Ideation and Validation

How do I come up with an idea for my indie teaching creation?

The first stage in our design sprint journey is ideation and validation. In indie teaching, we need to identify the expertise that we are going to share. We are not assigned a class to teach or develop. There are no preestablished learning outcomes or even a course description.

Start with an idea.

An idea has three parts:

Audience: who are your target learners?
Need: what is an unmet need that the audience has?
Solution: how will you solve their need?

Ideation is about discovering your audience, their need, and your solution.

The solution solves a need of an audience.

If you have a solution, you need to validate that it fulfills a need for an audience. Not all ideas (even good ones) meet a need for an audience.

If you do not have a solution, you can discover one by first identifying an audience. Second you analyze the audience to discover their needs. Finally, you use problem solving techniques to develop a solution to that need.

I call the process of identifying and validating an idea “ideation.”

In indie teaching, we need to identify the expertise that we are going to share. We are not assigned a class to teach or develop. There are no pre-established learning outcomes or even a course description.

Most people have heard of the Kevin Costner movie, Field of Dreams. In the film, an Iowa corn farmer has a vision to cut down his corn field to build a baseball diamond. The quote from the movie is, “Build it and they will come.” This is great in a movie about ghosts of famous baseball players wandering in from the corn to play again. This is not great advice for launching an indie teaching gig.

A successful indie teaching gig is not built on what you know, rather it is based on what someone else wants to know. Only when there is an audience with an unmet need will there be an opportunity to make money to pay for your time and knowledge. Your purpose might be more than making money, but unless you are doing this as a hobby, making money is important to cover your time and expenses.

You could attempt to find this audience by creating a course or book and seeing who shows up. (Build it and they will come…we hope.) This is a bad idea as you may invest significant time and effort to see no results.

What you want to do instead is do some research on what people are looking for, spending money on, and not entirely satisfied with.

What are the categories of ideas that will work as a course?

People are interested in learning a wide variety of topics. These are some of the broad categories that might spark your imagination:

Professional Development
- What are skills specific to profession or industry?
- What competencies from the universal competency framework (Leading & Deciding, Supporting & Co-operating, Interacting & Presenting, Analyzing & Interpreting, Creating & Conceptualizing, Organizing & Executing, Adapting & Coping, and Enterprising & Performing) could be used as the basis for learning?
Personal Development
- What learning can lead to personal growth and development?
- What learning is tied to hobbies or pastimes?
Academic Development
- What learning can lead to advanced placement college credit?
- What learning can support classroom success either through topics like study skills or resources for a specific course topic?

What topic should I start with?

Typically, you will have at least a broad topic to start with, usually based on your past teaching. While some online gurus argue that you can create courses without being an expert, I find this to be overly optimistic advice. Think about what courses you have taught before or courses you have taken or work you have done outside of higher education. The most important element is that it should be something that interests you. If you do not like your topic, it will be a challenge to make progress. Part of the joy of indie teaching is that you get to work on what you want to work on. Take advantage of that.

Where do you start with ideation?

You can start with the audience, the need, or the solution. Many experts only have experience starting with one of these, and as a result, their advice is limited to one perspective. Where to start depends on what you already have and what is most readily available. If you already know your audience, start there. If you see a need in the world, start there. If you have a solution, start there.

For example, the idea behind indie teaching began with the audience: faculty. The need came closely behind the audience: faculty who were having a hard time getting teaching positions. The solution, training and resources to help those faculty become indie teachers followed but went through several iterations in its development.

If you don’t know have a starting place, start with an audience. It is always easiest to figure out what someone needs and find a solution compared to finding someone for your solution after you have built it.

Once you know your starting point, there is one clear next step.

I have an audience, what next?

If you have an audience in mind, then you have two options. Either the need or the solution comes next.

Once you know your audience, there are several ways to identify what their pain points and unmet needs are. This analysis can be used to then develop a solution. Steve Jobs famously said, “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” The risk in this approach is to not be innovative and discover something that people did not realize that they needed.

