By Akida Mashaka, Founder of Barcelona High School
The BHS Method for Startups
In the world of startups, turning an idea into a future sustainable business may seem impossible. With limited resources and a lack of entrepreneurship experience, how do you come up with a startup idea that can not only survive but thrive? Enter the BHS Method for Startups created by a free-spirited entrepreneur, Akida Mashaka, founder of the fastest growing school in Europe, Barcelona High School.
While the BHS Method is also a revolutionary educational methodology created as the learning approach for Barcelona High School, the BHS Method for Startups offers a roadmap for founders who wish to turn ideas into scalable ventures by helping them understand that trying to come up with an amazing startup idea is not what will be the key to their success. Instead, it's all about how well you can discover and solve the urgent (credit Barbara Corcoran) problem of customers.
What is a Startup?
As defined by Stanford University professor Steve Blank, a startup is a temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model with the goal to eventually become a large company in the future. Believe it or not, a startup is not a smaller version of a larger company. A large company aims to successfully execute a business plan and known business models. A startup doesn't even need a business plan and must search for a business model. The issue with startups is that while founders are driven by passion, they are also driven by faith. For a startup to succeed, however, founders must turn faith into facts as rapidly as possible. The mistake is simply thinking that just because you believe, therefore, it exists. The goal of a startup should be to take your startup idea which is based on certain hypotheses, otherwise untested guesses, and to test them to find out what is the actual problem that customers most urgently have and need to be solved.
What does the BHS stand for?
Build
Harvest
Succeed
Now let’s dive deeper into each stage of the BHS Method for your startup plan.
What is the BHS Method for Startups?
The BHS Method for Startups is a proven approach to startup development that teaches you to build a product quickly on your own, harvest insights through rapid iteration for a core group of customers, and achieve success from solving urgent needs systematically through customer feedback and metrics. The BHS Method for Startups follows the lean startup (credit Eric Ries) philosophy— how to efficiently turn ideas into viable businesses with minimal wasted effort— and makes you not only obsess over solving the most urgent problem for customers, but to start with the smallest economically viable customer base (credit Seth Godin) as the best path to build a scalable business idea.
Build: Bootstrap to Solve an Urgent Problem
The first stage of the BHS Method is to Build your product offer all by yourself. At this stage, it's called bootstrapping—building your product yourself using your own resources without relying on external funding. This first stage is where you build an initial highly imperfect product which is called a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) (credit Eric Ries) to discover customers' most urgent problem (credit Michael Seibel) instead of assuming your first product offer will instantly be a success with customers. Ideally, you should be solving your own problem (credit Brian Chesky) or a problem that is highly critical to a certain audience.
Why Build it Yourself:
Speed: Getting your imperfect product into customers' hands as quickly as possible allows you to start testing assumptions early to begin the solution idea experimentation process.
Customer Feedback: Instead of spending months, or years, developing a product you think customers would want, you can quickly start collecting real customer feedback and marketing metrics to find out what customers actually want.
Market Validation: Find out what initial customers are actually willing to pay for which is really what their actual urgent need is, and then set your aim at finding 100 customers that love your product (credit Brian Chesky).
In this stage, the goal isn’t perfection—it’s about getting a basic product launched in weeks so you can start testing assumptions immediately to discover the urgent need of your audience as fast as possible.
Harvest: Iterate to Find Your Unique Superpower
Once you’ve built your MVP and gotten it into the hands of your first customers, it’s time to Harvest your idea. This stage is all about refining your product through continuous iteration based on customer feedback and market data. The aim here is to discover your startup’s "superpower"—the unique value of your product to its core customer base that solves their urgent problem so much better than anyone to the point where your product's value far exceeds its price.
Key Actions During the Harvest Stage:
Iterate Quickly (credit Eric Ries): Obsess over constantly updating and refining your product from customer data which is the best way to get to the final stage of having a successful startup idea.
Do Things That Don’t Scale (credit Paul Graham): In the early stages, focus on personalized solutions and high-touch customer interactions to deeply understand their most urgent needs instead of scalable methods that may never come to fruition.
Find Product-Market Fit (credit Micheal Seibel): This is the sweet spot where your product perfectly meets the needs of a core group of customers, leading to exponential customer growth.
The Harvest stage is where you move from an unproven idea to a great product. It's where you learn what customers truly want and how you can best deliver it.
Succeed: Achieve Product-Market Fit
Finally, after you’ve built your MVP and refined it to meet your core customers’ urgent needs, it’s time to Succeed. Success in the BHS Method is about transitioning from a startup to a scalable business. This happens when you consistently deliver on your product’s promise and your customers begin to grow exponentially due to your product’s strong market fit.
How to Achieve Success:
Grow Rapidly: It is essential, as demand grows, to grow your customer base at a rapid pace which creates a network effect that makes it impossible for any competitor to overtake you.
Leverage Data: Through rapid growth, you get more and more customer data to guide you to provide a mature product that serves more customers better than anyone else can.
Customer Focus: By growing rapidly and leveraging your data, you're forced to stay focused on solving the most urgent needs of your customers, instead of wasting money and time on non-essential things that you only assume matter.
Success, in this context, isn’t just about revenue—it’s about creating a sustainable business through growing your customer base to gain unique leverage to evolve and stay aligned with the core needs of your customers.
Why the BHS Method Works for Startups
The BHS Method for Startups works because it aligns with the realities of startup life. By focusing on building imperfect things quickly you become fearless. By harvesting insights through iterative development you discover solutions based on facts instead of guesses. By scaling based on proven success you stay aligned with growing needs of your customer base. The BHS Method for Startups helps entrepreneurs avoid common pitfalls like failing due to competitors in the marketplace because you launched too late in pursuit of an unattainable perfect product before you even have customers, and over-investing in untested ideas that waste value resources, or even scaling too quickly without first having product market fit with your audience.
Why the BHS Method Works for Startups:
It's Efficient: The BHS Method minimizes wasted time and resources by focusing on rapid iteration and real-world testing.
It's Customer-Centric: By constantly iterating based on customer data, you ensure that your product is always aligned with what the market actually wants.
It's Scalable: Once you’ve nailed product-market fit, the BHS Method provides a clear path for scaling your business sustainably.
Build, Harvest, Succeed with Your Startup Idea
If you’re ready to take your startup idea to the next level and you have the courage to learn through imperfection and failure versus faith and over-confidence, then I suggest you adopt the BHS Method for Startups: Build your MVP quickly for a niche audience, Harvest insights through constant iteration, then Succeed by scaling your business based on a repeatable system. This method not only sets you on the path to harvest a successful startup idea, but it also ensures that your business will be built to last.
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