We, at SparcIt, we have tools to measure different aspect of the company’s technical factors.

We run our application on Google Cloud.  We use Google Cloud’s monitoring tools, NewRelic and Nagios to monitor the servers, measure the uptime, throughput and memory usage.  We also use Rollbar to catch exceptions and errors in the log files.  And these are just the ones I know about.  I’m sure our developers use other tools that I don’t know nor heard about before.

We use Hubspot to capture leads, monitor the number of daily visitors, how many visitors watched the videos, read this blog post or other whitepapers.  We use ConstantContact for email marketing and we use Zoho CRM for customer relation management.  Lastly, we use Bing and Google Alerts to capture any news that mention our name anywhere.

We are a small company.  So, we don’t use any Talent Management system yet.  But we use SparcIt and Foursights to measure one’s innovative thinking abilities.   That sums up the external tools we use.

Besides SparcIt and Foursights, all the other tools are to measure technical factors.  Our investors ask for the numbers on these technical factors.  But SparcIt’s biggest asset is its employees.  Every single one of them is putting immense # of hours, work very passionately and are very dedicated to SparcIt’s cause.  My co-founder for example, rejected an offer of over $250K per year to work at SparcIt.

We are just one example.  Organizations are great at measuring technical factors.  But we rarely measure or even attempt to quantify non-technical factors.

So, why are we not investing more in our employees? Research has shown that innovative employees do affect the bottom-line. Why are we not trying to make them more innovative and why are we not measuring innovations in organizations?

A new research by IBM shows that, organizations like to innovate, but they primarily focus on maintaining the current status quo. But why?

Is it because new innovation is risky? With the budget cuts, most organizations are just attempting to maintain their status and not to innovate.

Is it because innovation focuses on employees’ abilities and put the spotlight (and pressure) on them? Hence they need to push themselves, get out of their comfort zone and be more innovative?  I don’t think that’s the case.  Most employees enjoy training classes and do want to learn new skills or learn more about themselves.  But they do not enjoy doing survey-style questionnaires.  Personally, if I ever run into any types of assessment, I take it.  I’m always curious to both learn about myself and also understand how that assessment works.  But if the assessment is a set of multiple-choice question and takes more than 5 minutes, I probably will not complete it. But what if, we create game-like assessments where it engages and encourages the participants to think and produce.  Then, I believe participants will be interested.

To innovate and to improve, we should :

• Measure the employees’ creativity and innovative thinking – in most cases, employees like to learn more about themselves and understands their strengths and areas for improvement.  (Note: Create a link where people could take a set of tests).
• Measure # of ideas submitted by people in 30 or 60 day periods – research shows that the more ideas we generate, the higher the likely-hood of generating one that is break-through.  At SparcIt, in our biweekly company meetings, all employees are required to generate and submit ideas for product and process improvement.  It doesn’t mean it get implemented.  But they are definitely heard.
• Spend at least 5% of your time on innovation and cutting-edge projects – at SparcIt, since we are a small organization, we definitely spend more than 5% of our time and energy on this. This is not only beneficial for the organization, but it also keeps all of us engaged.
• Have a list of all ideas for new product/process or improvements to existing ones in the company portal – At SparcIt, all suggestions and ideas are put in our company portal.  And of course, everyone can chip in and comment on them.

HR managers, hiring managers and leaders in organizations; I invite you to share your opinion: With all the budget cuts, what do you do to encourage innovation in your organizations?

… and flex your creative muscle

We’ve dedicated our entire business to the art (and science) of creativity. This included spending countless hours researching what it takes to identify one’s creative quotient, or “CQ” as we like to call it, to know where one ranks on the creative spectrum, and exercises that can be conducted over time to improve that score.

Despite what the naysayers may say, research shows that creativity can in fact be learned.  The combination of conducting a series of exercises that sharpen your creativity and conducting them consistently over time can increase his/her creativity.

