 3 phrases:
timing-is-everything
test-before-scale
user-centric
We’re thrilled to know what you think and discuss with you about product development and startup stories. Get in touch with us at [email protected]!
“At least 40% of all businesses will die in the next 10 years if they don’t figure out how to change their entire company to accommodate new technologies.”
Indeed, since technology has been changing radically the way individuals live, they expect businesses, as either employers or vendors, to catch up and even lead such changes. As such, digital transformation is no longer a luxury for only big corps or tech startups but has become a necessity for today’s businesses of all shapes and sizes.
If your business is in very early stages of digital transformation journey, this article would give you a great warm-up.
Let’s get started!
Photo by Ross Findon on Unsplash
What is Digital Transformation?
Shortly put, digital transformation is a form of business transformation with adoption of technology. This process involves leveraging advantages that technology offers in an efficient, innovative, and cultivating approach.
4 Main Areas of Digital Transformation
1. Process Transformation – modifying business process elements to achieve new goals.
e.g. Adopting data analysis and business intelligent tools for data-driven decision making; Automating and moving to cloud admin processes that are formally manual and offline; Implementing an ERP system to improve efficiency of business operations.
2. Business Model Transformation – leveraging new technologies to modify a traditional business model or even generate an entirely new business model to better solve customer pain points.
e.g. Netflix with their streaming subscription model; Uber with their platform business model; or more partially, Adobe switched their Adobe Creative suite from the desktop version to Adobe Creative Cloud, thus changing their monetization model from upgrade model to subscription model.
3. Domain Transformation – using new technologies to redefine products and services a company offers to the market, thus expanding the industrial domain that it participates. This form of DX is less popular due to the challenges in both seeing the new opportunities and being bold enough to make a move. However, done right, it’d pay off tremendously.
e.g. Just think of Amazon expanding from online retail to the super successful Amazon Web Services (AWS).
4. Cultural / Organizational Transformation – transforming the people inside the company to adapt to the new technologies. No matter the ultimate missions of your DX attempts are about the operational productivity or consumer experience, your in-house personnel is the first ones who needs to be prepared with sufficient digital literacy, mindset and skillset. Without this fundamental transformation, your later initiatives would likely fail or poorly perform.
The evolution of digital transformation
DX did not immediately happen at the holistic level and large scale as it is today. In fact, it has undergone an evolution that increasingly addressed different levels of shared roadblocks within organizations. Having a comprehensive view over these digital transformation levels would give you better ideas on where your business is standing today regarding technology adoption and where you would like to get to in the near future.
1. Systematic recording
The switch from paper to electronic record keeping is apparently one of the most basic but effective forms of digital transformation. Instead of spending hours (with superhero memory) looking for some file or piece of data record, with a few clicks or shortcut keys, you can now find it in a couple of seconds.
2. Systemic collaboration
Shared information, data and other working materials previously used to be physically transferred from one collaborator to another. Otherwise the collaborators had to sit in one room at the same time. Now, platforms like Slack, Microsoft Teams, Trello, Figma, Jira, etc. provide a virtual workspace where collaborations can be done in real time with team members sitting at wherever they want.
3. Systemic engagement
Back in the day, businesses depended largely on traditional radio, newspapers or TV to communicate to their target customers, with the “target” part was barely achieved, given that the audience base of these channels were mostly fixed.
Data science and algorithms has now radically changed the game. Today’s businesses can leverage real-time online databases and powerful algorithms to reach to the right demographics. To the customer end, this has also helped personalize their experience, giving them exactly what they want with less effort.
4. Systemic productivity
Technology is now a means not only for problem solving but also to enhance humans’ capabilities and productivity. Once companies reach unified and seamless digitalization, they will be able to map out optimized workflows and resources, ultimately gaining enormous competitive edge.
What are the benefits of digital transformation?
To employees: better productivity, efficiency and collaborating experience
Your employees would likely be the first ones who are touched by the company’s digital transformation initiatives. Prepared carefully, they would enjoy smarter workflow, smoother communications and collaborations, ultimately better productivity and efficiency. This would not only reward the company but also improve employee satisfaction and facilitate them in personal growth.
To customers: Better experience and more values
Customer loyalty is becoming rarer than ever before. Today’s companies are competing on every touch-point of customer experience. Accenture reported that a single point increase in customer experience scores can add millions of dollars to annual growth. To be not left behind, digital transformation is absolutely a must in your strategy. This would enable not only better care to customers but also involving them in shaping your products, services and values, thus establishing really long term customer relationships.
To the organization as a whole
Enable data-driven decision making
Even when your business is performing excellent, you are missing out on enormous opportunities lying in your dark data. Digital transformation would help you make the most of this asset by gathering, processing and analyzing data into insights and forecasts that fuel your decision making.
Photo by Franki Chamaki on Unsplash
More efficient and sustainable resource management
Digital transformation when applied holistically would encompass every area in your organization. Its tools would help integrate formerly disperse resources and assets into a central repository for better control and more business intelligence.
Greater agility
If you have ever heard about the agile philosophy in software development teams, you may know that its central idea is about speeding time-to-market and reacting more effectively to changes. The same values could be implanted in whatever kinds of organizations with the facilitation of digital transformation.
