Wrapping up a fabulous few weeks in New Zealand, where I had the privilege of attending some great events, like Kiwi Foo and Webstock; met some amazing entrepreneurs and inventors (yes, including a jet pack); and generally enjoyed a supportive and enthusiastic reception. I want to especially thank the dozens of Kiwis who acted as my guardians and escorts from place to place, even driving me around on the wrong side of the road

Every tourist will tell you that New Zealand is a beautiful country, and they are not kidding.
 


I would add that the people I met were extraordinarily welcoming, friendly, and humble. In fact, you have to learn to adjust to the humility. Quite a few Kiwis told me that they "didn't count" as entrepreneurs, even though they own their own business. Their supposed lack of ambition was belied by the many cool demos and startups I got to meet. If you're in Europe, for example, keep an eye out for the innovative YikeBike, a new kind of personal transport device. It was described to me as "what the Segway should have been." Overall, I came away from the experience optimistic about the potential of New Zealand to cultivate a significant startup hub. I look forward to seeing it happen. If anyone is interested, the Wellington Lean Startup Meetup is a good place to start.

Up next is an extremely brief stop in Australia. I'm particularly looking forward to inaugurating the Sydney Lean Startup meetup. We'll be kicking it off with an event featuring yours truly Monday March 1 at 6pm. If you're a Sydney entrepreneur, I hope you'll stop by. Last time I checked, there were still a few half-price tickets left. You can register here.

Most of the events I did here were private, so there aren't as many videos and slides available. For now, you'll have to make do with the slides from my keynote at Webstock:

2010 02 19 the lean startup - webstock 2010

View more presentations from Eric Ries.

Hopefully, video of that talk will be available soon. For a preview, you can check out this "backstage pass" interview, which was recorded at Kiwi Foo a few days before.

I also did a radio interview on Radio New Zealand's Nine to Noon program. You can hear me attempt to explain the ideas behind the lean startup to the general public in MP3 or Ogg.

Webstock generated a lot of follow-on commentary, including a number of reviews. For a good synopsis of my talk (and the other keynotes), check out Idealog's blog. I also recorded an interview with them, which should be in the next issue of their extremely cool-looking print magazine. Other write-ups: NZ Herald, gianouts, Te Ara, Public Address, Bibliophile, BIB. Also, if you're an event organizer, check out some of the innovative ways the Webstock team encouraged attendees to interact with each other and with the speakers. Highlights for me were the Webstock Game and Webstock Bingo.

Last, if you didn't get a chance to see it, be sure to check out this video of the closing performance for Webstock (which was also an award show called the ONYAs). It was mind-expanding:


Read More »

I've been trying very hard to avoid turning this blog into a travelogue. Normally, I try to make my post-event writeups more than just a transcript, by including reactions and comments. On this speaking tour, that's been simply impossible, so I've decided to let the following collection of videos, podcasts, and slides batch up for a little while. If you're interested in more real-time updates during my speaking tour, please tune into my twitter feed.

In the meantime, I hope you enjoy all this multimedia content. In addition to some of my recent talks, you can learn more about the Startup Visa movement and enjoy two really interesting lean startup case studies.

My Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leader Seminar courtesy of Stanford Ecorner (audio podcast only for now, video coming soon):

if you'd like to follow along with slides, they are here:

2009 09 29 The Lean Startup At Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leader Seminar

View more presentations from Eric Ries.

From high atop the BT Tower in London, this brief BT Tradespace interview:


Why do we need a Startup Visa? A Tale of 2 Erics:


Also in London, I took up a lot of airtime during day two of Seedcamp. You can read highlights on their blog, or watch this short video:


Seedcamp - Day 2 Highlights from Seedcamp on Vimeo.


Or watch my full #leanstartup presentation at Seedcamp in London:


And two bonus videos that are well worth watching (weally):

Timothy Fitz, who worked for me at IMVU, giving an in-depth presentation on the details of the continuous deployment system that we built there.


With accompanying slides:

Continuous Deployment

View more presentations from TimothyFitz.

pbWorks (formerly pbWiki) was one of the first companies that ever invited me to join their advisory board. I like to think that had some small part in causing their subsequent success. Judge for yourself by watching David Weekly's #leanstartup case study (pbWorks):


Thanks to everyone who has helped plan, organize, record and attend these many events!
Read More »

Last week, I had a unique opportunity to spend some time in Boulder at the behest of TechStars. It was a great experience to see a relatively new startup hub in action - and thriving. It's easy to take Silicon Valley for granted. The startup scene here can be ostentatious and serve as an echo chamber, amplifying the cool trend of the week into a deafening roar. But there's no denying the level of support for entrepreneurs that we enjoy. I've written a little bit about the origins of Silicon Valley because I think it's important for us to understand how we got here in order to make sure we preserve what is best about our community.