To flex your own creative muscle, here are three great exercises you can do in your spare time.

We provided a link for you to play with.  Don’t worry.  We won’t be asking for your email address, nor we will be grading these.  So feel free to go all out.

These exercises are best played on your PC or tablets and preferably on Google Chrome.

OddIt – Play it here.

This is an odd-man-out exercise.  This exercise provides 5 sets of words or phrases. Randomly select one.  Next come up with a  scenario or story of why the selected word or phrase is different from the others.

PairIt – Play it here.

This is a linkage exercise. This exercise provides 5 sets of words or phrases.  Randomly draw a line between two words. Next, create a story of how the two words or phrases are connected with each other.

BekIt – Play it here.

This is a content creation exercise. In this exercise, a phrase or topic is provided.  Come up with a story or scenario about this topic.  If a question is asked, answer it as best as you can.  Please note that, there is no right or wrong answers.

To check out a list of other exercises to improve your creativity, see our recent “5 exercises that will improve your creativity” post.

Let me know what you think and please check our home page.

Ideas worth dime a dozen – execution is all that matters.  When you’re talking with a person with an idea for a business, but is reticent to share that idea – you know they’ve never launched a business before. Good entrepreneurs can spot this from a mile away.

How you may ask? Well, it’s simple. Ideas are easy – it’s the execution that’s the hard part.

When you’re able to bring together people who are capable of generating good ideas AND have the ability to execute against it, that’s where the magic happens.

So, how do you find people who are creative and can execute?

Finding the Common Thread

The 21st century workforce is heading towards an uncertain future.  Manufacturing jobs are constantly being offshored; practically everything is becoming global; much of existing work demands complex and creative thinking with high-tech tools used in almost all lines of work.

Figure 1: Economy-wide measures of routine and nonroutine task input: 1969–1998 (1969 = 0). SOURCE: Levi and Murnane (2004).

Hence, organizations are looking for not just expert and knowledgeable thinkers, but also for creative thinkers and innovators.

We wanted to figure out the easiest way to find these innovators, so we can use it for our recruiting and development practices. Hence, we did a formal search into individual industries to determine if there was a link between individual’s Creativity Quotient and the three key factors:

• Individuals who have generated new ideas for product development or improvement
• Individuals who have implemented new ideas
• The industry where the individuals are currently employed

Here’s a look at how the data broke down.

Industry

The industry breakdown is as follows.  Majority of our participants were part of Sales, Computer and Technology and Healthcare organizations with the rest divided across quite a variety of industries.

Creativity Quotient and Idea Generation

Generating new ideas for product development or suggesting new ideas for improvement, are valuable attributes of an innovator.

Participants completed a set of open-ended exercises, such as mind-mapping, mini-saga, object-usage and improvement activities. These exercises are all part of our patented process to measure one’s creative thinking ability, which uses four key indices: Fluency, Flexibility, Originality and Elaboration.

Next, we looked at the top and bottom 25% performers and asked them if they have suggested ideas for new product/process development or improvement to existing ones.

Figure 2: Idea generators in top and bottom 25%  performers: Pie-chart on the left displays that 73% of top performers did suggest ideas for new product/process development or improvement to existing ones.  However, only 50% of bottom performers (pie-chart on the right) suggested such ideas.

As shown on the graph, the top performers did generate more ideas for new or improvement to existing products and/or processes.  But this still is not enough.  We want to take this one step further.  Were these ideas and suggestions implemented and did they provide any value(s) to the organization?

Creativity Quotient and Idea Implementers

To take this one step further, we looked at the top and bottom performers who were idea generators (73% and 50% respectively).   We wanted to see if those individuals were able to not only suggest ideas, but also implement them.

Figure 3: Idea and Suggestion Implementers in top and bottom 25% performers:  Pie-chart on the left displays the 63% of top performers who make suggestions were also able to implement them.  However, only 16% of bottom performers (pie-chart on the right) were able to to do so.

