While more and more start-up coaches are promoting lean business validation, customer development through fast iterations, and making your mistakes quickly, it seems that there are still venture capitalists out there who want companies to do long-term business plans.
To demonstrate the difficulties of predicting consumer behavior, here is the story of my plans for TV watching at home during the past three years:
We have moved several times and renovated quite a bit lately. This has allowed me to redo the media facilities at home according to what I thought my family would need.
Three years ago, we were living in an apartment with a baby. The falling asleep by the TV then took place in the bedroom, where we had our only TV set. When we moved a little bit later, I logically thought that the bedroom is where we watch TV and decided to make place for a larger connected TV there.
When the renovation was ready, however, it turned out the only person watching live broadcast TV was my son, who wanted to watch the morning show for children. The ideal place for the new TV was as far from the bedroom as possible. Which was fine as we in the new house had an extra room for it. The carefully crafted sockets for the TV antenna and the Internet connection on the wall of the bedroom were never used.
Now, we have moved again and based on my previous learnings, I rewrote the media consumption plan. The TV for my son is now in the corner of the living room, and I have a Playstation connected to a projector in the guest room that allows watching TV shows and films from the Internet. Quite nice a setup actually, with cables hidden in the walls and all.
Too bad nobody’s using them. My son now refuses to watch the TV morning show and wants to watch his favorite series on an iPad instead. My wife and I still have very little time for media entertainment, but we sometimes watch downloaded TV shows – when the pad is free late in the evening. This takes place in the bedroom, where we have no TV.
No wonder the TV manufacturers are struggling. If I can’t even predict my own media behavior in a year’s time, I imagine it is tough to create an Excel sheet that tells the exact truth about what potential TV customers think in 2015.
So my vote goes to agile learning and rewriting of plans.
To add a short epilogue: I just got a letter from the local health authorities who want to store my reckless behavior in their statistics. There were many funny questions, the relevance of which was at times difficult for me to grasp, but among other things they wanted to know how much TV I am watching.
It would be statistically correct for me to write down 0 hours and 0 minutes, but is it the relevant fact?