Validating our assumptions and making assumptions about our validations

A few weeks ago Baruk and I met with Rowan Yeoman from Akina foundation, primarily to talk about our makery support offering to schools. To progress with any sort of service development you need to make some assumptions and then test them with your customers. Because we’ve been talking to plenty of humans we thought we were doing a pretty good job of validating our assumptions but as Rowan pointed out some of our validations were assumptions themselves.

We know that there are some schools that are unlikely to be interested in our service because they already make extensive use of technology and don’t need additional support. But, this doesn’t mean they are not of interest to us. You might be familiar with the Rogers’ Innovation Adoption Curve already.

It categorises adopters of technology by the stage at which they adopt it. We have assumed that innovators will be unlikely to be interested in our service because they will already be doing their own thing, which seems a fair assumption. But these are some of the people we should be paying the most attention to as they can tell us what they were trying to achieve and what benefits they have seen from adoption. Therefore, they can provide us with potential selling points for our customers and help us clarify what we should be helping schools to achieve.

We have shown our proposed product to plenty of people and the feedback has generally been quite positive. Unfortunately, because people want to please you generally get positive reviews, no one likes telling someone their product sucks. What we need to be asking is ‘why do you like it?’. The people who give you the most honest answer are likely to be your best friends.

Our pricing is probably the biggest thing we need to test. We had assumed that because the few people (alright one person) we had shown the pricing to had thought it was reasonable all potential customers would share that view. Clearly, we need to test this with actual customers and get them to commit money before being certain the market will be willing to pay for it.

Something else we need to work out is how we will demonstrate our value. It’s all well and good to tell people that we are educating rangatahi and that nothing else matters, but if people are contributing money in the form of grants then we will need some sort of metric to show that their money has been put to good use. This goes back to finding out what schools are trying to achieve and then working out how we can prove it. Of course if the aim of the project was just to generate revenue then things would be a lot more straightforward. Unfortunately measuring social enterprise impact is a lot more difficult. If we are trying to improve students’ ability to use technology creatively and to problem solve then this is unlikely to reliably show up in a questionnaire at the end of a one hour lesson. We can’t just assume we are making an impact, we will need to find evidence that can prove it.

Next steps

Our priorities for the coming weeks are:

• Setting up the robots and 3D printers and making sure we know how to use them
• Testing the lesson plans and operational systems with teachers and library staff at Papakura
• Learning how to measure social enterprise impact