Traveling to Boulder I had the feeling of stepping back in time. It felt like I was watching a new startup hub in the process of being created. The companies I spoke to all agreed that the community there was extremely supportive, especially in the critical ulta-early-stage. That community is, by all accounts, relatively new - less than five years old according to several folks I asked. Even more impressive is that the culture there seems to have been the conscious creation of just a few people.

On my brief visit, the results were impressively on display. If you watch the video/audio below, you'll get to see some of the questions I was asked after my presentation. On the whole, I found them unusually sophisticated - and mostly rooted in the actual practice of entrepreneurship. I also did quite a bit of asking questions myself. I spent most of my time with TechStars, who were my hosts for the trip. Their model looks like a key ingredient in the startup brew there. Every summer, they bring approximately 10 companies to Boulder for an intense "accelerator" experience (don't call it an incubator, or you'll get dirty looks). They don't invest a lot of money; just enough to keep them going through the summer. They take common stock, not preferred, a fact that the entrepreneurs mentioned to me many times. And they expose the startups to a vast network of mentors, none of whom get paid for their involvement.

Some of the mentors are based in Boulder, but many are not. As a result, the companies get a lot of exposure to VC's, investors, and partners in larger, more traditional startup hubs. And, as one entrepreneur put it to me, "we understood that a big part of our responsibility in the program was to make sure the mentors have a good experience, by taking their advice to heart and giving them a feeling of being part of our evolution as a company." As a result, for a lot of these companies, Boulder is just a gateway to San Francisco. TechStars encourages them to go wherever opportunities take them. But even the companies that move on have had a taste of life in Boulder (it looks awfully nice). And every year, it looks as if one or two entrepreneurs from the program decide to stay.

That strikes me as a really smart formula for building a startup hub. First, pick a place that entrepreneurs (and other creative class-types) would love to live. Great weather, a strong university, outdoor sports, cafe culture, good restaurants - you get the idea. Then, create an encouraging environment for early-stage companies. You don't need massive amounts of capital available for VC investment - modest amounts will do. Accept that many successful companies are going to want to be backed by big-name firms in other cities. Instead, focus on getting them ready for that stage. Provide early seed capital, and be the ones to make those introductions. Make your city a gateway to other opportunities, so that entrepreneurs can increase their access by starting there. And do your customer development. If you talk to early-stage entrepreneurs who randomly landed in Silicon Valley, you'll hear just how hard it is to break into the scene here. Because you're not asking entrepreneurs to forsake those bigger cities, it's a no-brainer to give your city a shot.

Anyway, those are my thoughts after having spent only a few days in Boulder. You can see that it stimulated a lot of ideas; you'll have to evaluate the veracity of those ideas on your own. In the meantime, let me keep my promise of some multimedia. I did my best to capture video and audio; a YouTube playlist and Slideshare slidecast are below:



Slides (with audio):

2009 08 19 The Lean Startup TechStars Edition

View more presentations from Eric Ries.

And, as usual, I wanted to share some of the audience reaction with my commentary. These quotes are, as is my custom, straight from twitter.

My biggest thanks goes to the people who generously sponsored scholarships for others to attend the dinner and workshop, Thank you so much!

ericries: special thanks once again to @fancy_free and @KISSmetrics for sponsoring scholarships for the #leanstartup workshop in Boulder.

I'm also excited to share two long-form reviews from actual attendees. I'm always excited to see how these ideas are expressed by entrepreneurs in their own words:

petewarden: Another blog post, this one on the @ericries Lean Startup Workshop I attended: http://bit.ly/4UWuf #leanstartup

tmarkiewicz: Notes from the Lean Startup Dinner with @ericries http://bit.ly/80kKW #leanstartup

And I can never resist sharing some positive feedback. I hope you'll indulge me - I need to have a copy of these testimonials for the record:

neilsimon: Thanks @ericries for the #leanstartup tips last night. Articulate, inspirational.

jdegoes: Great talk from @ericries last night. Inspiring ideas: real-time biz metrics; safe continuous deployment; A/B split testing. #leanstartup

feverishaaron: @ericries thanks for droppin' facts at the #leanstartup dinner. Learned a lot and enjoyed the discourse.