63% of top performers who had made suggestions, were also able to implement their ideas.  But only a mere 16% of bottom performers who also suggested ideas, were able to implement them.

So, what does all this mean? How do I find the creative executors?

Finding the Creative Executors

In today’s uncertain economy, innovators are more valuable than ever before.

• Look for candidates that are not just knowledgeable, but they are also creative and innovative.
• Look closely at their past experience.  Ask them what innovative works they’ve done in the past.
• Be diverse.  Innovators from one industry could be innovators in another one as well.
• Don’t let them stop there. Ask them what their innovation’s impact was and how it affected their organization

And last but not least, keep their innovations alive.  If you are lucky to find one, let them do what they are good at and give them the freedom they need.

If interested in a full report, please contact us through SparcIt’s contact us page.

When you think creativity in an organization, do you think…brainstorm?

This is the term many people think of and while brainstorms have their place when generating ideas, they are not the only ways nor the best way to foster creativity. The most effective ways of fostering creativity is to approach it very strategically. Here are four ways to foster creativity in your workplace.

Measure and track your creativity

Do you know what your test scores were for the SAT or the ACT? Or have you ever taken an IQ test and know your score? How about a CQ (creativity quotient) test?

Creativity sounds like a metric that’s too subjective to measure. But it’s no strange topic to psychologist and creativity experts in the field.  Through over 50 years of psychological research, psychologists have found that you can accurately measure someone’s creativity using a psychometric approach.

We’ve developed an automated way of measuring your Creativity Quotient (CQ) through open-ended thought-provoking, outside-the-box-thinking exercises. Your CQ, which determines your ability to come up with novel ideas that are adaptive and applicable, can be assessed using four dimensions: Fluency, Flexibility, Originality and Elaboration.

To learn more about characteristics of a creative person, click here.

Conduct exercises to improve your creativity

Believe it or not, creativity isn’t always something you’re just born with and you can improve your own creativity over time. But, it takes work. We’ve conducted extensive studies on this subject and we’ve developed five scientifically-proven daily exercises that, if used consistently, will improve your creative juices.

You can find a list of exercises to help you improve your creative chops here.

Build programs to encourage creativity

Internal innovation programs have been successful built in many companies and there is no reason you can’t build one at your organization. And if you already have one and think it could be better, here is a list of some great ones: Five Examples of Companies with Internal Innovation Programs.

Create a culture that rewards those ideas

Motivation is key with any idea program to stimulate creativity. You need to have everyone on board – leadership, staff and employees. The best way to get them on board is to have incentives in place for all three that continue to drive the program over time. It’s likely some form of recognition, financial benefit or alignment with annual goals to increase status internally. There is no one-size-fits-all model. The only way to determine the best fit is to assess your environment and determine what motivates your team/company.

Tune in for our post later this week to find out more about these idea programs!

Every business will say they need more innovation and more creative people to compete in today’s day and age. In fact, according to a 2010 IBM’s annual CEO survey, 60% of the surveyed CEOs indicated that creativity is the top quality they are looking for in their leaders.

Figure 1: The 2010 IBM Global CEO Study highlighted creativity as a critical capability for success.

Even though companies know they need creative people, why is it that creativity always falls by the wayside when looking for talent?

The obvious answer is that other factors like experience and education take precedent. Other reasons may include:

• Creative people are often the ones that cause distributions to the norm
• Too many ideas are distracting from focus and business objectives
• The creative ones may lack the ability to implement

Given some of these underlying assumptions, we wanted to see if there were any hidden connections between creativity and business success (including aspects like execution and promotions).

So, we did what we always do – a study.

What’s the process?

The study we conducted was only focused on the U.S. Participants completed a set of open-ended exercises, such as mind-mapping, mini-saga, object-usage and improvement activities. These exercises are all part of our patented process to measure creativity, which uses three key indices: Fluency, Flexibility and Originality.

