StartupLessonsLearned2011 at San-Francisco, 23rd of May 2011
#sllconf on Twitter, identi.ca, Local Simulcasts, TwitterStreamGraphs, Collecta, flickr
Own objectives
- meet again Lean Startup people in Paris
- be involved and focused
- re-evaluate current ideas
Attended activities
Eric Ries: State of the Lean Startup Movement
- to check
- HBS MVP fund + launching tech ventures
- BYU rsearch project
- +=ref bit.ly/Custdev
- mission of improving the success rate
- lean startup principles
- following the last talk watched (cf ...)
- recall of not "can it be done?" but rather "should it be done?"
- how many pivots can I still do?
- pinpoints the assumptions
- learn by transforming them to facts
What are the lessons learned from my past projects? ROI despite failures?
See WithoutNotesSeptember10#EricRies, WithoutNotesApril11#EricRies, WithoutNotesMarch11#EricRies and several others.
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Mitch Kapor, KEI - A Conversation with Mitch Kapor and Eric Ries
- explaining why it worked when it did is not easy
- difficulty of keeping up with growth
- innovatoin as punctuated equilibrium
- which feature will early adopter really appreciate and share around?
- no middle ground for entrepreneurs too
- being part of the solution or part of the problem
- negative externalities including environment degradation taken into account
- lean startup as a process innovation
- managing decreasing risk by learning for the minimum cost
- conferring an "unfair advantage"
- "You only know if you are right or crazy in retrospect."
See TheFutureOfIdeas#MitchKapor.
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Votizen Case Study: How and When to Pivot
- quick review of finance and chances of success
- including a (nearly depressing) variance vs "classical engineer position" e.g. at Google
- "create your own reality"
- cf Pygmalion gift
- lean mitigate own reality distortion field
- lean as converting market risk to technical risk
- pivot the statement of your BM
- consequence of learning about your business, not just your product
- vision-driven, not testing-driven
- own example of iteration through 1.0 (1.1 tweaking) 2.0 3.0 4.0
- when? when you have to bounce out of the local maximum
- how? understand the pain that is driving people to act
- but don't flail
- still have to learn
- see also the Swiss AI researcher robotic ML algo discovered recently
- seek funding for tech risk rather than market risk
See Seedea:Utopiahanalysis/Politicsoldandnew
(potentially add @Votizen there too)
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Wealthfront Case Study: Continuous Deployment in an SEC-Regulated Environment
- democratizing money managers
- continuous deployment, not continuous feature adding
- screenshot of their deployment manager
- 5 essentials (but through a loop)
- Culture, everybody in the company owns the quality of the code base
- TDD
- Continuous integration
- Immune system (with the "production pager")
- Continuous deployment
- tests and test coverage have to be of quality too
- one has to have confidence in the "green light"
- consider starting by a small system, add pieces step by step
See Cashing (Caching?) added to Financing? before.
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Brad Smith, Intuit - A Conversation With Intuit CEO Brad Smith and Eric Ries
- the rougher the prototype the better you are
- checking for regulations on projects
- asking the right questions at the right time
- run experiments as a whole culture
- not personal, the point is the outcome
- build Just-In-Time not just in case
- "a genius with a thousands helper does not scale"
- love metric
- "what is the #1 reason the person is hiring the product?"
- mention of Clay Christensen
- have a management and business model that scale
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Food on the Table One Year Later: From the Concierge Minimum Viable Product to a Scalable Business
- grow efforts based on justified needs
- learn first, code last
- use paper prototype, mockups, ...
- leaps of knowledge by talking to customers
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Case Study: "BigCo Lessons Learned - IGN Entertainment"
- experiments culture as a bet factory
- also with SC2 replays sponsoring
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Case Study: "The Epic Pivot - Heroku’s Story"
- conditional pathflow for production and... testing for who are the "real" users in the "end-user" targeted market
- early success can lock on the wrong (non scalable or out of the vision?) product
- mainly just attention
- which should be cherished to be later on converted
- pivot
- from Heroku Garden to current Heroku platform
See Ruby#Heroku
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Design + Lean Startup = Lean UX (Case Studies: Cooper, TheLadders, LUXr NYC, SideReel)
- understanding a person, what they need, ...
- similarities between the UX process and the customer development process
- test in pennies, spend in dollars
- reduce the amount of time between try and feedback linked to goals (e.g. conversion)
- nice slide on old way (long curve of risk going up) / new way (sawtooth)
- moving from deliverable to experience
Explore
See recently watched WithoutNotesMay11#MaryCzerwinski
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The rest will be added once recordings will be watched (had to sleep, sorry Steve :(
Steve Blank
See WithoutNotesMay10#SteveBlank with the first mention of Startup Lessons Learned WithoutNotesJanuary11#SteveBlank, WithoutNotesSeptember10#SteveBlank, TheFourStepsToTheEpiphany
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Dropbox Case Study: Epic Scale One Year Later
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Hearsay Case Study: Agile Practices Applied to Sales and Marketing
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Case Study: IMVU, One Year Later
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Groupon Case Study: Using Lean Startup Principles to Manage Hypergrowth
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Closing Remarks
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Overall remarks and conclusions
- ironically nearly nobody from the Camping?
- this event and all the other Dojo, Meetups, ... maybe show that being in the physical hub still matters even at the age of the Internet and "simultcasts"
- between market studies, customer development, designer research it seems it to be all about theory of mind
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Other reviews or coverage
To do
- improve Template
- add map data (:ola-point lat= lon= text='':)
- integrate
- BusinessModelGeneration, LeanThinking, TheArtOfLeanSoftwareDevelopment, VentureCapitalAndTheFinanceOfInnovation, ...
- TheTinkerersAccomplice on the importance of tinkering in nature too
- LeanStartupEtBusinessModel, LeanStartupEtBusinessModelDecembre10, MBE01#SerieStart, ...
- WithoutNotesSeptember10#AshMaurya
- official sites
- http://www.startuplessonslearned.com
- related Quora topics
- http://www.quora.com/Lean-Startups http://www.quora.com/Customer-Development http://www.quora.com/Startup-Business-Models
- check https://github.com/geemus/fog
- consider it for Seedea:Oimp/CloudArbitrage
- share LeanUX to Mao, eventually to @Cybunk
Fabien Benetou's PIM
