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3 Secrets to the Lean Start-up

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If a small company is disciplined enough not to waste from the get go, it can set itself up to beat the odds and flourish later.

Let’s face it. This hyper-consumption society we’re living in is breaking us down. We are voracious spenders, workers, and technology users, often with destructive effects on our health, relationships, quality of life…and yes, our businesses. We entrepreneurs may recognize this in the back of our minds, yet most of us still struggle to shift out of the waste paradigm.

This is why I challenge start-ups to muscle up from the outset and establish the boundaries, habits, and business practices that allow them to embrace the oh-so-important “waste not, want not” adage. Mastering this simple (but not so easy) rule is a key way that a start-up can outperform the majority of its peers that will go out of business within five years. Think of it as the “lean start-up” rule for these lean years.

Looking back on my journey as a small-business owner, I realize the best way to slay the hyper-consumption dragon is to start out by thinking about what you want, and then work backwards to figure out how not wasting will help you get those things faster. If you wait until later when you’re more set in your ways, it becomes extremely difficult (although not impossible!) to distinguish the “nice to haves” from the “must haves.”

Let’s assume that your goal, for example, is to create a profitable business by year three. This means making hard choices to curb frivolous spending, and being mindful when it comes to saving–whether that be cash or time! To get your creative juices flowing, here are three examples of ways to rein in spending:

1. Reward customers and team with exuberance, not extravagance.
“It’s the thought that counts” actually holds true, plus, is often more affordable! Rather than spend a lot on a generic department store gift, why not gift something more personal from a handmade marketplace such as Etsy? And if you do choose a more usual gift category, find an unusual provider, like Urban Meadows, a nonprofit florist in Chicago that assists people with mental illness in their recovery journey.

Techmeetups launches the Guru Program to help Startups & early stage companies with mentoring on all aspects of your Business.

Limited spaces are available – book your place on the Guru Program now to attend in London or remotely from anywhere in the world.

Online event registration for TechMeetups Guru Program 2013: January – April #TMUguru powered by Eventbrite

September 26, 2012 | Techmeetups

Devops and The Lean Startup

Original post by Matthias Marschall via DZone

The DevOps Zone is presented by DZone with partners including ThoughtWorks Studios andUrbanCode to bring you the most interesting and relevant content on the DevOps movement. See today’s top DevOps content and be sure to check out ThoughtWorks Studio’s Continuous Delivery Video Series and UrbanCode’s Webinars.

The Lean Startup teaches us to focus on learning about what really works for our customers. It advocates using the scientific method for running data driven experiments in very short cycles. But, continuously running end-to-end experiments need the total cooperation of the entire business. Truly cross-functional teams are required which is also one of the goals of Devops. Let’s take a look how the ideas of The Lean Startup and Devops enrich each other to successfully create product development flow.

Data driven experiments

The Lean Startup methodology starts your product development by formulating a clear hypothesis about which business metrics your new feature should change and how. If you want to add a new “subscribe” button to your homepage, you should first formulate your expectation: “We expect a subscription rate of 0.5%”. When your hypothesis is ready, think about how to measure the results. Now is the time, early in the idea phase, where the core strength of Devops really shines: knowing what to measure and how to measure it. And running feature development as a data driven experiment creates immediate feedback for early collaboration.

Techmeetups launches the Guru Program to help Startups & early stage companies with mentoring on all aspects of your Business.

Limited spaces are available – book your place on the Guru Program now to attend in London or remotely from anywhere in the world.

Event management for TechMeetups Guru Program 2013: January – April #TMUguru powered by Eventbrite

August 16, 2012 | Techmeetups

Has The Lean Startup Methodology Produced Results?
Depends On Who You Ask

Original post by Mark Boslet via PEHUB

Listen to Steve Blank, author ofThe Four Steps to the Epiphany,and the answer is yes.

The lean startup movement that applies scientific techniques to startup building and which he helped pioneer is producing results. “I think we now know how to make entrepreneurs fail less,” he said Friday during an on-stage appearance at the Menlo Ventures 2012 CEO Summit. “It is now possible to reduce the 100 stupid things entrepreneurs do.”

Lots of company teams have been taught and substantive change has come to the early stage ecosystem, Blank said.

Not so fast. “We’re starting to amass evidence, but it is still early days,” counters Eric Ries, author The Lean Startup and perhaps the reigning heavy weight in the movement.

The industry is just now seeing the first generation of companies that applied the ideas start to exit. Ecosystem reform is a long journey with lots of ground still to cover, said Ries (pictured), who shared the stage at the summit.

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May 9, 2012 | Techmeetups

Lean startup

Top 10 Phat Startups of 2012

Original post by Barb Darrow via GIGAOM

There’s nothing wrong with making phone apps or mobile games. But Jamie Goldstein thinks that startups — and their backers — should attack bigger, meatier problems. So, while many people talk up the virtues of lean startups, Goldstein thinks it’s time to focus on companies willing to take big risk — and it is risky to attack big problems. These companies are what Goldstein, a general partner at North Bridge Venture Partners, calls Phat startups.

Here are Goldstein’s Top 10 Phat Startups in no particular order. (Full disclosure: five of the 10 are North Bridge affiliated companies and they’ve been designated with NBVP.)