The other approach is to develop a solution then seek to find a need that the audience has that the solution matches. What do you do if your solution does not match a need? Steve Jobs created a fantastic device, the NeXT computer that failed in the market. It was a great solution in search of a need. This the risk of innovating too much.

Generally, the best approach is to research what your audience needs as the next step.

What if I start with a need?

The famous saying goes that if you build a better mousetrap the world will beat a path to your door. Why? Because the world has a serious mouse problem that is unmet by existing mouse control solutions. This is an example of starting with a need.

Another way to discover needs is to look at reviews of books and courses at Udemy and Amazon. In particular, look at 2-3 star reviews, and look for what was missing (the unmet need) from these books. That can be the need that starts your idea.

Once you know there is a need, you can either start building a solution or looking for an audience with that need. If you start with a need then the audience should always be the second step. Solutions take time to develop, and there is a risk that will not be able to find an audience later. This is what happened with NeXT computers. The better mousetrap success story assumes that there is an audience out there for mousetraps. It is better to validate that belief before embarking on developing a solution.

What if I have a great solution to start?

Steve Blank tells the story of a team in his class at Stanford that were working on an automated lawn mower solution. The initial audience was farmers for weeding. The idea was a total failure there, but in a second effort they found success with golf courses.

If you have a solution, you can test it to discover whether an audience exists. One strategy is the use of pre-sales. You can announce an upcoming course and allow pre-registrations. If there is enough interest, you develop the course. If not, you refund the pre-sales and go back to the drawing board.

If you start with a solution, you want to make sure there is a need for your solution and then find an audience for that need. The automated lawn mower was designed to take care of weed management. While that did not work for farmers, it did for greens keepers.

The risk from going from a solution to an audience is that you can easily create a contrived need that the solution solves. This is what is wrong with many consumer products. The challenge becomes how to market a product that no one really needs or wants. As a result, the focus is on the marketing and creating interest without creating true value. A key value of indie teachers is that it is always about creating value for learners. That is why we do what we do.

When you start with a solution (or even if a solution is the second step), you also must be aware of natural biases in human decision making. Once we lock into an idea, it can be hard to let the idea go. We can look for information that confirms the idea while ignoring evidence to the contrary.

How do I define my topic?

A key to success is to discover the words and phrases that your audience use when talking about their needs. The way to do this and to define your topic is to do keyword analysis.

Step One: Identify potential keywords

A great place to start is Wikipedia. Start with the topic page for the topic you are interested in and look at subtopics on that page. This allows you to narrow your topic and identify the commonly used words.

Another great starting point is Quora. Search for what questions people are asking related to your topic. Make notes of the exact phrases and questions.

You can also use Amazon as a starting point. Find the category related to your topic. What are common topics within Top 100 books in this category? You can also use Amazon search like Google search to see what suggestions it has for niches. You can add words like “for” “with” “and” to search to uncover additional niches and subtopics.

Finally, you can use Google. Start typing your topic in the search field and take note of what Google suggests to autocomplete your search. You can also look at the bottom of the search results page to see related searches. Google bases these recommendations on what people have searched for in the past.

In keyword research, a one-word keyword is known as a “head.” It provides the trunk of the tree of related search terms. A “body” keyword has 2-3 words in a phrase. The “long-tail” keyword is a phrase of 4 or more words. Long tail keywords are very focused and targeted. Body and long-tail keywords are the words that you are looking for.

Step Two: Expand keyword list

With a set of keywords and phrases, next visit the site Uber Suggest. Uber Suggest does many cool things, but what we want to do is generate related searches. We type our first keyword phrase into the search box and then look at what Uber Suggests as related searches.

Save each of these results as a “CSV” file. (That is a text file with the values separated by commas.) Do this for each of your keyword phrases.

