hey guys it's Bella from Life with Bella so since my very last video the strawberry matcha latte making video what I've been up to recently is starting my new internship this summer so this internship is going from June 9th to July 18th and I just finished up my first week and I'm going into my second week of this program so basically HBTSP stands for Harvard Tech Venture Summer Program we have three Zooms a day my first Zoom is the section workshop from 9:00 a.m to 10:00 a.m and then we have the daily lecture that is from 11:00 a.m to 1:00 p.m and then every single day except Fridays we have our daily guest speaker from 7:00 p.m to 8:00 p.m as far I'm a big fan of this program i've really been enjoying it and I will be sharing what I've learned from the past week in the next upcoming days I'm going to be making two separate videos on Guy Ellis and William Braum which are two of the guest speakers we had the week before i also wanted to clarify it's not run by Harvard but it's affiliated with the Harvard students and basically the company that I selected to intern with is called Edu Beyond and I will be making a separate video talking about what it's like working alongside with the individuals and founders of Edu Beyond so I think a good starting point is beginning from the very first day June 9th so basically what we learned is how a startup is not a smaller version of a big company big companies execute known business models a startup is temporary by design it's an experiment with an expiration date and its goal is to uncover a repeatable scalable business model before time or money runs out one thing that we really talked about during the daily lectures was about the myth that startups fail because of bad luck or external forces and the thing is this is comforting to kind of tell yourself oh I'm just very unlucky i'm not meant for this area but I'm just strong believer that if you put your mind to it and you look for the root problem then you would be able to redirect yourself find a solution so anyways this myth is inaccurate most failures are self-inflicted rooted in poor execution which can luckily be solved by looking at the root issue at hand as I mentioned and the truth is many founders fall in love with the idea before they understand the problem basically what me and the group of people that was assigned to my small pod talked about was the fact that it's important to talk with the users whom you want the product to be designated to and basically understand what are the issues that they're struggling with and then also apply your own prior knowledge your own experience so moving on another question that rises is when do you launch a product and the answer is not when it's beautiful but not when every feature is perfect because the thing is you can keep saying "Oh I need to fix these things i need to fix this." But the thing is you need to put the product out there to be able to understand oh this is the main core issue or this is something that the users are not very fond of that's why when you have a product in mind it's a good idea to speak with the people whom you want the product to be for to truly understand what they want so going back to what I was speaking about before was the fact that if you're building something purely based on your own intuition without interviews without painpoint validation without competitive analysis you're basically gambling because you don't know what you're working with and I think that this kind of mindset can be tied back to a sports game for example more specifically cross country because that is something I used to do but anyways like for example before every single race we would at least walk the course jog the course we'll have a map to take a look at and this can be tied back you know to the business model because you want to take a look at what you're working with exactly and you know taking a look at who your competitors are so overall I think it's becoming pretty relevant that market research isn't a checkbox it's your foundation basically if you take anything away from this video talk to the audience whom you want your product to be designated for if you're already in motion and unsure you're on the right path you could create an event for example you can create a Google forum and send it out to different people watch how they react to your product and ask what they're currently doing and what frustrates them and this isn't just marketing but it's also for your own personal knowledge gain because you want to understand how you can make your product better so moving forward on June 11th we had a valuable daily lecture lesson on founder market fit so we often hear about product or market fit but you can't exactly reach that milestone without first understanding how you align you as a founder with the market that you're entering hence why it's important you know to educate yourself through interviews through videos through speaking with other people so founder market fit is the degree to which you're uniquely suited to solve a specific problem in a specific market and it's not just about expertise but it's also about the proximity to the problem clarity on the user's needs and credibility and execution your focus should be on market inefficiencies unmet demand and friction points in existing workflows and don't expect the idea to be perfect right out of the gate like I was pressing on before and every early stage idea is a hypothesis the job founder is to build fast test with real users and iterate constantly during one of my morning section workshops we were basically talking about trends versus fads there was one interesting question our pod leader basically brought up is oat milk a trend or fad personally I thought that this was a fad everyone is subject to their own personal milk preference if you're not making a product regarding to milk or coffee shops whatever the sort that is not relevant you want to build your product in alignment with inevitable trends what technologies or behaviors are clearly on the rise over the next 5 to 10 years the next topic we have is customer dialect proficiency test so basically I'm going to explain this don't worry because I had no clue what this word meant either when we talk about the customer dialect proficiency test there are four main questions that are being brought up so first of all we have the question can you clearly map the market landscape including major players gaps and trends can you troubleshoot a real user's workflow step by step without guessing do you understand undocumented pain points things users don't complain about publicly but still waste time or money on and then last of all we have can you speak the customer's language naturally including their But the pronunciation is a bit confusing so let's break it down british English pronunciation jargon jargon when we refer to jargon one example is medical jargon for example many doctors will use terms that you don't necessarily understand for example engineering is another example where a lot of words are brought up that you know the average daytoday person may not be aware of to sum it up if your answer to any of these questions was no you may lack founder market fit and that matters because investors team members and early customers will pick up on it immediately and you don't want to show that you lack foundation in your very own idea because that just shows that you know you're not a strong founder one of the first questions you'll get from any investor is why you you will need a response rooted in credibility prior work experience failed attempts to solve the problem or even money you've spent on so next we'll be talking about some red flags to avoid when you're too focused on your solution and not obsessed with the underlying problem you can't articulate what most people in your industry are getting wrong you're giving a generic answer to why you're the right founder for the space and then last of all your market research began after you came up with the business idea not beforehand so overall the bottom line here is that building something people want is not just about intelligence but it's also about insight and that insight usually comes from being immersed in the problem space itself for example I'm very passionate about the medical field and that's why I'm going to be doing hospital volunteering soon i'm trying to get my EMT certification but these are all things that are still in the works of happening but I'm trying to immerse myself in the product space and then who knows maybe one day I can come up with an idea okay so now we have a new topic new background too trying to play around you know keep keep the video interesting on June 17th we went over the business impact of ICP and personas so ICP basically stands for ideal customer profile your ICP is a specific type of customer who gains the most value from your product and is most likely to become a loyal paying user one important thing that you should be able to take away is the fact that you cannot build a successful business by trying to serve everyone if you're trying to speak to everyone you're actually resonating with no one but the thing is by identifying your audience earlier on it helps you realize that um I'm like overheating right now i keep repeating myself and nothing's making sense one of the fastest ways to waste time money and momentum is to market to the wrong people that's where ICPs come in they help you define exactly who your product is for and who it's not for at the end of the day once you've identified your ICP the next step is to build customer personas fictional but realistic representations of your users that bring data to life b2b businesses the ICP is built around the attributes of the organization itself and this includes factors like company size industry budget range technology stack organizational maturity on the other hand B2C ICPs focus on individuals and behaviors you're looking at the person's lifestyle emotional drivers digital habits and their values a strong B2C ICP reveals not just who the person is demographically but also what the problem is that they're trying to solve in their daily life so enough talking about ICPs B2B B2C and all of these buzzwords your sales process should reflect their buying patterns and your customer success efforts should anticipate their long-term goals so slowly as we wrap up this video knowing your customer better than they know themselves is how you unlock product to market fit so as you move on with your day today think about in your head do you have some sort of issue that you run into on a day-to-day basis whether that's you know spending your your time your money your sanity the key point here is focus on how you win by considering the fact that it's really important to consider who your audience is what kind of lifestyle they live and overall if you put yourself in their shoes what kinds of issues would they run into or in general what would they expect from the app in which you are marketing and remember the ICP is your foundation stay tuned for the next