KevinMSmith: Excellent discussion on #leanstartup w/@ericries. If you get a chance go see him. If you don't get a chance , MAKE ONE. He's that good.

lmckeogh: Best $50 I've spent in last yr as unempl. prod mgr. #leanstartup dinner Boulder full of useful info that I want to apply [echo @roger_tee]

ultimateboy: #leanstartup was the most invigorating event I've ever attended. Thank you @ericries for drastically altering my perception of agile startup

Thank you all so much for your kind words. I was really overwhelmed this time. Now for some actual content:

jeantabaka: Really liked @ericries answer to adding in quality while still a startup #leanstartup

If you want to hear the exact question and answer, check the video. This was a question about how we convinced our investors to "allow" us to invest in quality after we'd shipped the initial buggy version of IMVU. That's always a tricky relationship to navigate, but we found a way to get our investors on board with that program by practicing a form of radical transparency. When they could hear the customers' complaints in their own voice, it became clear when it was time to up the quality level. We also had the benefit of many lean practices that break out of the "time, quality, money - pick two" paradox. (You can learn more about that by reading The engineering manager's lament.)

Here are two more questions that I really enjoyed answering:

roger_tee: At #leanstartup dinner w/ Eric Reis. Asked where I find visionary early adopters who pay 4 buggy beta SW. Killer answer.Ask me. #bdnt

nbauman: When to split test? Anytime anyone on the team thinks it could make a macroscopic change. Define macroscopic change! #leanstartup

I could recap these - but just go watch the video already!

And one last specific practice that came up at this session:

feverishaaron: UI, design and programmers are all in the same department, all have the same title, and all are evaluated the same. #leanstartup

We organized our engineering team at IMVU to try and maximize cross-functional collaboration. That meant getting designers, programmers, and QA folks to cross-train and work together as peers. By expressing these values as part of the formal structure of our department as well as the formal evaluation system, I think we went a long way towards reducing the usual internecine conflict between these groups.

Let me close with one last thought. I think it speaks for itself:

peterhoskins: At least have the courage to make new mistakes. #leanstartup

Thanks to everyone who participated and helped make these great events!

Read More »

One of the most important lean startup techniques is called the minimum viable product. Its power is matched only by the amount of confusion that it causes, because it's actually quite hard to do. It certainly took me many years to make sense of it.

I was delighted to be asked to give a brief talk about the MVP at the inaugural meetup of the lean startup circle here in San Francisco. Below you'll find the video of my remarks as well as the full slides embedded below. But I wanted to say a few words first.

First, a definition: the minimum viable product is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.

Some caveats right off the bat. MVP, despite the name, is not about creating minimal products. If your goal is simply to scratch a clear itch or build something for a quick flip, you really don't need the MVP. In fact, MVP is quite annoying, because it imposes extra overhead. We have to manage to learn something from our first product iteration. In a lot of cases, this requires a lot of energy invested in talking to customers or metrics and analytics.

Second, the definition's use of the words maximum and minimum means it is decidedly not formulaic. It requires judgment to figure out, for any given context, what MVP makes sense. As I talked about in a previous interview, IMVU's original MVP took us six months to bring to market. That was a pretty big improvement over a previous company, where we spent almost five years before launching. Yet in another situations we spent two weeks building a particular feature that absolutely nobody wanted. In retrospect, two weeks was way too long. We could have found out that nobody wanted the product a lot sooner. At a minimum, a simple AdWords smoke test would have revealed how utterly bad the concept was.

Without further ado, the video:


Slides are below:

Minimum Viable Product

View more presentations from Eric Ries.

Read More »

As a follow-up to my previous post on my talk for fbFund at Facebook, there was enough interest in watching video of the talk that I have finally uploaded it using Apple's MobileMe. There are three sizes of video available here; I've embedded the medium quality below. Because the Flip was set at a bad angle, you can't see the slides too well. I've embedded them via slideshare below the video, so you can follow along at home, if you'd like.

Edit: I finally got YouTube upload working, which has better embedding options than MobileMe. If you want to see the original video, use the link above.




Slides are below:

The Lean Startup fbFund Edition

View more documents from Eric Ries.

Before I close, let me quote just one additional bit of twitter feedback from one of the video beta-testers:

bmeschke: @ericries This is such GREAT information. A lot of it i have heard before, but your presentation is so clear. http://bit.ly/IMorB

bmeschke: @ericries @KhuramMalik has been trying to convince me of ur pov and i saw the value, but ur 2 startups example really gives in perspective.

