I recently blogged about one of the websites I worked on straight out of college, and the lessons I learned about verifying assumptions early on.
Let me give you 5 customer-centric questions and then 5 business-model centric questions. These are all things you should be working on before, or along side, development of your consumer internet product.
1. Who is your product is for?
2. What is the context of your customers’ world?
3. What motivations and values do they have behind their actions?
4. When potential customers see your product, what happens?
5. Do you talk to your customers every day?
6. What is the “core mechanic” (or minimum feature set) of your product?
7. What factors can kill your business model?
8. How do you acquire users? Can you make an existence proof?
9. How do you make money? Can you make an existence proof?
10. What technology do you depend on? Can you prove it can work?
I’ll blog in more detail about each one of these tomorrow.