Testing Your Offering

In this section, we will cover:

• MVP — Minimum Viable Product — and how to develop it
• Customer acquisition — the channels and methods for selling
• Elevator pitches

Important: you will iterate a LOT during this phase of your startup. Your solution will need to change as you get feedback from customers - that's a good thing! If you aren't changing, you aren't learning. 

Customer Acquisition

Let's calculate some of the standard customer acquisition costs across different types of channels:

• Google Ads have an average cost per website click of $1.50 and average % conversion rate of those website clicks of 2.2%.
• Facebook Ads have an average cost per website click of $0.27 and an average % conversion rate of 1%.
• Let’s assume that mailing flyers will cost 3 minutes of time charged out at $10 per hour, and that flyers have a 1% conversion rate.
• Let’s assume that personal selling through warm introductions and targeted customer outreach requires 10 minutes of time per customer and has a 20% conversion rate.

An MVP is a minimum viable product, so a simple proof of the basic functionality is all that is needed. A wireframe or pilot can be an MVP, though a manufacturing-ready prototype or an app with all of the features is more than is needed at an early stage to test the hypotheses