At the end of each set, participants were asked to fill out a detailed questionnaire including if they have generated and implemented new ideas in their organizations, if they have received a promotion over the last two years, which industry they currently are employed in and what position they currently have.

Here is the breakout of the participants by industry:

Creativity = Business Success?

The results are clear as night and day.  On average, individuals who were able to generate and implement ideas who were also promoted in the last two years, had a higher Creativity Quotient (CQ) score (basically, your IQ for creativity).

More specifically, individuals who were able to generate ideas and implement them effectively have Creativity Quotient (CQ) score of at least 10% higher than their counterparts. Furthermore, these individuals who were promoted over the last two years, had a CQ score of 23% higher than their counterparts.

Here’s a snapshot of our results:

If you’re interested in getting the full analysis, please contact us.

Are one’s Creativity, wealth and Poverty linked?  We’re curious people at SparcIt, so we do what we do best – we conducted a study.

This is a closer look at our study, which is the first of its kind in finding and measuring the link between Creativity, Wealth and Poverty. The findings were surprising to say the least.

Digging In

We worked with SUNY Buffalo State University to get the ball rolling.  As part of this study, we worked collaboratively to pull together information from more than 6,000 participants and 161 countries across the globe.

Participants completed a set of open-ended exercises, such as mind-mapping, mini-saga, object-usage and improvement activities. These exercises are all part of our patented process to measure creativity, which uses four key indices: Fluency, Flexibility, Originality and Elaboration.

At the end of each set, participants were asked to fill out a detailed questionnaire that asked for various demographic including the country where they lived.

Using the geographic data specified by participants, we cross-referenced  the World Bank’s income classification data, which was broken down by the following buckets of gross national income (GNI) per capita:

• Low income: $1,035 or less
• Lower middle income: $1,036 to $4,085
• Upper middle income: $4,086 to $12,615
• High income: $12,616 or more

By comparing and contrasting these two large data sets, we were hoping to scientifically prove whether or not there is a connection between creativity and poverty.

Are Creativity, Wealth and Poverty Linked?

The results were clearer than we anticipated. We found that participants in “High Income” countries scored higher in creativity than the middle income countries and significantly higher than low income countries.

More specifically, participants from “High Income” countries scored approximately 0.8% higher than participants from “Mid Income” countries.  This is considered an insignificant jump. However, participants from “High Income” countries scored approximately 5% higher than participants in “Low Income” countries.  This is considered a more significant jump.  Moreover, we predict the gap is going to be higher as participants from”High Income” countries have access to better education and more resources.

Of course, any statistician or researcher will tell you that ‘correlation is not causation.’ While we cannot prove that creativity impacts income level or vice versa, but one thing is for certain – creativity, wealth and poverty are linked.

If interested in a full report, please contact us through SparcIt’s contact us page.

Disclaimer: SparcIt is not associated with any political organization.

If I give you two words -“Museum” and “Sauce” – and ask you to come up with a mini-saga of at least 140 characters,  what would you write?  What can you create with and around these two words?  How about this:

The local dinosaur museum also has an in-house restaurant that is famous for their special “Museum Sauce”. Little do the consumers know, the tasty sauce is made of ground up dino bones that can’t be paired with their original skeletons for unknown reasons. Come on out and have some 200 million year old dino dinner!

Creative brilliance is a phenomenal thing to witness when it happens. Whether it’s a work of art, a scientific theory, an invention or in an everyday brainstorming session. Many believe that you are either creative or you’re not, but the truth is it can be learned and improved over time.

We’ve conducted extensive studies on this subject and here are five scientifically-proven daily exercises that, if used consistently, will improve your creative juices.  Note that, these exercises can be done anywhere and any time.

• MapIt: A mind-mapping exercise, which effectively gets the ideas in and out of your head.  It is a well-known exercise where you are given a central word or phrase and it asks you to brainstorm out of it. This exercise can be done by yourself.   Look around you.  Pick an abstract idea.  Then map out of it in multiple directions.

