The Key to Finding Solutions is Making Mistakes

CO.STARTERS is a Small Business Too: Part III

The third in a series of inside tips on how we’re adapting our own small business to the current challenges.

‍

After—and only after—you talk to a number of your customers, it’s time to form a plan.

As a business, your job is to offer your customer solutions to their problems. So you need to ensure that whatever solution you create is going to actually solve the problem.

The value of experimentation.

Where does this certainty come from? Like any kind of knowledge, the perfect pivot solution won’t come from a shower-moment of ingenuity, but from trial and error. Your ideas are grounded in assumptions, and you won’t know which of those assumptions are true until you start testing them out.

To find a new solution for your customer, you need to identify several solutions. They won’t be perfect or optimal, but it’s the only way to truly identify what your customers want.

As a business, your job is to offer your customer solutions to their problems. So you need to ensure that whatever solution you create is going to actually solve the problem.

We had to do the same thing at CO.STARTERS several months ago. We talked to our customers, from entrepreneurial support organizations to Main Street associations, and identified where their pain points were—what they wished was different.

Once we identified those problems, we had to look at our finances, our capabilities, and our existing models to offer several new solutions we thought would help. Sure enough, some of those solutions hit the sweet spot—we’ve reached over 2,000 entrepreneurs since. But not all of our ideas were connecting with folks. We had to refine our approach over and over until we landed on a few sure-fire ideas.

Test three times, build once.

In tandem with this testing process, you’ll need to build prototypes of your potential solutions, often called a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) in the business world. The purpose of an MVP is to be able to offer a testable solution to your customer, so they can either say “Yes, this is what I need,” or “no, not what I was looking for.” Build the prototype that costs you the least, so that you don’t lose money on a non-solution.

This is the philosophy we employed at CO.STARTERS. Instead of trying to build completely new tools and supports with completely new technologies, we returned to our tried and true methods—which we already knew were working in communities—and applied them to the new challenges in our society. Taking the established methods and frameworks in our signature Core program in one hand and virtual-learning technology in the other, we reframed the conversation around business adaptation with our Road to Recovery initiative and Rebuild program.

Resist the urge for perfectionism.

In the testing stage, trying to be perfect will end you. Do good work—excellent work, even. But don’t expect perfection from yourself, your staff, or your organization—that will only hurt your customers. You need to get something into their hands. They can always improve on it if they need to, after all.

You are at your most creative when you are calm. When you’ve stopped and breathed. Don’t ruin that state of calm with the demands of flawlessness. And creativity is absolutely essential—you’re going to need new ways to solve your business problems. As the saying goes, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

In the testing stage, trying to be perfect will end you. Do good work—excellent work, even. But don’t expect perfection from yourself, your staff, or your organization—that will only hurt your customers.

Finally, I want to emphasize that while we will all make mistakes, we must always seek the best way forward. At CO.STARTERS, we tested repeatedly and found out what our customer needed—however, we have certainly tried solutions that the market didn’t really need (or want). Even as we teach the virtue of listening to your customers, we sometimes fail at that goal ourselves.

Ultimately, the purpose of testing is not to prove your product works, but to find out what your customer needs. We welcome you to continue on this road to recovery with us, learning from our mistakes and experience. Together, we can rebuild and restart.

About the Author

Jose Alfaro is the Director of Growth at CO.STARTERS, where he works to build strong and sustainable business models to support CO.STARTERS work at scale. He is an experienced operations director who has successfully scaled organizations in the community development and hospitality industries. Jose loves the creative approach CO.STARTERS uses to help individuals and communities thrive through entrepreneurship. Jose’s first business was a catering company, but his dream is to build a sustainable food accelerator that supports minorities by expressing their culture through food.