Step Three: Evaluate the keywords

Copy and paste each of the files into one file. You can then sort the file by “search volume.” The search volume is a measure of how many times a month the term is searched for. Your target is search terms that have a volume of between 500 and 2,500 searches. Below 500 and the term is too long-tail and does not have enough interest. More than 2,500, and the search term is too popular and generic. This upper limit matters most when working on search engine optimization (SEO), as more popular terms are harder to establish SEO.

For now, our objectives are to test whether the topic has existing interest and what terms are used when people search on this topic.

The column “CPC” refers to the “cost-per-click” that you could expect to pay for advertising. Higher CPC means that advertisers like to sell ads related to this search term, which means that people are buying products and services related to the search term.

If you find that there are no keywords related to your topic, this may mean that no one is searching for related solutions. It can also mean that you do not have the right keywords. You might be able to reverse engineer this by looking at an existing web page that is related and identifying keywords from that page.

If no one is searching, that does not mean that you need to abandon this topic. You will need to use Blue Ocean validation as you may not find any related resources to use as a reference point.

Step Four: Use the keywords to identify sites

Now that you have significantly narrowed your keyword list, go back to Google and use those search terms to see what web pages come up.

You only need to review the 1st page of Google for each high performing keyword. You want to see if there are well established web sites with quality resources. Just because there are existing high-quality pages does not mean that you should abandon the topic, it just means that you need to think about how you will be different.

What is an example of keyword research?

One of my projects is a book on college advice. The idea came from Quora and the number of questions people asked about college.

To search for keywords, I started with:

college advice
should i go to college
how to choose a college major
how to choose a college
where should i go to college
should i go to graduate school
is it worth it to go to college

From Uber Suggest, I ended up with 1,012 keywords.

But only 10 of these were in the volume range 500 – 2,500:

what college should i go to quiz
what should i go to college for
where should i go to college
should i go to college
how to choose a college
college advice for freshman
college advice
how to choose a college major
how to choose a college major
college student advice
where should i go to college quiz

The rest were all below 400 monthly searches.

I then tried “College degree” which adds 326 keywords. Of these, 12 of these in range:

college degree list
college degrees list
college degree types
college degree 2 years
college degree frames
college degree online free
college degree worth it
college degree required jobs
college degree useless
college degree benefits
college degree is worthless
college degree worthless

Another 8 keywords were above the range.

The lesson learned is that the phrase “college degree” is important. My focus has been on starting college and the college experience. I missed the idea that people are interested in the end result (the degree).

This is why this type of research is important to do. Through this process, we can develop ideas for a topic, develop a better understanding of the language people use, and test how much interest there is in the topic.

What is an audience?

You can think of your audience as a tribe for your knowledge. Often the best audiences are niche-focused with long-tails. This means that they have very specific interests. The online auction site started because the founder collected Pez dispensers, and he wanted a way to facilitate their buying and selling. That is an example of a focused niche with a long tail. Ebay grew beyond that initial focus, but its origin is a concrete example of serving a specific audience.

The audience might be united by interest in a topic, by a common profession, work in a certain industry, share demographic characteristics, support a cause, or by old fashioned geography.

The narrower the audience, the easier it is to be an expert within that niche. People also tend to respond to solutions that are tailored to them versus something generic.

How do I find my audience?

Once you have a topic that has potential, you need to validate your ideas and start building your community. You need to create awareness of what you are working on so that when you publish you have people lined up to consume your offerings.

Online and face-to-face groups and meetings are a valuable place to begin to understand the needs of your audience. You can learn a great deal just by listening/reading.

The web site Quora is another great resource. Quora is a site where people ask (and answer) questions. By looking at what questions people are asking, you can get ideas about what people want to learn. The idea to do a book on college advice came from Quora as I saw many people asking questions about college and seeing the limitations of many answers.

You can also interview people from your target audience to develop a better understanding of their needs.

My preferred approach is to do a survey. As part of the survey, you can ask people for email addresses and permission to follow-up with them on your project.