• LoopIt: An object-usage exercise, where you are given an object and think of creative ways you can use this object. This is a common exercise used in many divergent thinking tests such as TTCT or rCAB.  You can do this  exercise by yourself. Get a flashcards of objects.  Each day, choose one and simply practice it.

• TieIt: A mini-saga exercise. where you are given two objects, phrases or ideas, then write a “mini-saga” of at least 140 characters about it. This exercise challenges your story-telling. You can easily practice this exercise, by choosing two unrelated objects or ideas, and then come up a story that links them together.

• ImproveIt:  An exercise where you are given an ordinary object and asked to come up with ways of improving the object. It can also be done by yourself by obtaining flashcards of objects.  Everyday choose one and come up with ways to improve it.

• OddIt: An Odd-man-out exercise where you are given a set of items, objects or ideas.  Randomly, choose one of them.  Create a story around it as why the selected item is unique and different from the rest.  Again, don’t look for a logical reasoning.  Come up with a scenario or a story.  You can do this exercise by yourself.  Use your flashcards and sort them in groups of five.

A person’s creativity and mood are both tricky and complex.  Yet we all wonder if our creativity is affected by our mood.

It is a common belief that how you are feeling directly affects your creativity.  However, recent studies show that there is little relationship between your mood and how creative you are.

This is a summary of a study performed in partnership with SUNY Buffalo State University to find any correlation between one’s mood and creativity quotient (CQ) score.  The study includes the combined results of 6,455 participants.

The research concludes that how we feel and what mood we are in, has very minimal effect on your creativity.  Furthermore, it proves that, this creativity assessment is unbiased towards one’s mood and feeling.

How did we measure creativity?

We’ve developed an automated way of measuring the Creativity Quotient (CQ) through open-ended thought-provoking, outside-the-box-thinking exercises. Your CQ, which determines your ability to come up with novel ideas that are adaptive and applicable, can be assessed using four dimensions:

• Fluencyrefers to how many unique and relevant responses you can come up within a given time. Someone with high fluency would be able to conjure many different ideas, options and, therefore, more viable solutions to a given problem.
• Flexibilityis measured by the number of distinct categories your answers represent. Flexibility is about generating ideas that are different from each other. Someone with high flexibility would be able to maneuver out of a “thinking rut” by coming up with entirely new ideas.
• Originalityrefers to how infrequent your responses are compared to others’. People with high originality can come up with ideas that are statistically uncommon, but still relevant to the problem at hand and possibly break-through ideas.
• Elaborationis measured based on how detailed your ideas and solutions are.  Someone with high elaboration is able to create detailed and intricate plans and embellish them with details. Note that for the purpose of this study, Elaboration was not measured.  But it will be available in future studies.

How did we gather the data?

This study was conducted in partnership with SUNY Buffalo State University.  As part of this study, participants completed a set of open-ended exercises such as mind-mapping, mini-saga, object-usage and improvement exercises.  At the end of each set, participants were asked to fill out a set of survey questions such as how they are feeling today and other demographic information.

What do the results mean?

In general, if you are feeling good or great, you tend to have a higher overall creativity score.  However, the affect is minimal and the difference between the highest and lowest scorers in each category is less than 1%.

Let’s look at each individual score independently.

With regards to Originality, the highest scorers were individuals who were in the “good” mood with an average score of 649.  The lowest scorers were in the category of feeling “poor” with an average score of 647.  The difference is less than 0.5%.

With regards to Flexibility, the highest scorers were feeling great with an average score of 207.7 and the lowest scorers were individuals who were in bad mood with an average score of 207.  The difference is less than 0.5%.

With regards to Fluency, the highest scorers were individuals who were feeling great with average score of 173 and low scorers were in “average” mood with score of 169.  The difference is less than 1%.

