I’m doing the Ignite course in Cambridge this week, sponsored by Informatics Ventures (thanks!). It’s been a mixed bag so far for me, and although checking email during sessions has been banned, I’m going to try and take notes and blog a few things from the course.

Yesterday was about marketing — establishing who your customers are and how you’re going to get them. Businesses typically go through two stages: initially, you are pre product-market fit, so you spend your time figuring out how your product will fit into the market or vice versa. Then, once you have that fit established, it’s time to ’step on the gas’ and sell to the market — and go supernova.

An initial step, though, is to define whether you’re an aspirin or vitamin.

Aspirins cure pain. Vitamins enhance.

There’s room for both, but knowing which you are is important — and not just from an internal point of view, what you’d like to be, but from a customer’s point of view.

Do you solve an acknowledged problem?

Do you solve a problem the customer doesn’t know he has?

Do you make the customer’s life better?

Another interesting division is whether you’re a new idea, or better-faster-cheaper than something that exists. It’s possible to be a bit of both, but the key camps here are ‘very risky, have to establish the market’ versus ‘existing market but competitors’. If the latter, what will your competitors do when you launch? (A side note, something I was told a while ago: very few business plans/presentations consider competitor response as well as simply competitor existence.)

If the former, are you really a new idea? What do people do now? Is your technology disruptive? Is it defensible? If you’re a tech company, can you productise as well, or are you better off licensing? How do you fit into the existing picture?

This is possibly the most valuable part of the course so far, having time to think about the larger scheme of things and where we fit in. Interesting.