The survey allows you to start to create a relationship with your audience. You can find people to respond to your survey in a variety of ways. Your audience self-selects by responding to the survey.

If you cannot find people to respond to a survey, then, you probably could not find people to take a course or read a book. The survey allows you to test the need for what you are offering and your ability to reach your audience before you invest more hours in developing something that you cannot find anyone interested in.

What is a Learner Profile?

As you get to know your audience, you will want to develop a learner profile that answers these questions:

What (and who) are people complaining about in your topic? What’s frustrating them? What are they worried about? What are they dreaming of doing? How do they feel about what they’re doing now?

These questions and their answers will help you understand the audience’s needs and criteria for a solution.

What is a “Job-to-be-Done”?

Job-to-be-Done (JTBD) is a way of looking at the world through the lens that people have jobs that they are attempting to accomplish. These jobs are varied such as change the oil in the car as something mundane to something abstract like have a career that is financially and personally fulfilling.

For example, when someone wants to learn, the JTBD is not the learning. It is the application of the learning. The JTBDs can include:

Learning for career
Hard skills related to the technical aspects of a job
Soft skills relevant to all jobs
Learning for home and family
Self-growth topics from parenting to time management
Hobby topics that are for pleasure such as golf or history
Learning for school
Academic skills related to the content of a specific course
Supporting skills such as study skills that support success in class

A JTBD is another way of thinking about the needs of your audience. What is the outcome that the learning will produce for them?

How do I identify a solution?

As an indie teacher we are interested in building products and services that support learning. The solution is always going to be about helping someone learn new information or skills. We need to identify what learning will address the learner’s need.

Sometimes the learner may not know what they need to know. Sometimes they may not know where to find the information. Other times they have access to the information, but it is not presented in a way that facilitates learning.

How do I stand out when other options already exist?

There are three ways to standout:

You can do whatever one else is doing but do it differently
You can do what everyone else is doing but do it for a different audience
You can do something different from what anyone else is doing

For example, if we want to build a course on time management, we can be different from the other courses on time management by:

Presenting the content in a different way than anyone else. Maybe we create a course that teaches one practice a week, adding practices over time so that it Is easier to create time management habits.
We can present time management to a different audience. Usually we talk about this as “niche down.” Rather than trying to do time management for everyone, we can focus our time management for students or even more specifically for online college students.
We could also create our own time management system that is different than anything else available anywhere else.

This guide and related courses on indie teaching are a combination of all three of these. Other courses exist on creating online courses, but this is different in providing the content in a guide for free and offering courses that build on the content. Most courses lack this transparency and claim secret knowledge only to be gained through admission to the course. By focusing on teachers and professors, we are also different. Most courses on these topics are generic or focus on people who want to be entrepreneurs. Finally, indie teaching includes techniques and ideas drawn on over two decades in teaching which are not available from anyone else.

How do I validate my idea?

You want to validate your idea before you invest time and energy into creating a solution. Depending on how you developed your idea, you might have already done the validation as part of your research. If you started with an audience and did research on what their needs are and based your solution on that, you have already done what you needed to do. Validation is a check on what you have done so far.

Validation requires answers to three questions:

Is there a need?
Who has this need?
Does the solution fulfill the need?

How we validate our idea depends on whether we are in a “red ocean” or a ‘blue ocean.”

A red ocean is one where there are many existing products competing like sharks going after the same fish. In traditional business strategy, you want to avoid red oceans. Indie teaching, though, is not traditional business. You are not looking to create the next big business that will go public on the stock exchanges. Your goal is to share your expertise with an audience. There is enough audience to go around. Also, a red ocean means that an audience exists and is actively looking for solutions like yours.

A blue ocean, on the other hand, is open space with no existing competition. The risk is that that may mean there is no audience either. The upside is that it is easy to be the best when you are the first.

How do I do validation in a Red Ocean?

We are going to assume that we are in a Red Ocean until research shows that we are in a Blue Ocean.