Additional Information

For participants interested in additional information such as correlations, internal reliability, scattered plots, etc, please feel free to contact us through SparcIt’s Contact Us page.

Creativity sounds like a metric that’s too subjective to measure. But it’s no strange topic to psychologist and creativity experts in the field.  Through over 50 years of psychological research, psychologists have found that you can accurately measure someone’s creativity using a psychometric approach.

We’ve developed an automated way of measuring your Creativity Quotient (CQ) through open-ended thought-provoking, outside-the-box-thinking exercises. Your CQ, which determines your ability to come up with novel ideas that are adaptive and applicable, can be assessed using four dimensions:

• Fluency refers to how many unique and relevant responses you can come up within a given time. Someone with high fluency would be able to conjure many different ideas, options and, therefore, more viable solutions to a given problem.
• Flexibility is measured by the number of distinct categories your answers represent. Flexibility is about generating ideas that are different from each other. Someone with high flexibility would be able to maneuver out of a “thinking rut” by coming up with entirely new ideas.
• Originality refers to how infrequent your responses are compared to others’. People with high originality can come up with ideas that are statistically uncommon, but still relevant to the problem at hand and possibly break-through ideas.
• Elaboration is measured based on how detailed your ideas and solutions are.  Someone with high elaboration is able to create detailed and intricate plans and embellish them with details.

Our CQ exercises have three sections—creative association, creative context and creative selection – each contains one to four open-ended exercises.  Grades are then rated on a scale:

• Fluency: 0-1,000 (90th percentile > 900)
• Flexibility: 0-1,000 (90th percentile > 900)
• Originality: 0-1,000 (90th percentile > 900)
• Elaboration: 0-1,000 (90th percentile > 900) (Note: Elaboration is still a work-in-progress and will be available in the next release)

The more unique, original, diverse and detailed ideas and responses you can generate, the higher your scores are.

SparcIt’s engine evaluates your responses using techniques in:

• Advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP)  – which is concerned with interactions between human language and computers
• Semantic networks from Computational Linguistics – which is the form of knowledge representation that shows the relationship between concepts
• Computational power for statistical mining of large data-sets and corpora

What does my final score mean?

Scoring low in certain dimensions on the CQ scale is not necessarily a bad thing. For example, certain job functions need people who are more linear thinkers as opposed to divergent and original thinkers.

Our research has also found that doing exercises can actually improve your CQ, so like many skills, you can become more creative with practice. Contrary to the popular opinion that an individual is creative or they’re not, our data indicated that creativity can be learned. On average, participants who completed the study improved in both flexibility and fluency.

Furthermore, study results suggest that the statistically significant increase of one’s creativity was observed in participants who listened to more lectures (i.e., those who watched more lecture videos and learned from various researchers improved significantly compared to those who didn’t.) Other means, such as completing assignments also have an impact on one’s creative thinking ability.

Just remember, Creativity is like a muscle – you need to train it to get stronger.

Some people tell me I’m crazy when I tell them I’ve had 25,000 beta users for my startup. “If you have that many users, why wouldn’t you just launch your business and make money off of them?”

Sure, there is logic to these arguments, but we have a different business model than most.

We are not building the most downloaded app or the next startup in the sharing economy or anything in social media aiming at being the next fad. We are building a different type of Engine – an engine that can measure one’s creative thinking ability, something maybe even more advanced than IBM’s Watson or Google’s existing NLP method, something that will set a standard for posterity.

While this approach is uncustomary, it was the right move for us. It is a methodical process that is reaping many benefits already.

But, is it right for your startup and how many beta testers are needed to make your startup succeed?

How We Did It

It took us 1.5 years, 4 full-time employees, 3 consultants, $200K in funding and 25K test cases and early adopters to build our first MVP and find our first real customer. By far, the hardest part was getting those 25K beta test users. This was crucial as we needed these test cases, so we can evaluate, calibrate and modify our engine as needed.

