A recent New Yorker article by Atul Gawande discusses the lack of major changes needed to fix the healthcare system in the US through the ongoing reform process. The bill has a number of pilot programs, but nothing drastic to fix a clearly broken system. He argues that this might not be such a bad idea and provides the analogy of the agricultural sector in the US and the process it went through in the early part of the twentieth century to achieve major improvements in efficiency. While the Soviet Union tried forced collectivization, which failed drastically, the US started small. By running pilot programs, they were able to learn what worked, earn trust among farmers and then scale as the process was perfected.
In startup land, that’s pretty much one of the key aspects of customer development. Figure out the market or business model first – experiment and iterate to identify a replicable, scalable revenue model before stepping on the pedal. Chances are quite good that a product is world changing only in the entrepreneur’s head. It doesn’t matter if it was agriculture a hundred years ago or high technology startups today, some basic concepts remain the same.
Of course, the customer development methodology is a lot more than the one analogy I described above. I heard Steve Blank’s first class was standing room only last week! But, it’s possible to find lots of resources on the web. Here’s a good video series – part1, part2.
Tags: agriculture, Startups