Every day we experience some kind of pain or friction. On a scale from “Meh” to “I cannot even deal with this” meltdowns, the Dread Pirate Roberts nailed it when he said “Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.” Product/Market fit is all about easing the customer (or user) pain. And this is where the first stage of the CROP model which I am putting together comes in: Concept.

One of my favorite books is “Start With Why” by Simon Sinek. I refer to it frequently because it’s so fundamental. Like a good roundhouse kick that starts in the core and aims for the moon, a good product starts from a heartfelt “why” and aims for the perfect realization of that intent.

Since there is no end to the pains and frictions of life, there’s no end to business opportunities. It’s up to us to find our “why” and then validate the problem to see if the ends justify the means for our current situation. Sounds easy, right? And yet somehow it’s not so easy. There’s actually more to the concept stage of business planning than just coming up with an idea that would solve pain for a lot of people, or walking through a lean canvas.

Take for example my pain of recycling. I love the earth. I’m passionate about the triple bottom line of people, planet, and profit. I really really really want to be a good citizen of the earth and recycle correctly. But I can’t seem to get my plastics and papers separated from the food. Take, for example, a coffee cup. I know I should carry a reusable cup with me but I don’t always have one, especially in the airport. So I drink my beverage in the airport and then what. I’m faced with three bins. Is this coated disposable cup paper? Is it plastic? Is there too much food residue on it? I want a magic recycle-pactor that acts like a trash compactor but knows what to do with my coffee cup. It scans the item, senses the chemical makeup, maybe does a quick rinse, and then sorts my item appropriately according to local processing capabilities.

Sounds very cool and very pain-solving. Literally millions of other people around the world have this problem. It has amazing potential. If I walk through a lean canvas I would totally nail it. Great concept, right? I should totally do it! Well, actually not yet. As great as this idea is, I don’t actually have a solid concept yet.

Sure, probably everyone I asked would agree they want this thing to be available; it would really solve problems for people and planet and could almost certainly generate profit, which are totally in line with my core values. I could totally quantify and pitch that. But I haven’t asked yet if it can be built, and if it can be built what would it take? What would the recycle-pactor look like, how much power would it draw, how would it be serviced, what accessories would it need, how would the local processing capabilities be maintained (is there even an API for that?) and what would the total cost of ownership be (because sometimes the cure is worse than the disease, especially when we’re trying to solve environmental problems, not cause them). What would the production cost be, what would the timeline be, how scalable is this, really? I have not done a real feasibility study. There are still thousands of questions I haven’t considered. My idea is not yet a concept.

And here is where we progress from the why to the what to the how, following the golden circle model explained in Start With Why. A solid business concept requires us to examine all three of these rings of the circle before we move from concept to runway: Why > What > How. It’s my experience that when we walk a lean canvas through the golden circle of Why, What, and How, important details will emerge.

When someone asks what you’re doing, you should be able to answer by delivering your “elevator pitch” in 30 seconds or less. If you’ve really done your homework, your elevator pitch will show how everything comes together to encapsulate your market, their problem and it size, your unique solution and its profitability, and your reason why.

For my recycle-pactor idea, after I’ve done my research and walking my lean canvas through the golden circle, I could end up with a statement such as “For people who want to recycle but aren’t sure which bin something belongs in, we’re building a recycle-pactor that costs under [$x] to own and operate per year and returns [$y] on investment because we want to make recycling easy and affordable.” That would be a solid business concept. I could then elaborate about how it senses the item, compacts each bin for appropriate disposal, my total addressable market (TAM) and serviceable addressable market (SAM), supply chain, go-to-market strategy, etc. But everything anyone needs to know is built into my first statement: my Why, What, and How with just enough feasibility.

And that, a solid concept, is the beginning of my CROP model: Concept, Runway, Operations, Profit or Pivot. It all starts with a solid concept.