TOOL: Book Recommendation
If You Build It, Will They Come?: Three Steps to Test and Validate Any Market Opportunity by Rob Adams
If You Build It is one of my go-to books. The thing I like about it is that Rob Adams has started and run companies. He writes about how to keep yourself out of the earliest and most fatal trouble that you can get into as an entrepreneur—being wrong about who is going to care about your product. Market and customer validation is arduous work – as entrepreneur can attest. But if you do want to build a new company, this book will give you a framework and excellent tips on how to make sure you build the customer viewpoint into your product (and everything else you do as an entrepreneur). It’s a perfect preamble to the in-depth validation work that client companies do in Rev1’s Customer Learning Lab.
If You Build It Book Description
More than sixty-five percent of new products are commercial failures, and if you compound this with a recession, now more than ever you can’t afford to be wrong. In If You Build It Will They Come, business professor and strategy consultant Rob Adams shows you how to make sure you hit your target market before you spend a lot of money. He shows you the fast, systematic and proven approach to performing Market Validation in advance of making a significant product investment.
Adams outlines a simple and effective market validation and testing strategy that is proven, giving entrepreneurs and managers the ability to improve the prospect of product success dramatically. He explains how to quickly gather information on competitors, directly interview members of your target market, and figure out what the market wants to buy, versus what customers say they want.
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The steps to quickly understanding the viability of your market
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Where to go to gather the information needed to hit the market requirements
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How to follow through with the right product launched in the right way
This book is for anyone involved with designing, developing and launching new products. Its examples and advice cover everything from the fledgling startup that needs their first product to work just to survive to the successful Fortune Class company establishing new worldwide markets. Examples cut across all major industrial sectors including consumer, retail, manufacturing, technology, life sciences, and services. This book offers the step-based guidance you need to make sure failure is not an option.
Author’s Biography
Rob Adams, Ph.D., is on the faculty of the University of Texas at Austin where he teaches entrepreneurship in the MBA and MSTC programs. He is also the founder and director of Texas Venture Labs at the McCombs School of Business. He is a former software executive, entrepreneurs, and institutional fund manager. He has served on many corporate boards and has founded or financed more than 40 companies, which have launched more than 100 products and raised significant amounts of capital in both private and public markets.
Available for purchase at Amazon, Wiley, Barnes&Noble
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