Testing Business Ideas

Glossary

Action

Next step to progress with testing and de-risking a business idea; informed decision to abandon, pivot, iterate, or continue testing.

Affinity sorting

An exercise used to organize ideas and data in which ideas are sorted into groups or themes based on their relationships.

Assumption

A statement or fact that we believe to be true; a statement in which we take something for granted without any evidence to support it.

Assumptions mapping

A team exercise where desirability, viability, and feasibility assumptions are explicitly written down and then decided upon.

Business Model

Rationale of how an organization creates, delivers, and captures value.

B2B

Business to business; exchange of products or services between businesses.

B2C

Business to consumer; exchange of products or services between businesses and consumers.

Business Model Canvas

Strategic management tool to design, test, build, and manage (profitable and scalable) business models.

Call to action (CTA)

Prompts a subject to perform an action; used in an experiment in order to test one or more hypotheses.

Conversion

When a customer interacts with your ad and then takes an action that is valuable to your business.

CSAT

Short for customer satisfaction.

Customer development

Four-step process invented by Steve Blank to reduce risk and uncertainty in entrepreneurship by continuously testing the hypotheses underlying a business model with customers and stakeholders.

Customer gains

Outcomes and benefits customers ...