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Find and refine your startup idea

At Durham Startups, we have curated a list of resources used by leading entrepreneurs and investors to get you started in finding the next big idea, carrying out research to validate the idea, and finally prepare to launch to the right market.

 

  1. Cheat code for spotting and building the next big thing

Product zeitgeist fit (PZF): when a product resonates with the mood of the times. It’s the thing that makes users and employees want you to win. It’s also the thing that helps other stakeholders—media and trend watchers, big companies, other builders—spot the next big thing.

Key takeaways:

  • Product zeitgeist fit: How does it work?
  • How to spot product zeitgeist fit
  • Product zeitgeist fit favors the upstarts

 

  1. Evaluate your startup idea

All great startups start off with an idea followed by years of hard work. So how do you evaluate quickly and efficiently whether the idea merits further investment of your time and money? The article describes the process Forward Partners have seen play out with great success for the companies they have been working with.

 

  1. Conducting customer interviews

One of the biggest risks you have as a founder is building a product nobody wants. The best way to reduce this risk is to understand your target customer’s needs and desires before you start building. Learning how to conduct great interviews can help you to get unbiased customer insight on the problem itself, and how people are solving it today. And once you have that, you can start to innovate on a solution.

Key takeaways:

  • Developing a great interview technique will help you understand what product to build;
  • You only need to run 8-10 interviews per customer segment to get deep insight.
  • Build a fixed structure to make things easier.
  • Your interviews will reveal tasks, touchpoint and emotions of your potential customers.

 

  1. Customer discovery and user journeys

If you want to build a valued product that you can be sure your customers will love, you first need to understand who your customer is. Behaviour, motivations and needs are all factors that need to be discovered in order to create the correct journey.

Key takeaways:

  • Understanding your customer saves time in the long run;
  • It will be a lot easier to build a great product if you can truly understand the motivations and pains of your target customer;
  • Some companies will need multiple personas and user journeys as each serves different needs.

 

  1. How to run a user interview

Building product, and talking to users. In the early stages of your startup, those are the two things you should focus on. In this lecture, Emmett Shear, Founder and CEO of Justin.tv and Twitch, covers the latter. What can you learn by talking to users that you can’t learn by looking at data? What questions should you ask? How can user interviews define or redefine your product goals?

 

  1. Positioning your startup

There are frameworks and distinct steps founders can take to define what their company is doing, why it’s important, and why — above all the noise — people should listen to them.

In this exclusive interview, Arielle Jackson- product marketing for Google (Gmail, Docs, Calendar and Voice) and Square – shares exercises entrepreneurs can use to nail their product positioning, develop the right assets (including a name that strikes the right chord), and make a stunning first impression on the market — whether they’re launching a new feature or an entire company.

 

  1. Revenue models

This is a short piece where Fred Wilson (renowned venture capitalist who has invested in Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, Zynga, Kickstarter, Etsy etc.) walks through the various different revenue models he’s seen and dives into each one in more detail.

 

  1. Writing a business plan

This is a quick guide to the sections that should be in a business plan and why they are important.

 

Please note: Durham Start Up Portal includes links to other websites. These links are provided for your convenience to solely provide further information. They do not signify that we endorse the website(s). We have no responsibility for the content of the linked website(s).