Great business ideas demand more than just creative ideas. Over 90% of startups fail, and more than one-third cite a lack of product-market fit as a key contributor. While this is a clear issue that entrepreneurs are facing, it highlights a valuable lesson for today’s founders – true innovation requires a complete shift in how we approach thinking.
To beat the odds, it’s critical that founders diverge from traditional ways of thinking when it comes to innovation. This shift is challenging and often requires unlearning familiar methods. It begins with breaking away from conventional approaches, from design thinking to product development, and reimagining these processes. While it’s inspiring to see founders turn their passions into startups, at Intel Ignite, we encourage a different approach. We want founders to reverse that process, instead beginning with a problem and working backwards to uncover the solution.
What drives the quality of the ‘best’ opportunities?
When sitting down to brainstorm, 
oftentimes the ideas that are landed on as the ‘best’ are the most apparent ones. This is because of the natural inclination to determine the ‘best’ ideas by the most acceptable ones across the board. These are the ideas that everyone collectively agrees on, at least in part. However, the problem with this approach is that these ideas are often just that – average, and they will likely be obvious to most other teams, i.e. your competitors.
This way of thinking also becomes a dangerous proposition when it comes to creating a great startup. Ironically, the truly best concepts are the outliers – the ideas that people view as outlandish and obscure. It’s easy to rule out these visions for a variety of reasons, from being too hard to bring to fruition to not imagining a world where they exist, but the rejection of abstract ideas is what stifles innovation.
Evaluating ideas with the Real-Win-Worth It analysis
There are hundreds of questions that can be asked to understand the chances of success for a startup business. However, the Real-Win-Worth It analysis offers three simple questions to help founders determine whether an opportunity is worth pursuing.
- Is it real? This question seeks to answer how desirable the
opportunity is for people, and whether there is an existing market to serve. Founders should consider the size of the market against the availability and pricing of their technology. - Can we win? Considering this question helps founders understand the technical feasibility of their idea, and whether the team has a competitive advantage to dominate in the market. This relates to whether that advantage can be sustained, perhaps through patents or branding, and the team’s capability of executing the opportunity better than others.
- Is it worth it? This last question surfaces conversations around the business viability of the opportunity, and whether it would be financially worth it. Not only should founders have a grasp on their access to the proper resources, but also if the investment will be rewarded sufficiently.
At Intel Ignite, we have founders frame issues as customer hypotheses to ensure that they are targeting the right customers for the problems they are aiming to solve. “The biggest challenge is understanding what customers actually need, from their perspective, which may not always match a founder’s vision of what the technology can provide,” said Sheldon J.J. Kwok, CEO and Co-Founder of Lase Innovation.
Customer hypotheses enable founders to not
only understand the problems that their customer segment is experiencing, but also the constraints they are facing and where there may be opportunities to innovate. As an example, a customer hypothesis problem statement for the founding team at Intel Ignite might have looked like “I believe early-stage deep tech startup founders experience difficulties when growing their business because of a lack of support from accelerator programs targeted at founders in this stage of their journey.”
Classifying customer needs with the BLAC Matrix
Beyond just achieving a viable business model, founders need to ensure that their product or service truly aligns with the market demand. This is where the Blatant, Latent, Aspirational, and Critical Matrix helps founders qualify the problems they are tackling. Acting as a filtration system, the matrix provides a structured, hierarchical view of customer needs in terms of two factors – the visibility of an issue and the need for it to be solved. As a benchmark, founders should aim to solve a blatant and critical problem.
When thinking about the visibility
of your customers’ issues, it’s important that it is blatant and explicit. These are problems that are widely known and that individuals think about often, so customers are actively seeking out a solution – and there may even be commoditized products in the market for them already. On the other hand, a latent issue tends to be harder for customers to classify and may need education, as it exists, but is not yet discovered widely. Due to this, the issue is currently unaddressed, with any existing solutions primarily being in the visionary stage. As it relates to a startup, latent realities are not additive to value.
In terms of customer needs, a critical issue needs a solution. For an aspirational issue, it might be nice to have a solution, but it’s not needed immediately, either due to constraints or the fact that the problem has not yet emerged at a high level.
Determining the optimal problem to solve
As mentioned, blatant and critical is the optimal combination – the problem is both evident to the customer, and it’s vital to solve. However, due to the obvious nature of the problem and the critical need for it to be solved, it’s likely there are many other innovators looking to create a solution to the same issue, or one may already exist.
When an issue is identified as both blatant and critical, founders need to consider whether there is untapped white space to address it and how innovation can be used to capitalize on the opportunity. If they choose to pursue a novel approach to solving the issue, the key is to create value that customers can easily recognize.
The fundamentals of identifying a winning startup opportunity
Unfortunately, it is often the very first step of choosing the ‘best’ idea where founders set themselves up for failure. Identifying a problem and successfully executing a business idea that solves the issue is an extremely challenging task. However, as markets evolve and customer needs change, founders will need to evaluate their business on an ongoing basis to ensure that their solutions continue to meet consumer demand.
“Conducting cutting edge research is hard, but building something that people really want is harder. When searching for product-market-fit, you need to be very comfortable to go back to the drawing board, and avoid falling into the sunk cost trap,” says Dan Lenton, CEO and founder of Unify. “Remember, most companies never reach true product market fit. If you don’t have it yet, then you have nothing to lose by going back to the drawing board.”
Leveraging strategic frameworks alongside a deep understanding of the market and its customers can improve the odds of success. By understanding and applying the Real-Win-Worth It strategy, entrepreneurs can ensure their ideas are not only feasible, but also competitive and rewarding enough to sustain long-term success. Layering on the BLAC Matrix, founders are able to pinpoint customer needs to drive their product development strategy in alignment with real market demand. These strategies enable founders to evaluate their ideas with a pragmatic approach, allowing them to prioritize pathways and products with higher potential for success in today’s high stakes startup industry.