To start, we are going to use the keywords that we identified when we were researching topics. We will use these keywords in three places to identify what interest there is in this topic:

Google Keywords (Ubersuggest)
Amazon
Udemy and Class Central
Quora

If a topic is being searched on Google or people are asking questions on Quora, that is an indication that an audience and need exist. If people are buying books on Amazon or courses at Udemy, that means there is an existing audience. By looking at reviews, we can identify how we can offer a better solution.

Red Ocean validation may also identify niches that are not being served by existing solutions.

How do I do validation in a Blue Ocean?

If your research in Red Ocean validation comes back empty, you may be in a Blue Ocean.

In this situation, you have four options for validation:

Survey: If you know your audience, you can survey them. This works well if you have a mailing list or know groups that you can survey. You can also run advertisements that link to a survey. The key to the survey is in measuring that there is an audience and identifying their needs.
Pre-sale: If you know your solution, you can run a pre-sale. You can advertise or otherwise promote the pre-sale.
Beta Test: A beta test is when you give away the solution for free in exchange for feedback. It is like a pre-sale without the sale part. If you cannot give your solution away, you probably won’t be able to sell it either.
Pilot Project: I love running pilots in organizations to test whether an idea will work. You can do the same thing as an indie teacher by offering a small solution that requires less development than a full solution. If the pilot works, you expand.

Any of these approaches will validate that you have an idea that can be viable.

How do I use Google for validation?

You already used Google to identify keywords for your topic. If your topic has changed since then, it might be good to return to Google and UberSuggest to see what people are searching for.

You can also use searches on Google like “audience + solution” to see what comes up. For example, “colleges students and time management” would show you what exists currently on this topic.

How do I use Amazon for validation?

Even if you are not planning on publishing a book, Amazon is a great tool for validation. People who buy books on a topic are also likely to buy courses and other learning resources on a topic.

Use your keywords to search for related books on your topic.

How many books are there on your topic? (More is better to indicate an existing audience.)

How many of these books have 30+ reviews? 100+ reviews? (This is an indication of how many have been sold and how committed the audience is.)

Look at the popularity of books that come up. Are there at least 5 books on topic in Kindle top 30,000? (These titles have a revenue of about $100/month.)

Review the 2-3 star reviews to see what people liked and did not like about these books. This tells you what to improve on in your work.

Note what categories and subcategories these books are listed in on Amazon. Find the subcategories related to your topic, and look at the 1st, 5th, 10th, and 20th ranked book in the subcategory? Where are they ranked? Top 15,000 or 30,000?

Amazon sales will give you an idea of existing interest in your topic. If there are books that are selling and being reviewed, that is probably validation for your idea.

How do I use existing online courses for validation?

Udemy is the largest platform for online courses. Look for what courses are popular. Udemy courses have reviews, so like Amazon, look for 2-3* reviews and as well as how many people have purchased a course.

Another option is to look at Massively Online Open Courses (MOOCs). These are typically offered by universities, but they will give you an idea of what people are engaging with. Class Central maintains a central directory of courses including rankings by popularity. A popular MOOC is a sign that there is an audience interested in this topic.

Facebook and LinkedIn both have groups. You can read the discussions and see what people are frustrated about related to your topic by reviewing the past discussions.

The site Reddit allows you to search your specific keywords. You want to look for posts that talk about the audience’s needs that you can be used to validate your idea.

Active social media discussions typically indicates an area where people are looking for solutions.

How do I use a survey for validation?

My preferred approach is to do a survey. You can use Google Forms (part of G Suite) to create your survey.

The survey should ask questions about what problems that your expertise could solve for someone else. You want to verify that people are motivated to solve these problems.

I was working on an online course for people who wanted to become professors. I did a survey with four questions. Where were they in their journey to become a professor? What obstacles were they facing? What advice they had for others, and what their email address was for follow-up. I ended up with about 300 responses…mostly from people who were professors and many of them who advised people from not following this career path. The results made me realize that I need to shift my focus to something for professors who could not find teaching positions…which is why I am writing this today.

