It is a good time to roll your magic ball.

Innovators and Entrepreneurs do not think and act linearly. They understand the value of exponentiality for growth and iteration for validated learning. Magic Ball Process helps people leave the old way of a waterfall or linear approach, and take staged iteration with assumption testing to Sell, Survive and Grow.

This process is based on insights gained from experience in workshops, coaching, consulting and learning organization for various start-ups and corporate clients for more than five years.

1) Stage-I. Sell (Product-Market Fit)

• During this first stage, your finding goal is to find a customer’s big problem and an effective solution idea to solve that problem. Your developing goal is to develop paying customers with sellable prototypes like MVP (minimum viable product).
• You can start from the customer to find a customer’s big problem. Or you can start from your solution or technology if any to find a problem that can be solved by your solution.
• You will develop products after you developed paying customers in advance. You don’t have to develop a perfect solution all at once. It would be better to have an evolving product. So MVP (minimum viable product) and AVP (affordable viable product) make it possible. MVP is a widely known concept that means a sellable prototype or your vision of a product. AVP is a sellable product that can make within your affordable capability. It is an interim product that generates early revenue before making a dreaming visionary product.

2) Stage-II. Survive (Business Model)

• During this second stage, your finding goal is to design a business model accompanied with an effective strategy. Your developing goal is to enrich customer relations and long-term partnerships to settle your business sustainably.
• You are going to think business with your long-term partners and profit formula that enable sustainability matters. Industry analysis is needed to find a divergent way against strategy groups in the industry you belong to.
• You can expand your target to develop B2B/B2B2C customers.

3) Stage-III. Grow (Growth & Scale Up)

• During this third stage, your finding goal is to search the growth ways based on your asset and core competency already developed. You can see the world as aligned and organic system with your company. Your developing goal is to cultivate and expand your target market and build business system that will generate long-term sustainable growth.
• You can find another new big problem to solve from your lead user (DIY user) who tweak your product to solve quite new another problems.
• You can build your own ecosystem with partners to go farther together.

What ball am I holding in my hand now? Sometimes you may have more than one ball in your hand. The important thing is there is one ball that we will be particularly focused on at a specific time. To better understand this process, it may be helpful to read the post “From the kitchen to being sold to Coca-Cola” as an illustrative example.

Now it is time to roll your Magic Ball.