Lean Startup

Pitch advice from seasoned funder

Posted by abraham.williams@gmail.com on in Business, Lean Startup, Product Management, Success

I was fortunate enough to be in an Intuit group pitching to multiple investors recently. Bing Gordon was there and gave feedback afterwards. It was so valuable that I just had to share it. 
He said the best entrepreneurs build small and great…one feature at a time. They use existing assets, existing brand, and existing data. This is a hit business and you need to present like a movie pitch. Your presentation is a movie poster with a clear picture of the customer enjoying value. This pitch needs to have very few slides:
  • Distinct strategies 
  • Starting assets 
  • Numbers
Only 3-5 bullets, one sentence per bullet and know your slides at all times. You have to know it inside and out…you can work the story without slides and pictures. 

Steve Blank at the Alchemist Series

Posted by abraham.williams@gmail.com on in Business, Lean Startup, Product Management
I just sat in the front row of an intimate Steve Blank talk. It was great! I got to be in the “hot seat” on the stage where I put my venture out in front of the audience and took questions. Then, Steve Blank came up and did a great presentation on the Startup Owner’s Manual and answered all kinds of great questions we had for him.

Here are my notes (I banged some out on twitter during the session).

Business plans were the old way. When they didn’t work, you fired the VP of Sales. Then you hired another VP of Sales. If it still didn’t work, then you fired the VP of Marketing. If the business was still failing, then you replaced the CEO. Now, you replace the business model first. Pretty cool. He hammered the waterfall product development model: Waterfall has 2 specific errors… it assumes I know the customer problem and I know the features.  Most startups fail from a lack of customers and not product development.

He talked of the big difference between startups and companies. A startup wants to become a company. The definition of a startup is a temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model. That whole startup mode is the “search” for a model. Then, after the model is found, the company exists and is now in “execution”. Then, marketing and sales and development can execute. Executing before the search is complete leads to disaster.  Search! Don’t sell. Don’t code. Get out of the building and question your customers.

He talked of the Lean Canvas and Customer Development. The lean canvas is filled with hypotheses or “f-ing guesses”. The word hypotheses is used because people in school are paying big bucks for tuition, but they are really “f-ing guesses”. I love that.  Customer Development turns the “f-ing guesses” on the canvas into facts.

Startups go from failure to failure. The initial idea is almost always wrong. This is really hard for smart people. How quickly can you learn what is wrong is the key. You can’t get it all right on day 1. If you think that’s true, the odds are you are hallucinating. It’s about how quickly are you learning that you are wrong.
When asked about protecting ideas in the early stage, Steve said if you are doing a web startup…it’s an eng problem. Your idea is not a company. You need rapid customer feedback. You need to talk to customers about their problems and really nail that. Then, you need to see what solutions will work for those problems. Don’t sit in some room and fret over someone taking your idea. Get out and talk to customers. However, if it’s BIO tech, get a patent immediately. Don’t mess around with billion dollar biotech ideas.
We talked about smaller niche markets vs. bigger mass markets. He stated the Business Model Canvas doesn’t show the biz oppty. He said it’s really the difference between doing a small business and a big startup that VC’s want to invest in. If you have a 5m a year business, then it is a small business (which is fine if you want that). If you don’t know the biz model of Angels and VC’s, you will be frustrated. If your biz isn’t large enough, you aren’t getting VC money.   
When asked about straddling markets and deciding which to invest in, he said if you are GM with a lot of resources then you can straddle. But as a startup, you need to really know your market.  You need to understand your market to know when and where to put all your chips in. That’s a startup.  When you push a chip in at a time, you are a small business.  

Great list of startup tools

Posted by abraham.williams@gmail.com on in Business, Lean Startup

  • Developers use awe.sm to make meaning out of social sharing behavior.
  • Helps you set up a social launching soon page in minutes.
  • Measure engagement and impact in customer experience
  • Let’s people build, publish and test landing pages without IT or software
  • Live chat helps you to sell better and help your customer 
  • Provides fast, affordable feedback on your website and mobile apps within an hour
  • Interact with customers and build relationships
AskYourTargetMarket https://aytm.com/
  • Enables you to perofrm your own online market research
  • Feature-rich URL shortener tracks location and source
  • Help for designing apps by sketching out their ideas
  • Provide user interaface design temaplates that enable you to prototype and test your app ideas usig keynote, ppt, or open office.
Google Adwords, Bing Ads, Facebook Ads
  • Run ads to landing pages…test which ads work best

Alchemist Customer Development Series

Posted by abraham.williams@gmail.com on in Apps, Business, Lean Startup, Product Management, Success
My wife told me about a course on Customer Development and Metrics from the Alchemist Series with the Citrix Accelerator that starts on March 13th. I realized Steve Blank will be teaching, so I signed up in a heart beat! It’s a very special course because it is a small group of students learning from top-notch Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and VC’s. This particular course is being prepared as a lecture series for the top 30 universities, so we get to ask lots of questions from the best and be a part of some stellar new curriculum. It’s not full.  If you want in, visit the link above and get your butt there.

Last night’s session was with Alan Chiu, principle with X/Seed Capital Management. It was a super interesting session. For the business I am working on inside of Intuit, I got solid advice for scrappy/crafty ways of finding customers to interview, knowing when to experiment for design vs. price, knowing when to build, etc. More posts coming on those later. One of my big takeaways was that my previous main two questions are now three.

  1. What question are you trying to answer?
  2. What’s the fastest way to answer it?
  3. What’s the cheapest way to get it answered?
I’ll use these questions the rest of my working life.