Later I did a second survey asking people what held them back from offering their own courses and books. This survey helped me prospect who was interested and also what they perceived as the barriers, so I knew what to address in my writing and teaching.

To find respondents for my first survey, I posted it in half a dozen LinkedIn groups related to higher education. Most responses came from just two of these groups, but since it is usually not possible to know that in advance, you want to cast a wide net to start.

Social media liked LinkedIn is a great way to post a survey to collect feedback and email addresses. Groups in particular are a way of finding people with an interest in your topic.

Another approach is to use search engine optimization (SEO). The objective is to create web pages (blog posts) that will be ranked sufficiently high on Google and other search engines so that when people search on this topic, they will find your page. You can direct them to your survey from the page.

Another option is online advertising. Paid search is when you pay Google to list your ad when people search for certain keywords. Facebook and LinkedIn also sell ads that you can use to target people by different segments. In LinkedIn, for example, you can target people based on job title or industry. You can use ads to drive people to your survey.

If you cannot find enough people to respond to your survey, then you probably would not be able to find an audience for your course or book. You might want to revisit your topic or your approach in finding an audience.

When you are considering a blue ocean idea, this step in the process is essential because you do not know if an audience exists. This is the challenge I had in building services for professors who wanted to become independent. No books or courses existed on the topic, so I had to validate interest in an idea that my target audience had not even considered.

What if I have a better mousetrap?

The old saying is that if you invite a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door. This will be the case only if a couple of things are true.

First, does your audience realize that they have a mouse problem?

If they do not think that they have a mouse problem, they are unlikely to be interested in any mousetrap. In this situation, you need to understand whether your audience does indeed have a mouse problem. You may need to educate them that even if they do not see the mice that the droppings and chewed on food and other items might indicate a mouse problem.

Even if they know they have a mouse problem, they may not believe that any solution will solve their problem. You may need to demonstrate the effectiveness of your solution. They may not like existing solutions, so you need to understand what they are willing to pay for a mouse trap and what qualities a trap must have. Maybe they do not use existing traps because they are poisonous, and they do not want that in their homes. Maybe they object to killing a living creature. You must discover what would make a better mousetrap better.

Finally, they may be happy with their current mouse trap. In that case, you will need to prove how your better mousetrap is better.

The ideal audience knows they have a problem and are frustrated by existing solutions. Less than ideal audiences will require additional education to help them realize that they have a problem and the effectiveness of your solution.

What are the outcomes of my solution?

One of the last steps in the ideation process is to describe the outcomes that your audience will achieve as a result of your learning. What is it that they will know or be able to do that they cannot do before? Often these will be the satisfaction of the need but expressed in a positive perspective rather than the negative.

What goes into a design statement?

The design statement is the final result of the ideation process. In the design statement, you complete the following statement putting in your words for the underlined parts:

If audience uses solution they will overcome needs and achieve desired outcomes.

The design statement summarizes the work of the ideation process in one sentence that you can use to describe your project.

How do I make decisions during ideation and validation?

Each stage of the design sprint contains within it a decision-making cycle: Observe, Model, Decide, and Act (OMDA).

Observe: We do research and take in information beyond our own experience and pre-conceived notions.
Model: Based on the research, we will develop new mental models and approaches. Part of this process is using your own experience and values to make sense of the research. At the same time, it is about creating new patterns. One way to orient in this process is to apply concepts from one audience to a new audience. OMDA, for example, was developed for military applications. Using this model in the context of learning design is a new application of an existing concept. The orientation process requires generating ideas and possibilities.
Decide: The decision is selecting an idea from the options generated in orient. The design statement is the articulation of the decision during ideation and validation.
Act: We act by putting our decision into practice. A key aspect of this is that by acting we will generate feedback on how effective our decision was. In ideation and validation the action is fed forward into the design process.

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Chris Davis, PhD