• Started with family, friends and other startup founders: We started early with friends and family first. Every single game we designed, even the crappiest one was tested by our friends and family. This feedback was crucial as we were able to iterate on our product without exposing it to the masses. The one concern we had was getting “true feedback.” This can be a concern for some as your mom or your good friend may reserve comment to avoid hurting your feelings. But, we established up front that we want all feedback – no matter how harsh. Of course, they still kept their reservation. So, then, we approached our friends and founders in other startups. They know how valuable the unfiltered and uncensored feedback is. And we are lucky as we had quite a few of them.
• Worked with larger more general survey-type organizations: We used “Mechanical turk” (Mturk). Most founders are familiar with Mturk as it’s an easy way you can test your product at a fairly large volume. Of course, this service is not free. But it is worth it. We were running in average 200-500 test cases at a time every other week on Mturk for over a year. It was a great way to catch the bugs in the system, gather data, see what responses the end-users are providing and how they are using the system. Furthermore, we were running A/B testing where you select users from certain regions in the world and compare their behavior with respect to each other.
• Partnered with reputable educational institute in a MooC study: Although mturk data was invaluable, we wanted to find users that would push the system to its limit; we also didn’t want them to have monetary incentive to just use the system, provide minimum feedback and forget about us. We really wanted to find users that have a “higher” purpose when they were performing our exercises. What better way is there than partnering with a MooC course on Coursera from a reputable institute? The MooC had over 15,000 registered users and as part of an on-going research, we performed the pre, mid and post assessment for them. I must say that there is nothing like it when all of a sudden you have over 5,000 users log into your system and start playing. You find bugs that you could never even conceive that they would occur. Now, this begs the question how many beta testers did we really need and how many does your company need.

Getting the Most Out of Beta Testers

For early-stage startups, nothing is more important than figuring out what experience their end-users have and how they use it. Don’t be shy to push your beta testers. Don’t be shy to ask questions. And don’t be shy to send reminders to them. As we were running tests and partnering with different companies, not only did we asked them to push themselves and do the best they can, but we asked them to fill out surveys after surveys. Of course, we respected their privacy and made the surveys optional. When we explained to them why and what we are doing and they were more than happy to help us.

How Many Beta Testers Does Your Startup Need?

Few startups are research intensive like ours. The more research-intensive you are, the more # of beta users you need to both validate your product and prove to your first customers that it actually works. The short answer is, as many as you can till you get your first customer.

Note that my startup is in the B2B space. Your first customer is taking a chance on you. So they are more than willing to provide feedback and responses. And remember that success doesn’t happen overnight. Be persistence and you’ll get the results.

Regardless of your startup or how many beta testers you need, here’s what we learned from testing:

• Put Your Product in Testing ASAP. Get feedback, get it now and iterate. If you don’t have anything to test yet, bounce the ideas off of people you know or do a survey to get some quantitative and qualitative insights. Don’t be shy. Ask questions from your participants. You don’t want to build up an idea in your head, only to find your idea has no merit.
• Test Different Markets. While you may think you know what market you’re going after, let the market decide this part. We approached schools first, then businesses, then academia, then HR personnel, then psychologists and consultants. But at any given time, we were ONLY focused on one of them. Do not attack more than one market group at a time. As a startup, chances are you don’t have the resources. We had an idea of who would be receptive to a product like ours, but we never truly knew which markets and which people in those markets would find it most valuable. Our first customer ended up being a management consulting organization in the field in Australia, the 2nd and 3rd customers were corporate training organizations in the U.S.
• Talk to Similar Companies. Don’t recreate the wheel. There may not be any other company like yours, but there are likely companies out there that have done similar or parallel launches that you can learn from. Find those founders and learn from them. Don’t be scared that they might steal your idea. Some of our prospects and partners, are companies in the same space. Usually, there are synergies. You never know; maybe down the line, you might refer a customer to them or vice-versa.