Dear Farillio reader,

On 25th February 2021, you asked our amazing expert partner Joshua Bicknell:

"I need help telling people about my business so that I can work out if it’s going to work or not. How did you work out who your customer should be? Did you always know you were going to build Validate for universities? how did you go about getting in touch with them and getting them interested?

And Joshua said:

Be mighty always, Farillio

Transcript:

“The thing about Validate is that it was never anything that we really planned, so we never sat down and said ‘let's build a piece of technology to make entrepreneurship more easy and quicker’. It actually emerged just through things that we were doing, so as I said we were running these programmes in places like Kenya and Uganda, we worked with entrepreneurs, we then started delivering courses and modules at universities. I think through that you know we became experienced in a problem and learned about it. So, I think the thing with entrepreneurship is that you can't really experience this stuff just sitting in a box, you have to talk to people and experience different businesses, different industries, people running those businesses, customers and understanding you know ‘what are the problems that they have’, so that you can start to build around that. So, once we realised there was a problem, we then started thinking ‘how could we solve this’. The first thing wasn't a technical or a technology platform, it was going and delivering courses face to face. As you move, you learn new things, you spot opportunities, and that's really what the story of Validate was. It was seeing an opportunity and trying to build something for it. Then through that now there's lots of other kinds of opportunities coming up, schools are interested in using it, government programmes are interested in using it. Again, the problems are probably slightly different for them, so we take the opportunity and go back to the platform and think about how we can tweak it and how we can improve it to perfectly fit that need, and then launch it again!”

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Want more from Joshua?

You can also find Joshua’s answers to other questions being asked by you and your community in our Dear Farillio section on our blog site, and Joshua’s great guidance on business here.

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