I really value feedback like this; it keeps me going when I have doubts. I worry sometimes about making this blog too much into a travelogue or journal of my public events. My goal is to make everything I post here a substantive contribution to the larger entrepreneurship discussion; I hope to live up to that more often than not. As always, I welcome your feedback. If you have thoughts about the right balance of news, events, and commentary, feel free to leave it as a comment or drop me an email. I truly appreciate your support.

Read More »

I had a blast speaking at Startonomics Tokyo, which was organized to foster ties between the startup cultures in Japan and Silicon Valley. It was an eye-opening day, and a great crowd to present to. As usual, I'll post the slides and then check in with the live commentary and feedback, and offer some additional comments. Without further ado, the slides:

2009_06_08 The Lean Startup Tokyo edition

View more OpenOffice presentations from Eric Ries.

And now, the feedback:

Slansing97: #leanstartup @ericries Stumbled into your live talk, and it's very relevant to me! I'm watching as EA clings onto the waterfall model. Thx!

adamjacksonSF: #GoaP #leanstartup - notes and slides from Eric's preso - doesn't do it justice - go see him live if you can - http://bit.ly/Uherx

yongfook: @ericries is a rock star. Very concise presentation and a great speaker. I am now decompressing with a guinness. Mmm. #goap

Thanks!

ericnakagawa: Show of hands how many in startup here? 40%, How many think they could iterate faster? Same #. #leanstartup #goap

It was great to be in an audience of entrepreneurs who recognized the value of iteration and speed. Even though they may not know how to improve, they were eager to learn. It meant the questions and discussion were very practical.

benjaminjoffe: early adopters of buggy product are visionary customers, sometimes smarter than founders! #goap #ericries

InvisibleGaijin: #goap #leanstartup Eric Ries talks about importance of "visionary customers" in startup success. Brilliant insight.

Many founders don't like to hear that visionary customers are as smart, maybe even more so, than they are. Startups need to spend time with these customers. In fact, early stage companies shouldn't be able to get time from anyone else - who else would be crazy enough to try an truly innovative new product? Incidentally, I can't take credit for this idea - it appears in The Four Steps to the Epiphany, Crossing the Chasm, and many others.

christinelu: if you're building a disruptive innovation ...the only people who you want to talk to are early adopters. not investors says @ericries #goap

heysanford: Nay, recipe for chasm crossing fail. RT @christinelu: building a disruptive innovation? ... only talk to early adopters. @ericries #goap

Continuing on the theme of early adopters, I thought this exchange was really interesting. First of all, let me emphasize how much more important it is to talk to customers than to talk to investors, journalists, and the people who hang around at industry trade shows. I've previously recounted the story of the IMVU "IM add-on" feature, a feature that sounds so good on paper I wound up building it twice. Yet it's one of those features that's only ever requested by investors and engineers - never by customers.

Books like Crossing the Chasm are excellent, but they can be misleading. Getting to the chasm is actually quite difficult; most truly early-stage startups never even get that far. The most important thing is to realize that all strategies and tactics are context-sensitive. It's never "always correct" to do a certain thing, and therefore there really aren't any universal "best practices." Instead, we need to focus on tuning our practices to our real situation. Thus, even something as general as "listening to customers" can actually be lethally bad advice.

davetroy: "Think about how *hard* it would be to get a big company to steal your idea. That paranoia is totally ridiculous." - @ericries at #goap

People who work in big companies often laugh out loud when they hear startup founders acting paranoid about having their great ideas stolen. That's not to say that there are no situations where patent or trade secret protection is important. Rather, it shouldn't be considered obvious. Most startup ideas are actually completely worthless without learning and iteration to back them up.

davetroy: "Fanatical empathy for your customer's pain point is the key to designing great products." - @ericries at #goap Tokyo

I get a particular type of question quite often - I call it the "Steve Jobs defense." The idea is that great product visionaries don't need to listen to customers or test their ideas against reality. They just call forth amazing products from the ether. That's how the iPhone was made, right? I really don't buy this account of product visionaries. For one, it doesn't match my experience having worked with some true visionaries at all. It also doesn't seem to line up with the documentary record. Read Founders at Work or take a look at this video of Jobs himself, and see if you see anything at odds with that story.

My belief is that what makes product visionaries awesome is their ability to have radical empathy for their customers, and then to rigorously hold teams accountable for building solutions that match that standard.