Generate better or new sources of revenue & boost profits
At the end of the day, bottom line is (almost) all that matters. It is quite obvious though that all the previous benefits are collectively creating pathway to better revenue and profits. According to the SAP Center for Business Insights and Oxford Economics, 80% of businesses reported increased net income after implementing digital transformation, 85% increased their market share.
What SMEs should know before starting digital transformation initiatives
Before kick-starting your next digital transformation initiatives, plan it thoroughly to optimize your effort and minimize risks. Below we list down critical steps that you should go through when crafting your own DX strategy and plan.
Step 1. Ask the right questions
Which parts of the business could be improved by adopting new tools?
Which parts of the business are performing well enough and should be kept untouched in short term?
Which employees could find challenging in adapting to new tools and how could you prepare and train them?
How will the digital transformation affect the business’ positioning or brand image in the industry?
How will digital transformation affect existing customers?
How long will it take for the transition period?
How long will it take to have these initiatives produced business values? (time-to-money)
Not everyone is able to adapt to changes swiftly. Hiring a professional to train your team about the new tools, new workflows and best practices could help you speed up the progress. This is where a lot of companies make mistakes — letting the most tech-savvy employee lead digital transformation activities instead of hiring a specialized professional. Read the section below for a more thorough approach on adaptation without ruining the company culture.
Step 3.Choosing the right tools
Most of the cases, at the first place there appears to have more than one option to solve your specific problems and achieve your digital transformation goals. You might probably feel lost in questions like: Technology Build or Buy? If you opt to SaaS, then which vendor to go? Otherwise, if you prefer to work with a tech partner, how to find the best match? etc.
At this point, conducting thorough research and analysis about the available options will be crucial to your decision making. Try to find as many as sources to get information like product reviews, client testimonials. Some reliable review platforms are: G2 for SaaS, Clutch, Goodfirm for software service providers, App Store or Google Play Store if your prospective tools are on mobile.
Keep in mind, as you might not be right at your first choice, try to find solutions that offer sufficient trial period, or tech partners that offer certain forms of service trial.
Step 4.Incentivizing the transformation
Imposing changes without incentives can become reluctant. Providing incentives allows people to look forward to the adaptation since they will be earning something once they are well integrated towards your company’s digital transformation.
Step 5.Pilot before scaling
Some companies try to skip the beginner phase of trial and error before scaling. Let’s say if you want to automate your hiring process, test it out with a specific department before applying to the entire organization. Familiarize yourself with Zoom, digital documents, surveys, and viewing introduction videos before going large scale. This is the same with other segments of your company as well.
Start small to sustainably realize your digital transformation goals
Instead of investing a fortune in a total digital overhaul right from the beginning, you can start with the following small but impactful initiatives:
Communication
Instead of using separate software to communicate with your marketing, sales, IT, HR, admin and other teams, consider doing it in one aggregated platform.
Collaboration
Streamline collaboration processes within your teams through platforms that can keep track of your projects throughout phases in real-time, and allow project members to collaborate online in one place.
Data storage
Cloud services available today are becoming more and more efficient, secure and user friendly. Moving your data to cloud should be among the first steps you should take to start enjoying other perks that digital transformation could bring about.
Data analysis
Making use of data analysis is crucial to scale your business. At the simplest level, let’s say you’ve just made a sale. Now it should never be end of story but rather the beginning. You should go ahead to learn why and how you made that sale, what are implications. Use analytics to find out business intelligences like which demographics, locations, and generally what types of clients are most responsive to your products. For that converted customer, don’t forget to retain them.
Digital marketing
The world has changed and a slot on newspaper is definitely not as effective as it once was. Your customers are spending a major part of their everyday living online, follow them!
Final Thoughts
To answer the question in title, we would say: Digital Transformation is not a bandwagon but a new norm for all kinds of organizations, SMEs included.
You should join it as soon as possible, with thorough preparation and thoughtful considerations. It would be great if you have an in-house team that is super digital-savvy (in fact if it is the case, you must be thriving in your DX journey). Otherwise, consider to hire a tech expert to accompany you with strategic advice and practical know-hows.
Let’s talk if you need any advice from our team of digital specialists at Enable Startup. We have experience in 30+ product development and DX projects with clients in 12 countries.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
What is digital transformation?
Digital transformation is a form of business transformation with adoption of technology. This process can happen within 4 main areas: Process transformation, Business Model Transformation, Domain Transformation, Culture / Organizational Transformation; and at 4 levels: systematic recording, systemic collaboration, systemic engagement and systemic productivity.
Why is digital transformation so important?
Without digital transformation, you are missing out on significant benefits, including: better productivity, efficiency and collaborating experience to employees, Better experience and more values for customers, better decision making capability, agility and ultimately increased profitability.
Is digital transformation costly? How should SMEs approach DX with minimal risks?
Digital transformation could be resource intensive in the long run and especially for large-scale organizations. With small and medium firms, it is not necessarily that demanding. You can start with small yet effective initiatives such as adopting a new collaboration tool, implementing digital marketing methods and tools, moving your data to cloud, etc.
