SLAM: Build your startup idea or early stage business with the Startup Launch Assistance Map

Copyright 2019 by Jon Warner

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SLAM. Build your startup idea or early stage business with the Startup Launch Assistance Map.

Published by: Team Publications Pty Ltd

First edition: July 2019

Author: Jon Warner

Cover and internal design by Kerry Milin, Production Works

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN: 978-0-6486626-1-7

Disclaimer

Readers should note that the views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in the text, belong solely to the author. The case study used is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, etc. are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. In addition, although the author and publisher have made every effort to ensure that the information in this book was correct at time of printing, the author and publisher do not assume and hereby disclaim any liability to any party for any loss, damage, or disruption caused by errors or omissions, whether such errors or omissions result from negligence, accident, or any other cause.

Who will benefit from reading this book?

Every author likes to believe that a wide variety of people from all over the world will read his or her book. However, with business books like this in particular, the truth is that it is often a very specific niche that really benefits from the experience. The broad group of readers who are most targeted by this book are obviously anyone interested in startups and entrepreneurship as a subject. However, this breaks down into three areas as follows:

Individuals who constantly have ideas or think about new or different ways to do things in life but have never acted on it formally. This book helps by suggesting a path to validate that his or her thinking/idea is on-point and capable of potentially becoming a commercial venture of some kind. For example, this may be a college student or professor looking to evolve a project and license it, or any person who thinks an idea might become a small or even large business one day.

Individuals who are working in a larger company who have one or more ‘side-hustles’ and believe that one of these has the potential to employ them (and others) perhaps full-time in the future. This book assists by not only helping to validate that the side-hustle can grow and support them but also to outline the execution path that is necessary. For example, this may be a person who sells a product or service online on a website like ‘Shopify’ mainly in the evenings or weekends and thinks this may have more potential to grow.

Individuals who run or already work in a startup or early-stage company (or in some cases run a new division of a larger company) and want to ensure that their efforts to date haven’t missed any important steps (which he or she can revisit) or even help turbo-charge what is already being done and both de-risk their efforts and perhaps make the business more investable to outsiders. This book helps by offering two 8-step templates, which provide questions in response to which good answers should exist, or be found. For example, this may be a startup founder who has spent many months and a lot of ‘boot-strapped’ cash to establish a small business but now needs to convince outsiders of its future value and success potential.

Whichever category best fits, and some people reading this book will not fit into any of these categories, I hope the path described is an interesting one.

About the author

Five-time company CEO, Jon Warner is a widely respected entrepreneurship expert having founded and led three startups (with one failure, one that did not ‘trouble the scorer’ and one successful exit). Jon’s career started in the corporate world with Air Products, working in the US and across Europe before joining Exxon-Mobil. At Exxon-Mobil Jon worked in the UK, the US, Australia, and Nigeria, ending his career there as Deputy CEO.

Following his 15 years in the corporate world, Jon founded and grew a management consulting business called The Worldwide Center for Organizational Development which had over 20 people carrying out a range of strategy assignments for large national and global companies. Much of this work focused on building an innovative culture and establishing greater internal entrepreneurship skills.

Jon was also CEO of two other startups – a digital publishing company and a bill-pay and payments software platform that operated in the US, UK, and Australia. Since his exit from the latter, Jon has been working from a California base to mentor and invest in disruptive startup companies, especially in the area of technology deployment and healthcare and aging technology in particular. Jon is CEO of Silver Moonshots, a research organization and ‘virtual incubator’ for startups focused on the 50+ population.

Jon is a noted speaker at businesses, colleges and conferences across the world. He also lectures on entrepreneurship at both undergraduate and MBA level at UCLA, UCR Riverside and at the University of Redlands, all in Southern California, where he is based.

Jon is also a prolific author having published 40 books, all concerning business, management, leadership, entrepreneurship and innovation.

Jon is a graduate of the UK top-five Warwick University, with a double bachelor’s degree in philosophy and politics and an MBA (with a finance specialism). JON also has a PhD in psychology specializing in neuro-science.

Contents

Foreword

Preface

Introduction

The 8 steps of the SLAM process

SLAM Step 1 Unmet need(s)

SLAM Step 2 Key team

SLAM Step 3 Product or service offering

SLAM Step 4 Proof points

SLAM Step 5 TAM, SAM, SOM

SLAM Step 6 Go-to-market channels

SLAM Step 7 Business model

SLAM Step 8 Competition

SLAM summary

The 8 steps of the GRAND process

GRAND Step 1 Detailed launch and growth path

GRAND Step 2 Team resources

GRAND Step 3 Pricing and assumptions

GRAND Step 4 Capital raise and phasing

GRAND Step 5 Capital deployment

GRAND Step 6 Systems design

GRAND Step 7 Make or buy decisions

GRAND Step 8 Fiscal projections

GRAND summary

Case study summary

Summary

Using the SLAM and GRAND diagrams for pitching

Glossary of terms

Acknowledgments

Foreword

I took my first engineering design course as an undergraduate in 1975. One of our assignments was to design a way for people in wheelchairs to access books that were out of reach on library bookshelves. As part of the design process, we tromped off to the college library and imagined ourselves sitting in a wheelchair in the stacks. We then went to our drawing boards (this was before AutoCAD) and drew up variations on the theme of a reach extender with a hand-grip that would allow someone to pull a book off the shelf and lower it into his or her lap. The one thing none of us did (that I know of) was to actually talk to a person in a wheelchair to see what his or her unmet need was. If we had, we might have discovered that they were unable to even read a book or hold one successfully and turn the pages. In fact, we might have discovered that what they really wanted was something that looked more like a Kindle or an iPad with an electronic voice reader that would not require going to the library at all. We were warned by our instructor, not to be ‘functionally fixed,’ and yet we were completely stuck by the notion that books had to be acquired in a library. The absence of user feedback doomed our designs to irrelevance, although we were all very proud of them.

For my junior project, my engineering class was challenged to design a power pack that could be attached to a conventional wheelchair and make it self-propelled. We devised a system with a steering motor, a drive motor that powered a fifth wheel, and a battery that hooked on the back of the wheelchair. Once again we did not talk to any potential users. Our design worked fine on a flat surface but was underpowered to go up a ramp. Without user input, we had lots of fun but we had no idea if we were actually meeting an unmet need.

In my remaining engineering courses in mechanical and aeronautical engineering, we did a lot of analysis but very little actual design work, except for small subsystems. The assumption was that customer needs were something someone else would determine and we would design to follow suit.

In the 1980s I studied marketing and strategy as part of my MBA program. Our marketing instructor had a memorable matrix he called ‘wants and gots’ that he used to organize his market research. Wants were what Jon Warner would call unmet needs. Gots were what the SLAM model would call the product or service offering. While the list was helpful at identifying ways in which an existing product might be succeeding at meeting customer needs, we never discussed how to change the product to fill the gap. I remember asking him what defined a successful marketing strategy and his reply was ‘go where the customers are.’ At the time, I took that to be a geographic argument for locating your business wisely. An entire industry in spatial analysis has arisen to meet that need, but geography was only part of the answer. The real meaning of ‘go where your customers are’ is to meet the unmet need. When you do, you don’t have to sell the product or service. People will rush to get it. I was close to understanding this process, but somehow I had still missed it.

After getting my Ph.D., I did a lot of work designing a curriculum