Most surprising of all, to me at least, were the questions I got about how to reconcile the lean startup with "the Japanese way of doing business." Since I learned much of what I know about lean from studying Toyota, you can imagine how great a shock this was. After some discussion, it seemed like what I was hearing was that Japanese companies like Toyota have been so successful that many people have forgotten the entrepreneurial roots of those same companies. For anyone interested in this topic, I highly recommend reading Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production.


I want to thank everybody who helped oragnize the Startonomics Japan event and the whole Geeks on a Plane trip, especially Dave McClure and Founders Fund, who arranged for me to speak in Tokyo. I had a great time, and learned a great deal.

Read More »

Wow, what an incredible turnout for webcast this morning, right on the heels of a phenomenal crowd at startup2startup last night. It's been a great twelve hours for the lean startup!

We'll have a full audio recording posted soon, but I did want to share the slides with everyone. Much of the content is shared with the Web 2.0 Expo talk, but there are a few new slides and in the discussion/Q&A we were able to go into much more implementation detail. One big idea that I haven't had a chance to write about on the blog yet is answering the question "What is a startup?" Here's the working definition I've started using:

A startup is a human institution designed to deliver a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.

In a future post, I'll attempt to unpack this definition in detail. For now, I just want to call attention to the idea that it has nothing to do with size of company, sector of the economy, or industry.

2009 05 01 How To Build A Lean Startup Step By Step

View more presentations from Eric Ries.

And now for some instant twitter reactions:

KentBeck: @ericries thank you for the insights. "unknown problem" was an eye opener for me. i'm running junit max according to lean startup principles

OK, so I'm showing off. One of my personal heroes, Kent Beck, the creator of Extreme Programming and a truly wonderful writer was logged in and twittering, too. What a thrill.

OReillyUG: For more info on The Lean Startup by Eric Ries, register for our upcoming courses in SF May 29 and June 18 http://training.oreilly.com/theleanstartup/ #leanstartup

Very excited to announce that I've teamed up with O'Reilly to produce the upcoming Lean Startup Workshop as part of their Master Class series. As a result, we should be able to accommodate more people and more venues, maybe even more cities, if there is interest.

Now for some real feedback:

@rotkapchen #leanstartup Love this: Need both problem team & solution team working simultan, exchanging hypotheses, findings & solutions.

I'm continuing to push this idea, that departments can incentivize sub-optimal behavior. What makes a department (or individual) "more efficient" doesn't necessarily advance the company's goals.

farazq: Awesome session @ericries. LIKED: Y startups fail, cont deployment vs waterfall vs agile, small batches & learn fr biz metrics #leanstartup

As concise a summary as I've ever seen.

hwijaya: #leanstartup It's not the release fast dat matter. It's getting the evident dat u're on the right track (wat u learn frm making the release)

katrynharris: @ericries: "go as fast as we can work reliably to make progress & no faster" - absolutely & thanks for a super webcast! #leanstartup

Really trying to emphasize the importance of speed - but speed with regard to actual progress. That's what gives startups their disruptive innovation edge. Going "too fast" is not actually helpful. Learning to tell the difference is the hard part, and creating processes that act as speed regulators is the payoff.

clynetic: #leanstartup - All are ready to do this: Whether starting new company, have startup but need to iterate faster, or established company.

kylemaxwell: Behind every technical problem lies a human problem. #leanstartup

Always glad to see people pick up on these themes. It's never too late, you can always get started, and since all problems are human problems, there's no hiding behind a technical excuse.

Of course, not everybody had a great time.

wogsland: Still not understanding the "lean" aspect. Techniques sound fairly expensive to do correctly. #leanstartup

This is an objection I hear regularly, so I'm grateful to have the chance to address it. Lean is not about cheap, it's about speed. All lean transformation techniques, including the ones I advocate, involve making some part of the organization "less efficient" in order to speed up the whole. So they require investments to pay off. However, the level of waste in most organizations is so high that the investments pay off immediately, and therefore create new resources that can be reinvested in further improvements.

