How to Validate Meaningful Problems for Your Venture

Whether you’re building a corporate venture, a startup, a new line of business or something else, you need to start by validating the problem.

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Recently, our Founding Partner, Ben Yoskovitz, spoke to a group from Founders Institute on how to go about validating meaningful problems and building new ventures.

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Key Highlights:

Everything is an assumption. Rooting innovation in assumptions is key to solving the right problems with the right solutions. This is particularly challenging in corporate innovation, where companies may ignore key assumptions to focus on other elements (such as market size, profitability, etc.)
Empathy is key, but not on its own. You need to deeply understand users and their needs/pains, but you can’t ignore everything else. At Highline Beta we use a Design Thinking framework called DVF (Desirability, Viability, Feasibility) to make sure we focus on desirability, but we don’t ignore viability (can this scale?) and feasibility (can we build it?) All three are critical to successful venture building.
Focus on a narrow market. Going after a big, broad market early often means you don’t have clarity around the target user/customer and the problem you’re solving. We prefer narrower markets that we can dominate, and then scale from there.
Solve boring problems. Lots of people want to chase shiny objects and work in the “hot space” but there are a ton of boring, under-the-radar opportunities that are often ignored. This is where big companies can thrive, because they can see massive problems that are very specialized within their industries that others might not recognize. A corporate venture studio model focused on boring problems is a great way to innovate quickly.
Move insanely fast. Speed is often the only competitive advantage, especially for startups.

Venture studios often have a rigorous methodology for doing proper problem and solution validation, which de-risks opportunities and increases the chances of success. The key is going through the validation process quickly, testing & iterating as frequently as possible to get to the right answers for building new ventures.

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How to Validate Meaningful Problems for Your Venture

Whether you’re building a corporate venture, a startup, a new line of business or something else, you need to start by validating the problem.

Key Highlights:

Get in touch with us to learn more

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