The Startup Launch Assistance Map (SLAM), illustrated above, is an 8-step sequential process, starting on the far left, moving across the center to the far right, establishing the key boxes needed to consider product market fit, and then going clockwise thereafter. This map is a simple but powerful way for startup teams, individual ideators and founders, and even more mature businesses with new products or services, to assess their thinking and hypotheses and judge whether or not they have an idea that can commercially scale.
Let’s describe each of the eight steps in brief.
The Unmet need(s) and which segments (including the most likely “beach-head) experience the most pains or gains that would be alleviated by your solution?
The Key Team (founding members including the potential CEO, CTO and CMO)
Product or Service offering and how it offers unique and specific value to each identified key segment with unmet need(s).
Proof points/metrics that the channels, metrics and target customer segments are the right ones?
Size of market calculations and speed of traction to breakeven given the investment (TAM, SAM, SOM)
Specific go-to-market channels that achieve greatest growth and traction (including gaining, sustaining and growing customers)
Business model and monetization strategy and why (with support evidence)
Start-up Eco-System Map (a. Competition and potential saboteur(s), b. Buyers/End-users, c. Suppliers/Resources, d. Direct and indirect influencers
The ‘SLAM’ is intended to be a simple template for ideators, early stage startup founders and new product managers to relatively quickly test whether or not their thinking, hypotheses and guesses about an unmet customer need and a solution to improve the situation are the basis of establishing a new organization to tackle it. In other words, it helps founders to test whether their proposed startup/early stage business is scalable, repeatable and profitable in the future by testing structured thinking with real customers in an identified target segment. In essence, this is a process for starting to establish “product-market fit”. Product/Market fit has 3 main questions:. 1. Is the apparent unmet need urgent or vital to lots of possible customers? 2. Does the proposed solution meet the unmet need at a price that customers will happily pay? and 3. Are there enough customers in the suggested “universe” to build a scalable and ultimately successful business? We hope this process helps with these questions.
A quick word about the Reverse Side of the SLAM
The Startup Launch Assistance Map does have a reverse side to it. For the purposes of this article we will not describe it in detail here. However, in brief, this is intended to be the “execution” template and only to be drafted when the first side has been thoroughly tested by customer discovery, which will certainly take weeks and often can take many months.