For example, it takes a few days of effort to build a simple split-testing system along the lines I advocate. Some companies tell me they "cannot afford" to do it. But if that split-testing system allows you avoid building just one major feature that would have been a waste of time, it's paid for itself many times over. If you don't have the confidence or ability to make trade-offs like that, you can't get lean.

kylemaxwell: you have known knowns, and known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. #leanstartup #rumsfeld

There's no way to avoid this Rumsfeld quote. Then again, "just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you." What can I say? He had a point.

jimmurphy: @ericries bug is your waterfall slide: Problem: Know Solution: *Known* #leanstartup

Thanks! This is fixed in the posted slides.

wogsland: uck, buzzword vomit #leanstartup

Well, I don't know what to say to this. I welcome suggestions for ways to get the same content across with fewer buzzwords. I don't think I can be very helpful without a discussion of the theory behind the lean startup, but I also don't know how else to teach that content. Please feel free to post your thoughts.

And then there's some questions that came up during the webcast that we didn't have time to discuss. I covered a few of them on twitter already:

• Q: "Do you reccomend removing features that you've launched but don't movethe needle on engagement or revenue?" A: yes, absolutely.
  
  
• Q: Does the Lean Startup framework work efficiently within a company of 2-3 people (think small)?" A: yes, yes, yes
  
  
• Q: Does the Lean Startup framework work efficiently within a company of 2-3 people (think small)?" A: yes, yes, yes
  
  
• Q: "Seems like the biggest issue is changing people's mentality. How did you deal with that on a new recruit (specificaly seasoned ones)?"
  
  A: have them deploy code to production on their first day as an employee. made a big impression.
  
  
• Q "In CD you spend a lot of time on phone with users. How does this map to the web? Surveys? Trial and Error + Analytics? What else?"
  
  A: honestly, all of the above. Phone/in-person is still critical, but have to remember that is for idea generation, not idea validation
  
  
• Good Q on webcast: "when measuring the results of your test, how do you avoid the post hocergo propter hoc fallacy?" A: you must split-test

If you had another questions you wanted to see answered (or do after you see the slides or audio), please post them here! I'll do my best to answer.

Lastly, I was really excited to announce on the webcast that we've opened up two dates for the Lean Startup Workshop - now that it's in O'Reilly's Master Class series, I have a lot more capacity to do these events. If you're interested, you can find out more here.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Continuous deployment in 5 easy steps (4cloudcomputing.blogspot.com)
• The Lean Startup workshop coming soon (startuplessonslearned.blogspot.com)
• The Lean Startup Talk From Web 2.0 Expo (4cloudcomputing.blogspot.com)
• How to build companies that matter (radar.oreilly.com)

Read More »

It's been an exhilarating ride since the Web 2.0 Expo last week. Thank you all so much for making the event an overwhelming success (way beyond my wildest expectations) and a special thanks to all of you who have reached out to share your feedback, comments, and questions since then.

I have been meaning to write this post for days, but the meetings have been non-stop and I haven't had much time. First of all, I promised to post the full slides of the talk, which are below. I want to thank those people who were recording, tweeting, and posting from the hall itself. Thanks to you I know about the energy in the room and even have pictures to prove it. Best of all, Nivi from Venture Hacks was recording, so these slides have synchronized audio, too.

I learned an incredible amount by giving this talk, especially from the many people who have commented, disagreed, and asked questions about it. Here are some of my top takeaways. Rather than use boring section headers, I thought I'd just quote from actual customers, in their own words.

MarkH: Key takeaways from Eric's great talk #w2e #leanstartup 1) "building a culture to learn" @ericries

Mark's point is the one that seems to have had the biggest impact from the talk as a whole: that startups should be built to learn. That's the essence of so many of the lean startup techniques I've evangelized: customer development, the Ideas/Code/Data feedback loop, and the adaptation of agile development to the startup experience. Many people asked some variation of the question: "sure, learning sounds good. But how do I actually organize my team so that we actually do it day-in day-out?" Answering that question is what I'm striving to do on this blog (and at future webcasts and workshops).

blader: @ericries my #1 takeaway from #leanstartup: "No marketing team. No engineering team. You need a problem team and a solution team."

Steve Blank has evangelized the "no departments" theme for many years. This is my take on that idea. The insight is that waterfall and agile are well-adapted for situations of "known problem, known solution" and "known problem, unknown solution" respectively. The lean startup focuses on situations where we have both an unknown problem and an unknown solution.

