On the first workshop from acceleration program two experienced mentors shared their precious advice with 10 selected Seed-Stage startups from Slovenia and Austria about how to set a successful business model and succeed on the market: Tilen Travnik, co-founder of the most successful consulting and development company for startups DLabs, and Jon Butterfield, entrepreneur with a focus on Growth, Team Culture and Product Marketing, who has co-founded a number of companies.
 

Solving problems is the key!

Tilen Travnik explained you should always have a very clear idea of what problems are you solving with your product or service. And you should know which problem is currently the biggest problem on the market. To find out the top problem on the market you should consider multiple factors:
 

• How many people have this problem?
• How severe is this problem?
• How good the solution for this problem is?

 

This is very important to know also when you are looking for investors. Having a good understanding of why you are solving particular problem in the first place and then another problem in the second place, is a very good sygnal to the investor you seem to be knowing what you are doing.
 
Describe what your product can do for the customer and how are you releaving the pain, what is your solution and find out what is your competitive advantage.
 

42 % of products fail because they didn't find the market fit!

You might have some customers and are making some money, but that doesn't neccessarily mean you've got product market fit.
Why is it so important to perfect your product market fit? It is crucial for your success on the market. Without it you cannot achieve a really high growth.

To achieve the product market fit you need to align the product part and the market area.



Here are some advice from Jon Butterfield he shared about how you need to work within your product or service side to avoid the above mentioned statistics:
 

• Make sure you are selling the right feature set. What you offer needs to align with your customers' needs. Find out what feature is engaging them the most and use that.
• You need to understand what is your value proposition, what value does your product bring to your customers. Do you know what is your value proposition?
• When trying to align the product with the market, don't make huge changes in your product. Make just minor changes, test them and change it. Small changes might make a big difference.
• You should have in mind that you are developing your product for your users, not for yourself. Many times when companies grow the management dictates what features come next to the market, instead of being dictated by the market needs.

And on the other side you need to understand the market. You need to understand the needs of your target audience and you should track them all the time as market changes. Here are some of Jon's advice:
 

• Make sure you are always talking to your users. Don't hide in the office. Go out, meet your target audience, talk to them, find what their problems are, see what they actually need and start building from there. If you already have users, talk to them.
• And a key to success is to achieve high lifetime value, meaning customers stay with you for a long time, they return, tell about your product to their friends. How can you achieve it? Start offering your target audience things they need.

 
Now, it's your turn. How good does your product align with the market? How high is your lifetime value?