The Bus Exercise
Once you’ve got a few customer interviews under your belt, it’s good to pick the most promising customer you’ve spoken with and pretend the product you’d theoretically build is a bus. If you’re further along — even if you’ve already got a good product—- this is a great exercise to do.
The bus exercise forces you to answer two questions:
Where do you pick them up?
Where do you drop them off?
Here’s an example:
Let’s say you’re building a dating app for people who are divorced and have kids and are looking for people excited about the place they are in life. They don’t have time to go to bars or join a softball league or however else they may find someone, and other dating apps don’t help them find this person.
The bus exercise forces you to choose where you pick people up and drop people off.
From interviews, you might’ve learned that urgency increases after they’ve tried all the normal dating apps and had a terrible experience. You also might learn that they’re just trying to get to a place where they meet lots of people in a condensed period.
So, you might pick them up “after you’ve tried Tinder and Hinge and gone on seven dates with people that were doomed from the start,” and drop them off “with a partner who’s excited to help you raise your family.”
When you think about wedge products, the bus ride is much often shorter. So the wedge might be picking them up in the same place, but dropping them off at an event that has 20 people in the same boat.
The more specific about where you pick them up and drop them off, the more trust you’ll build, the better the product you build based on that “bus route” will be.