Another story highlighting a business success to inspire you with your business
John E. Richards, an angel partner, describes four types of entrepreneurships: 1) small-businesses to provide for a family, 2) scalable businesses with huge growth and quick exit, 3) large-businesses to build wealth, and 4) social entrepreneurship. He highlights that most venture capitalists invest in scalable businesses rather than the other three.
The Story of Instructure
I share the story from Brian Whitmer’s 2010 blog The Story of Instructure. He and Devlin Daley received an assignment in a master’s class at Brigham Young University to create a business idea and plan, and pitch it to a hypothetical group of investors.
They saw a weakness in the learning management system (LMS) currently used by their university. They served as teaching assistant’s and felt both confusion and frustration with the current LMS. They
- Identified that no company was driving innovation in the LMS market
- Generated ideas for how online learning could be improved
- Studied the size of the market and how contracts were signed
- Discovered why innovation stagnated
- Outlined the broken features of the main competitors and ideas to fix them
- Prepared a presentation to gather information from potential clients
- Surveyed 18 major and minor universities to gather feedback about their ideas
- Took exhaustive notes from each presentation, then reworked it based on feedback
- Found an angel investor who liked the ideas and gave startup funding
- AFTER ALL THIS, they started writing code based on the multiple ideas from their potential clients
As a result, Instructure has became a dominant player in learning management systems (LMS).
Model of Lean and Pivot Business Development
Instructure demonstrates the principals of lean and pivot development:
- Create a business idea
- Present your idea to potential clients
- Pivot the idea based on their feedback
- Present the modified idea to the same and other potential clients
- Pivot again based on their feedback
- Continue the process until most accept the idea
- Only then do you begin actual development (that’s lean)
Monday we highlight how you can use KPI Marketing to compare your benchmarks to others
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