EP101x – Do Your Venture | Prof.

Suresh Bhagavatula
Week 3

Anushka Shetty: Customer validation is an extremely interesting topic I see a lot of people
around me especially those who have Tech and enable businesses, who wait till the entire
Tech is built to kind of validate it. That's absolutely the wrong way to go about it. So how we
start evaluating our idea is, we started with the simple social media page, we started with an
Instagram page and got people to engage with us, when we were sure of the kind of
engagement we were getting, we then went ahead and created a simple landing page, where
we bought a Rs.1000 rupees template online, convert it into a small landing page website and
tested our hypothesis. I think this is how lean you should be. You cannot afford to wait till
your tech is built or you cannot rely too heavily on your Tech team to be able to deliver
because remember you are still validating for customers. So, there is absolutely no point in
investing and putting in that kind of effort in the technology and the team to build the
technology.

So please remember at the customer validation stage don't be in love with your idea, hate
your idea, be as critical as you can about it and treat your customers like you would treat your
student, like analyze everything they tell you, analyze whatever they do, judge them, figure
out why they are saying what they are saying and then go ahead with it. So, don't fall into the
trap of investing into technology at this stage. Go lean, make use of other platforms, there
are millions of them available, see what you can use to your advantage at this stage, don't
invest. And I came up with some wizard ideas, ideas where I had no skill, I didn't know how to
do it? I didn't know how to get it done? And I still wanted to get them done. And I realize that
those were major mistakes and that's when the MOOC happened for me.

Gouri Hegede: We were asked to do customer validation and that is the activity I like the most
because until then it's all just ideation. You think of the ideas you readout but you don't know
really out there if there is somebody who will want your product or service. So, once we went
through the lean canvas and put down and structured our business model, I would say, then
we had to go out there and do the customer validation. So how I went about doing this is I
created a website because this scoliosis is not something that a layperson would know very
few people know about it. So, there was no point in going out on the road like if I had a fitness
gym or like a food restaurant or a food product it would be easy just to go out on the road or

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 EP101x – Do Your Venture | Prof. Suresh Bhagavatula
Week 3

a park and talk to people and find out whether there is a customer out there, who is willing
to pay for that. But in this case, in case of scoliosis not many people are aware what it is, so I
had to make sure that I reach out to the right audience and get the customer validation from
that.

So that's how I ended up creating a website to give out the information about scoliosis and
also, I did a little bit of digital marketing to get in the people who are looking for a solution,
non-surgical solution for scoliosis. I would say as part of the online course this is the activity I
really enjoyed it made a difference because I could really find whether there are customers
who are willing to pay for this service who are looking for this service.

Deepika Anu: I believe customer validation is the most important part in the whole process
of deciding to do entrepreneurship.

Customer validation in my view is of three kinds where each having different levels of risk and
different levels of possibilities.

I. The best method I feel for customer validation is when the customer is already willing to
pay the price for your product or service and has already paid it in advance. This is the
best method in which you can validate your Idea.
II. The next best method for validating the idea is when the customer has given you a
promise or an letter of intent for building your product, this is obviously,
much more riskier than the first option, but again we have another option.
III. The third level wherein the customer pain points are very big enough and they exactly
match with the product or service that you have built and hence there is a huge potential
of earning money through it.

Out of all these three levels, the maximum risk is in the third level, but because of the nature
of the product and service sometimes it is not possible to take money in advance or when the
product is not yet built. It is difficult to even explain it to the customer and ask for money,
sometimes the pricing is also not fixed enough to ask for money. So, there are different levels,
different ideas go with different kinds of validation.

© All Rights Reserved, Indian Institute of Management Bangalore

 EP101x – Do Your Venture | Prof. Suresh Bhagavatula
Week 3

For me, it was a B2B SAS product, an enterprise solution and hence it was not possible to build
a product or deciding the pricing and then go for customer validation. So, we went with the
third option wherein, we interview a lot of customers, we asked them their pain points, we
documented whether or not the customer pain points were big enough that they will
potentially pay money for this service. When we were very, very sure about this, only then,
we decided to go about building the product. So, I believe one of these three validation
options should definitely be exercised before you decide to make a company of your own.

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