Creating a company-wide feedback loop that incorporates both customer development and agile development is a challenge. Traditional department labels just make it harder. So instead of having sales, marketing, and business development, we have a problem team implementing customer development. But where it makes sense, that team may also include engineers building new experiments or prototypes to try with customers. And instead of design, engineering, QA, and operations we have a solution team implementing a startup-centric version of agile development. But that team may also include product marketers or other in-house customers who can give insight into the impact that solution trade-offs might have on customers. Most of all these two teams are in constant contact, sharing insights, hypotheses and -- above all -- data.

rahmin: #leanstartup unit of progress: validated learning about customers, preferably with $$$ attached - @ericries

adachen: The biggest source of waste at a startup is building something that no one wants #leanstartup

Once we have our problem team and solution team, it's essential that they share a single definition of progress: validated learning about customers. It's not good enough to hit product milestones and conduct usability tests. We have to actually validate our key business theories and prove that we're on a path to creating somethng that matters.

dalelarson: "Metrics are people, too." @ericries's talk on Lean Startups absolutely fantastic. #leanstartup

ericnsantos: #w2e #leanstartup Metrics should be Actionable, Accessible and Auditable. Use them to split-test all the time.

(Gotta love using twitter quotes, since they occaisionally come with compliments attached).

Metrics are a key questions startups face. How do we decide what to measure and why? What do we do about it once we get started? I didn't start life as a metrics-lover, and it took me many years to learn to distinguish between "vanity metrics" that make us feel good and "actionable metrics" that help us make decisions. "Metrics are people too" is a reminder I constantly needed when I was a manager. It's not about moving numbers in a spreadsheet, it's about changing customer behavior -- for the better. When people ask about how to reconcile metrics with interaction design, usability testing, or in-person customer interviews, this is the issue they are really talking about. When we lose sight of the humanity of our customers, we're not likely to be able to delight them.

sachinrekhi: "Visionary customers are as smart if not smarter then the founders" #leanstartup

There's no skipping the chasm. Startups have no choice but to first talk to and sell to what Steve calls earlyvangelists. This is true whether you're selling million-dollar software to huge enterprises or selling fifty-cent virtual clothes to teenagers. Only the truly visionary customers will engage early-on. Luckily, they can help you find their mainstream counterparts, if you listen closely.

hansoo: #leanstartup "MBA fallacy: whiteboard, think about it, whiteboard some more, think about it, whiteboard, feel good about your idea"

Although I never went to business school, I have committed the "MBA's fallacy" many times. It's actually the fastest way to iterate on a business: just keep reworking it at the whiteboard. At IMVU, I remember spending an incredible amount of time iterating on the model that would power our third-party developer economy. My cofounders and I would hash out nuances and details almost every day, re-drawing diagram after diagram on the whiteboard. Now, the first few times we thought through those issues, we probably did some quality thinking. But pretty soon it degenerated into fact-free bloviating. If it doesn't involve new facts, it doesn't count as learning.

MeganMurray: "Behind every technical problem is a human problem. Fix the cause, not just the symptom." #leanstartup #w2e (via @blader) Amen

mcavalcanti: #w2e #leanstartup every technical problem is a usually a human problem.

jonbischke: "We're fine with having any problem occur one time. But no problem can occur twice." @ericries #leanstartup #w2e

If you are willing to follow a continuous-improvement methodology like five whys, you can re-derive almost all of the lean startup techniques, and probably discover many more besides. All it takes is that you focus seriously on the idea that you're not willing to waste time having the same problem occur twice. It sounds easy, but in practice it usually means a radical shift in perspective, one that can help see through the apparently technical problems that most of us who are engineers spend our time fixing. Those are only symptoms.

So without further ado, let me share the slides with audio.

The Lean Startup at Web 2.0 Expo

Upcoming Events
If you missed the session at Web 2.0 Expo, never fear. I'm doing my best to satisfy the many requests I've had to provide more in-depth material and more diverse locations.

April 21 - Agile Vancouver is sold-out (thank you all so much!). However, for those who weren't able to get in (or are real gluttons for punishment), I will be speaking the night before at a free event hosted by The Vancouver Ruby/Rails/Merb Meetup Group. It will be a more-technical version of the Expo talk. You can register here. I'm doing my best to live up to the three-!!! billing.

May 1 - free webcast. I'm doing a webcast with O'Reilly that is free and open to the public. We'll be discussing in greater detail the three techniques I highlighted at the Expo: continuous deployment, split-testing, and five whys. Here's the promo; more information is available on their site.

How to Build a Lean Startup, step-by-step
Get started with a detailed guide to three key lean startup techniques: continuous deployment, rapid split-testing, and root cause analysis (five why's). This webcast will cover the theory of how lean startups work, implementation details, and case studies. Participants will come away with a specific plan of action for how to apply these techniques to their product, company, or startup.
Register here.

