Extending the topic of ‘People-centric’ last week, we further drilled down in the Stanford model of Design thinking which can be divided into five key steps: Empathise, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test.
First thing, enhancing empathy isn’t easy without Terry’s guidance. By starting observation, immersion and interviewing your target customers, we gradually knew how to choose our customers. As Terry mentioned today, conducting research ‘like the Consumer Council’ could be a powerful tool for us to see if we are unique in the market and able to cater customers’ needs. We also understood some common mistakes of start-up such as focusing on all people rather than specific customer segments. After that we could try to define the problem by choosing what not to do rather than what to do.
Another important step was brainstorming. By adopting ‘SCAMPER’ rules, we understood how to come up with start-up ideas on products/ services etc. Finally we had to validate start-up ideas through prototyping, collecting feedback and improving. It was believed that these steps were going to be back and forth until the start-up idea successfully launched.
To wrap up two Design Thinking (DT) workshops, we all began to apply a specific DT model to come up with new business as well as avoiding common fatal mistakes. Terry was very generous to share his valuable successful and failure stories (which was not easy though). Throughout the lesson, we had ample time to exchange start-up ideas with other fellows and at the end, it helps each other to brainstorm and appreciate more new ideas. By doing so, we already have a basic idea or foundation of how to be a start-up owner.
For me, the most important insights throughout the lesson is:
1. Making sure there is sufficient market demand is of most importance (i.e. to sustain the business with good financial management after testing the market)
2. Doing partnership is way better than starting business alone
3. Less is more (i.e. target a specific market segment is good enough).
We were so thankful to have Mr. Terry Yim to share his start-up tips and related stories to us and we can’t wait to kick start our first start-up business after completing comprehensive start-up topic exercises!
Thank you for reading!
Grace Lam
Moms4Moms fellow 2024/25
#moms4moms, #hkmomtrepreneurs, #fellowsharing, #womenempowerment,