UbD for Startup Validation
There’s an educational approach called Understanding by Design (UbD) that’s been at the core of a bunch of the Tacklebox content.
The basic idea is “backwards design” - you start with the outcome you’d like your students to reach, then you work backwards. There are three steps:
Define the successful end state
Define “acceptable evidence” - the proof that your students actually hit that end state
Design the activities that result in the acceptable evidence
The strength of this framework is that it forces you to define success, which usually shines a light on the misalignment between the activities you’re doing and the successful end state you’d like to reach.
This makes it particularly good for startup validation.
Let’s say you’ve got an idea for a pet grooming service in your town. You’ve got to define what a successful outcome for that business would be, identify the “evidence” that would show you that success, and finally the activities to find that evidence:
Successful end state: Generate $10k monthly profit
Acceptable evidence (what do you need to learn to feel confident in that end state?): First, there’s the knowable unit economics stuff - labor, rent, supplies. Next, the slightly less knowable industry stuff - standard churn rates, how frequently dogs go to the groomer. Finally, the fuzzy stuff - how do you get customers and what can you charge?
Activities that result in acceptable evidence: It’s clear that you need to test out customer acquisition and pricing. It would make sense to start by speaking with customers to understand if there are underserved niches where you might get a higher conversion rate and better margins. Niches always win. Next, run acquisition tests to see how expensive it is to acquire cold, new customers (getting them to switch from their existing groomer).
There’s no way around it - you’d have to run some tests (hire a groomer, rent a space / cut dogs outside, try and get them to sign up longer-term).
None of this is complicated. I just wanted to pop it up because I spoke to a bunch of founders in a row who are considering Tacklebox and were doing the equivalent of trying to build an Instagram presence to validate a dog grooming business.