May 29 - the Lean Startup Workshop. I am particularly excited about this, as it will be a really in-depth discussion. The workshop will go all day and will be for a carefully screened audience. If you'd like to register, you have to take the survey. At the end, you'll be given the opportunity to participate in a customer validation exercise where you can reserve a spot, or just sign up to be notified when applications will start.

I'll continue to post about additional events as I get them scheduled. Looks like I'll be at TiEcon 2009 in mid-may, and at an event to be announced in Austin in early June.

Thanks for reading, attending, commenting and questioning. I'm continually inspired by your entrepreneurial passion and insight. Thank you.

Read More »

Image by Jessica_Mah via Flickr

Last week I had the opportunity to lecture again in Steve Blank's entrepreneurship class at Haas, which is always a great learning experience - for me at least! This time, I was lucky enough to have my friend Nivi from Venture Hacks in the audience, and he was recording. That means today, in addition to the slides themselves, you can listen to the whole talk in its hour-long glory, Q&A included. I liked the flattering Venture Hacks commentary so much I'll just quote it:

Many founders believe that early stage startups are endeavors of execution. The customer is known, the product is known, and all we have to do is act.

Eric takes a different approach. He believes that many early stage startups are labors of learning. The customer is unknown, the product is unknown, and startups must be built to learn.

...

It represents the triumph of learning, over the naive startup creation myths we read about in the media.

IMVU learned to learn. This process can be replicated at your company. Please do try this at home.

As usual, I learned a ton from the students and their insightful questions. Some highlights, at least for me:

• We experienced a great science experiment for the scenario: what would happen if a big company tries to compete with you given complete knowledge about your idea and designs? We actually lived this situation, and got to validate this answer: a process of rapid iteration can beat massive strategic investments from a big competitor.
  
  
• What happened when we got early press (circa 2004) in violation of our own no-PR rule. Learn why you don't want to do premature press, despite all the pressure you'll feel to "launch" early.
  
  
• I especially enjoyed the discussion of the power of fact-based decision making. When we'd go into a product planning meeting, often an engineer or product person would have already run a small scale A/B experiment, and so already have some data to go on. That led to much shorter (and better!) meetings than the old opinion based marathon planning sessions.
  

I've embedded the audio and slides below, but I recommend you click through to the Venture Hacks article if you're interested.

The Lean Startup

View more presentations from Venture hacks .

Read More »

Image via WikipediaSteve Blank and I had the opportunity to create a presentation about lean startups for Maples Investments. Maples Investments is the only venture investor I know who has oriented their entire strategy to lean startups. They've invested in many great companies, including IMVU, Digg, Kongregate, Twitter... you get the idea. I really enjoy working with them and their companies.

Steve and I worked to find a metaphor that would help explain the power of lean startups, and why they have a serious competitive advantage, especially in these challenging economic times. We borrowed John Boyd's OODA loop, a concept from military strategy. Boyd emphasized the importance of agility in combat: "the key to victory is to be able to create situations wherein one can make appropriate decisions more quickly than one's opponent." We think this same principle applies to startups, which have the same problems of maneuvering on unknown or confusing terrain.

As I've written previously, lean startups are built upon three main trends:

• Technology commoditization. It is becoming easier and cheaper for companies to bring products to market, leveraging free and open source software, cloud computing, open social data (Facebook, OpenSocial), and open distribution (AdWords, SEO). Lean startups have the ability to use this commodity stack to lower costs and, more importantly, reduce time to market.
  
  
• Agile software development. Agile allows companies to build higher quality software faster. This speeds up the Ideas-Code-Data feedback loop. Combined with the technology trends above, it also enables rapid deployment strategies like just-in-time scalability.
  
  
• Customer development. It's not enough just to build a product with great features - you have to figure out if there is a market for it. The only way to do this is to get out of the building and test your hypotheses against reality. The biggest source of cost/time advantage that all lean companies have is avoiding building features that customers don't want.

In this presentation, we tried to summarize those trends, show how they give startups an advantage in good economic times as well as bad, and explain why they enable a new and better investment strategy. Hopefully others will find it useful as well.

For those interested in getting started with agile or customer development, I thought I'd include a few links. My path to lean startups began with Kent Beck and extreme programming. The best resources there are his book Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change and the gentle introduction at extremeprogramming.org. For customer development, start with Steve's book The Four Steps to the Epiphany or take a look at his recent Entrepreneurial Thought Leader Lecture.

Lean Startup presentation for Maples Investments by Steve Blank and Eric Ries

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: lean startup)

Read More »