Since last April, we have been teaching the ASP Lancement d'une entreprise at the CFP Calixa-Lavallée. It is a 12-week business launch program, entirely online, which we deliver in full while coaching each student on their own project. Close to a year in, one observation stands out: almost everyone who wants to start a business begins with the thing they want to make.
A product, a logo idea, sometimes a name already registered or an Instagram handle reserved in advance. This approach is natural, and we have followed it ourselves more than once. Our many years building websites and marketing for other businesses, first with Raincity Studios in Vancouver, then with dive operators in Asia, confirm that the pattern is the same everywhere: the idea comes first, and the customer arrives later, in the best of cases.
Here, then, is where new entrepreneurs should actually start: before the logo, before the website, and certainly before the business cards.
Should you start with the product or the customer?
With the customer. The most useful question for a new business is a simple one: who, exactly, will pay for this product or service?
It must be a person you can describe: where they live, what they already spend money on, and what problem bothers them enough that they would pay to solve it. "Everyone needs this" is a very common first answer, but it is never accurate. Even when many people could use a product, it is impossible to reach everyone on a small budget and a few evenings a week.
So go and meet people. Hold ten conversations with the kind of person you believe will buy. Do not try to sell. Ask how they handle the problem today, what it costs them, and what they have already tried and abandoned. If you cannot find ten people to talk to, that is revealing too: it will probably be difficult to find them when it is time to sell.
After two years of lockdowns, curfews and reopenings, many people are considering working for themselves, which is a positive trend. However, the pandemic also changed what people buy and how they buy it. The customer pictured on the basis of 2019 may not be the one you meet this spring. Talk to the real one.
Why write everything down from the first day?
This step resembles homework, and it is homework.
It is also, in our experience, the habit that prevents people from restarting the same idea every six months. At a minimum, record:
- The idea in two or three plain sentences: who it is for, what it does for them, how you get paid.
- Every conversation with a potential customer, with the date and what surprised you.
- Your numbers, even rough ones: the cost of production or delivery, the price you believe people would pay, and the number of monthly sales needed to pay yourself something.
- Your decisions, and the reasons for them.
A paper notebook works, as does a Google Doc. The format matters little. What matters is being able to see, three months from now, what you believed and what changed. Memory is unreliable in this respect: it tends to remember being right.
These notes also become, almost naturally, your business plan. People dread the plan because they try to write it from a blank page. If you have recorded everything along the way, most of the content already exists and only needs organizing. At that stage, a business plan is mainly a matter of putting things in order and checking the calculations.
Why do small tests beat big plans?
Plans have their uses, and we have written a great many. However, until something real has validated it, a plan remains a well-presented hypothesis.
A small test is any approach that puts your offer in front of actual buyers at low cost. Here are some effective examples:
- A one-page website presenting the offer, a price and a form for pre-orders or a waiting list.
- A table at a public market for one weekend.
- Selling the service by hand to three people before building a system around it.
- A fifty-dollar ad pointing to that page, to see whether strangers click and sign up.
None of these tests proves the business is viable. They show whether anyone is willing to pay, which is the most important information at the outset. A simple landing page with a clear offer and an easy way to respond is often the least expensive reliable test available. A test that fails is good news if it only cost you a weekend.
The costly mistake is devoting six months and your savings to the full version from the start. The test takes place anyway, on launch day, and by then it costs far more.
Where can you find startup help in Quebec?
People starting out are often unaware of the extent of available support. In Quebec, as across Canada, there is more than you might think, and a good part of it is free.
Futurpreneur Canada deserves attention from people aged 18 to 39. The organization pairs startup financing with a volunteer mentor, and it requires a business plan and a cash flow forecast before lending, which is a good discipline in itself. Even without applying, its planning tools are useful.
The BDC offers many free articles and templates. Your local SADC, or your MRC's economic development office, can inform you about regional programs and sometimes small loans. Services Québec also offers a self-employment support program for eligible people. Rules and amounts change; we therefore recommend contacting these organizations directly rather than relying on a blog post, including this one.
A caution about free help
Advisors and mentors are excellent at answering the questions you already have, but they cannot hold the customer conversations for you. If you arrive at a first meeting with ten interviews recorded, you will get far more out of it than if you arrive with a logo.
What is the first advice to give a new entrepreneur?
Do not build the product yet. Find the customers, record what they tell you, then test the smallest possible version.
This approach is slower in the first month, but much faster over the first year. It is less exciting than designing a logo at midnight, but it is what determines whether the business will still be open two winters from now.