Our journey began with a dream of a perfect product - one membership to all sports. In Startup Journey, we turned the idea upside down and started to develop the actual product by recognizing the problem first. Quite soon we found out that our dream product might not solve an exact pain point and if it would, it probably wouldn't be the best solution for that.

As academics, we have noticed that it is easy to fall into the trap of planning too much and way ahead. Startup Journey has helped us to reconsider the mentality "well planned is half done." What if we wasted time planning a product nobody wants to buy in the end?

Therefore it's essential to start executing. Testing in the very early state gives so much insight and a chance to skip paths which would've been a waste of time in the end.

Here are three things that we have learned during the Startup Journey to make an idea into an actual product:

1. Recognize the problem
2. Execute
3. Test

Focus on the problem, not the solution.

At first we only assumed what could be the problems for our customers and based our dream product on those assumptions. By interviewing customers and business partners we realized that there are much bigger pain points and problems - where the real value is. We realized that we should fall in love with the problem, not the solution.

Concentrate on things you can affect, don't make plans too far away to the future.

We had a lot of dreams and plans where we would like to go with our business idea. We have learned that to make dreams come true we need to start carrying out to see how things work out.

Test your idea with a minimum viable product (MVP) - don't assume the results.

We started testing our idea by creating a simple version of it. So we had a one-week trial pass for four sports venues rather than one-month membership to sports venues. We learned things we didn't even expect: 1) the test week itself could be a product, 2) customers created a community and enjoyed it 3) our business partners, sports venues, benefit from this arrangement.

Behind Kiksi there are three passionate business students; Solja Kontu, Susanna Kuosmanen and Emmi Hämäläinen. We have our next Kiksiweek in September. You can join it on our webpage. Follow our journey on Instagram @kiksisport. Let's find a sport for you too!

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