1. Heartland Robotics: iRobot and MIT alum Rodney Brooks’ Heartland Robotics is making robots flexible and cheap enough to do manual tasks that most people don’t want to do. Boston-based Heartland’s success in building “teachable” robots could mean that repetitive jobs that might otherwise go to China stay put.

2. Foro Energy: Littleton, Colo.-basedForo develops drills for oil exploration that use high-powered lasers to do the job faster and cleaner. The company says its technology will enable oil companies to drill ten times faster than traditional drill bits. (NBVP)

READ 3 TO 10 HERE

May 8, 2012 | Techmeetups

Lean startup

Making Lean Startup Tactics Work for Games

Original post by Tyler via Betable

If you’re involved in the startup community or even just follow Hacker News, there’s a pretty good chance that you’ve heard about “lean startups” or the “lean startup method.” In his bestselling book, The Lean Startup,Eric Ries outlines a framework for small, innovative teams to more efficiently find product/market fit for new products. At its core is a focus on evaluating product design decisions based on user data gathered from scientific experiments. Eric argues that by making “validated learning” your key goal, you shortcut your time to building a wildly successful mass market product.

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April 22, 2012 | Techmeetups

Book Review: Applying Lessons from
The Lean Startup to the Arab World

Original post by Nafez Dakkak via Wamd

The Lean Startup is required reading for anybody serious about entrepreneurship. In the swift, engaging read, Author Eric Ries sets forth a scientific method for launching startups successfully and efficiently.

Entrepreneurship will always be a relatively risky business, but, he illustrates: “startup success can be engineered by following [a] process, which means it can be learned, which means it can be taught.”

Not only does the book read well for a business book, but Ries, an expert storyteller, takes the readers through several compelling case studies whose lessons can be applied immediately. (I have already in fact incorporated many of the lessons from the book into the workings of the Sharek team at the Arab Development Initiative, as we work to launch a platform that stimulates local micro-development projects across the region).

In a previous post, I argued that in its essence, entrepreneurship is about a proactive mindset that encourages ownership of surrounding problems in society, sees them as opportunities, and embraces the risks and failures involved in finding a solution. Given the state of the region, entrepreneurship, at all levels, can play a major role in bringing it forward.

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April 14, 2012 | Techmeetups

Welcome to the success factory

Original post by Eric Ries via MT

In magazines and newspapers, in blockbuster movies and on countless blogs, we hear the mantra of successful entrepreneurs: through determination, brilliance, great timing, and – above all – a great product, you too can achieve fame and fortune. There is a mythmaking industry hard at work to sell us that story, but I have come to believe that the story is false, the product of selection bias and after-the-fact rationalisation. In fact, having worked with hundreds of entrepreneurs, I have seen at first hand how often a promising start leads to failure. The grim reality is that most startups fail. Most new products are not successful. Most new ventures do not live up to their potential. Yet the story of perseverance, creative genius and hard work persists. Why is it so popular?

Entrepreneurial Management

There is something deeply appealing about this modern-day rags-to-riches story. It makes success seem inevitable if you just have the right stuff. It means that the mundane details, the small individual choices don’t matter. If we build it, they will come. When we fail, as so many of us do, we have a ready-made excuse: we didn’t have the right stuff. We weren’t visionary enough or weren’t in the right place at the right time.

After more than 10 years as an entrepreneur, I came to reject that line of thinking. I have learned from both my own successes and failures and those of others that it’s the boring stuff that matters the most. Startup success is not a consequence of good genes or being in the right place at the right time. Startup success can be engineered by following the right process, which means it can be learned, which means it can be taught.

Entrepreneurship is a kind of management. No, you didn’t read that wrong. These two words have wildly divergent associations. Lately, it seems that one is cool, innovative and exciting and the other is dull, serious and bland. It is time to look past these preconceptions.

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April 8, 2012 | Techmeetups

Lean startup

How We Fooled Ourselves
into Delaying Our Startup’s Launch

Original post by Vinicius Vacanti via Businessn Isider

I remember reading the first few pages of Steve Blank’s book, Four Steps to Epiphany, and thinking two things:

This is not exactly a page-turner
This is a really smart way of thinking about startups

Soon after, I started attending the Lean Startup meetup in New York and reading Eric Reis’s writings. I was believer.

One of the main principles is to release an early prototype of your idea to potential users to get their feedback.

But, despite being all in on the Lean Startup movement, we didn’t do that.

Why Didn’t We Release an Early Prototype?

Our current idea, Yipit, would find all the deals happening in your city (sample sales, happy hours, retail discounts) and would send you an email with the best 7 based on your interests and your locations.

It would have taken us just a week to have launched an early prototype.

We could have measured success based on whether people opened and clicked on the emails. We could have manually created the emails with deals we found and used MailChimp to send them out. There was no need to build any tech infrastructure.

But, we came up with all sorts of excuses why we just couldn’t release an early version.

Six painful months later, we finally put out the product. It didn’t work which was okay. What was not okay was realizing that our excuses for not releasing earlier were all wrong.

The Excuses We Came Up With

The bright side is that, 6 months later, when we iterated Yipit into a daily deal aggregator, we learned to ignore the excuses and released a prototype in 3 days that took off right away.

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April 3, 2012 | Techmeetups