Wellington
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‘Foolproof’ (great title) has been inspired by much of a working life immersed inentrepreneurial startups.
Its author, Jenny Douché likes to think of the 188 page book as a resource for anyone looking tocreate or grow a business.
At its core, Foolproof is about an all too often neglected or overlooked component of starting up– market validation.
That is especially, proving there IS a market before too much, or anything, has been spent onproducing a product, developing a marketing plan or anything of the busy business things that allrequire doing in a new commercial proposition.
And while the Wellingtonian mother of two young children expresses ‘introversion’ as herparticular personality profile, the May publication of Foolproof following eight months of researchand writing has provided a couple of intangible (aside from recouping self-publication costs)benefits.
“Most of what I read about market validation had a very narrow view on what it actuallyencompassed, that is it just tended to look at how the market would react to a particular offer,”she says. “Things like, what features people want, how much they’re prepared to pay. I saw verylittle that had a focus on potential customers’ current behaviours and on the barriers to changingthose behaviours.”
Douché says nothing in business or in life ever happens in isolation, and when validating theopportunity for a new offering one needs to understand the wider context. That is, what otheractivities does the customer do, what other products and services do they use and how do they comecross them? It all impacts on their likelihood of using your proposed offering.
Some of the potential barriers to a business customer changing their behaviours may be uncoveredby asking questions such as:
Part of the book’s motivation also came from Douché’s time as the ‘Activate’ manager forGrow Wellington/Creative HQ. Activate’s common theme is market validation – “but it is reallyhard to get some businesses to do this side of things,” she says.
“But, those who did, do, most have changed their business models, some substantially. Theprocess pointed out opportunities that were available, some people stopped their business.”
The going repetition of the need for market validation, and constantly telling and saying thesame message, indicated to Douché that Foolproof’s time had come.
Douché’s aimed the book at SME’s, tried to keep it general, tried to make it allinclusive.
“When writing the book I tried to ensure that it would be applicable to all kinds of business,whether product-based, virtual or service-based. Given this there will be bits that don’t apply toall businesses, but everybody should get something valuable out of it.”
Foolproof isn’t available in bookstores, but can be purchased direct (from