How to Prove the Concept of a Business Idea for Fertility Professionals

Learn the five key steps to turn your fertility business idea into reality: ideation, pre-delivery, product market fit, iterations, and funding.

You might be a fertility professional with a really good business idea. Today we're going to go through the steps of how you prove that idea and how you might even be able to take it to market. The five steps are ideation, pre-delivery, product market fit, iterations, and funding.

Ideation, this is where you're looking for the big pain point and this is where you want to work for someone else first. So if you're already in the fertility field, the best thing that you can do is get deeper into the operations of your own clinic or lab or company. What you're looking for is what is that pain point, what is that problem that bugs you, your co-workers, your bosses, that if they could wave a magic wand or if they could spend a small fortune to solve, they would.

During this ideation time where you're working for a clinic or a lab or another fertility company, looking for that big pain point, you also want to be networking with as many other fertility professionals as you possibly can. If you're in the lab, you want to be networking with as many embryologists and other lab personnel as possible. If you're in the clinic, you want to be working with as many providers and other clinic personnel as you can, getting to know them through professional groups, LinkedIn, and other means.

Because the pain point that you have might be different from what others have. You want to make sure it's a common pain point and that it's deep enough to enough people. That's going to bring us to our second step, which is pre-delivery.

You're going to have to learn so much about your product, about what you wanted to do, about operating a business. You do not want to be figuring out how to actually deliver the product or service that you're proposing. You really need to know how to do what it is that you're planning on doing, and you need to know how to train other people to do it.

This is part of the reason why you want to be networking so much during that ideation time. And you need both of those because number three is product market fit. There are multiple ways of assessing product market fit.

The most effective and the truest is pre-selling, and you have to be able to pre-sell ethically. Pre-selling means selling a solution that doesn't exist yet. Doing it ethically means you're doing it with very transparent expectations, meaning we haven't done this yet, but what we're attempting to sell for is A, or this isn't ready yet, but in nine months we expect to have B. The deeper the pain point that you've discovered, the deeper the relationships you've built, the deeper the expertise that you've built for yourself, the lower expectations that you can set that allows you to pre-sell even more and pre-sell even more effectively.

Meaning if you have a lot of trust and you're solving for something that people know you know how to solve, and it's something that is really painful for them, you can tell them, hey, this isn't going to be ready for another X years, or we haven't done this yet, but here's what we have done that I think will solve for it. Would you be willing to pay X for this in exchange for being our first iteration, in exchange for me giving you this personalized attention? And that answers the biggest question of product market fit. Who's willing to pay for this and how much? And when you have people paying real money to solve real problems, that's what brings you to number four, iterations.

You may have something that's really valuable and you can really solve for a particular problem, but you're going to find out the real-life considerations that affect that problem. In other words, sure, you can solve for this problem in a vacuum, but in real life you find out what other commitments they have, what their workflow is like, and other things you need to do to iterate to make sure it's actually valuable to them, that they're actually willing to part ways with their money continuously. And if you've done all that, you've begun to solve for number five, which is funding.

If you're going to bootstrap, you've pre-sell. You've got your earliest customers to pay for your solution, and then you can reinvest that. Maybe this is a much bigger problem that you're not going to be able to finance just with bootstrapping, but guess what? Venture capitalists still want to see that somebody is willing to part ways with their money to pay you to solve that problem.

And standing in front of venture capitalists, raising money from them is a lot easier to do if you've sold 5, 10, 15, 20 customers than if you've sold zero. There's so much to learn here. You're drinking from a fire hose, but you might have a really valuable business idea.

There are embryologists, nurses, REIs, other clinic staff that have really good ideas and really good potential solutions that we need in our field to scale access to care. It's going to be hard and cumbersome no matter what, but if you follow these five steps, working for someone else and networking in iteration, all your preparation and pre-delivery, properly assessing product market fit with ethical pre-selling, appropriately iterating, and thus being prepared to get the best funding source for you, then you will have gotten yourself miles ahead in your path towards success, and I wish you the best of luck. I'm Griffin Jones, and this has been my ASRM MedTalk.