There's never a dull moment here at Long Lane Honey Bee Farms. Hi! We are David & Sheri Burns and bees are our business. We live in East Central Illinois and our entire family is involved in our honey bee operation. We manufacture and sell beekeeping woodenware and we always appreciate your business. We also sell everything related to beekeeping and always welcome your business.
The primary goal of our business is to give glory to the LORD Jesus Christ through our business. The Bible says, "And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him" (Colossians 3:17). So whether we are building hives for customers, making up nucs, raising queens or answering the phones, we do it all in a honorable way that would give glory to the LORD.

The last few weeks has been a whirlwind of activity. Last Friday we had another successful class here at our honey bee farm. We had 17 students who came to learn about raising queens. This class was in conjunction with the Illinois Queen Initiative, which is a work where several of us are hoping to produce queens that are more acclimated to the climate here in the mid-west. Dr. Joe Latshaw is a commercial queen breeder and he came and held a workshop at our farm and the next day presented the same workshop to another group in Chicago.

Our store/lab was full of eager beekeepers wanting to learn the fine art of raising queens. During the morning Joe gave great detailed presentations on just how to raise queens. Joe holds a Ph.D and also teaches at Ohio State University in Columbus in Ohio. He has worked bees almost all his life and has studied and worked along side the most well-known entomologist. He has become my main mentor for understanding the art of raising queens. Joe has made himself accessible to me whenever I have any questions about queens. He's a true gentleman, friend and excellent beekeeper. His knowledge, experience and wisdom in raising queens is superior.

I highly recommend Joe to other beekeeping associations who would like a special speaker. Joe's website is: www.latshawapiaries.com

After a full morning of presentations on the details of raising queens, we broke for lunch. We try to make our classes and workshops as comfortable and professional as possible, so we had a tent company bring in a nice size tent so that we could enjoy lunch outside. Again, during the lunch break, beekeepers continued to pick Joe's brain as well as talking to each other about failures and successes in beekeeping. It was a nice day, though a bit windy.

I enjoyed meeting beekeepers from around the state of Illinois and hearing about their special techniques of beekeeping. My wife Sheri is such a hard worker around our honey bee farm. She put the entire day together for me. She made sure our room was configured properly for the class as well as making sure lunch was brought in on time.
For the last few weeks Sheri has installed packages, fed bees, answered the phone calls from our customers, helped packaged hives, data entry, taxes, Internet orders and the list goes on!
Even yesterday Sheri was on the four wheeler running up and down the apiary feeding the bees. I am so blessed to have a help-mate like Sheri! Last week I needed to take a trip down to Kentucky to pick up a trailer load of beekeeping supplies. Sheri jumped in the truck with me and our little youngest son Christian and we enjoyed a two day trip down for supplies. Thanks Sheri!
In the afternoon of our class with Joe, I worked to prepare a starter nuc and gathered up 5 frames of larvae so the students could practice grafting.
With Chinese grafting tools in hand, flashlights, magnifying glasses in the other hand, students when to work, selecting the perfect aged larva and transferring them over into queen cell cups I had made earlier in the morning. Students helped each other and Joe was there showing each student the art of grafting. This was a great hands on opportunity.

You can read all the books you can get your hands on, but until someone walks along with you, somethings are difficult to grasp.

LESSON 52: QUEEN REARING MADE SIMPLE
I have noticed that most beekeepers feel that raising queens is complicated and mysterious. I say that because I hear so many beekeepers say they are buying different types of "systems" for raising queens. These systems do work, but in my opinion there is much more control over raising queens through grafting than using systems. Besides, I like hands-on experience.
Here I am standing in David Miksa's apiary among his finishing colonies where he raises his famous queens. I told you that I visited with David Miksa. He and his operation was featured in the May edition of the American Bee Journal. It was a great article! Having seen his operation and now having read about it too, I am very pleased with his queens. I am incorporating several of his techniques into my queen rearing operation. And, of course, I'm using some of his stock in my yards for breeding as well. He has some very nice and very productive queens. I visited a hive two years ago that was headed up by a Miksa queen and I was impressed! We placed David Miksa's queens in 200+ packages, the ones that were picked up from our farm.
Raising your own queens can be very rewarding as well as save you money and time. I think every beekeeper should have a 5 frame nuc with an extra queen in there as a backup emergency replacement. Or if you want to make splits then you can raise your own queens to increase your hive count.
So let me give you a brief rundown on how to raise your own queens.
Create the perfect 5 frame queenless starter nuc. The nuc should consist of:
-One frame of honey
-One frame of pollen
-2 Frames of nurse Bees under 16 days old
Leave it queenless for at least 2 hours, but not too long or they might start raising their own queen if there are eggs present, which there should NOT be.
The starter nuc must not have any open brood so that the nurse bees can give all their resources to the cell cups. And this 5 frame nuc must be severely overcrowded with nurse bees,
completely blocked off and kept in a cool, dark place for the 24-36 hours they start the cups. When I make up my starter nucs, I leave an opening to place my queen cell frame into the nuc. I like to close off my nucs so that the bees stay in for the 24-36 hour duration.
The nuc should not have any open larvae. I want my nurse bees to only care for the grafted queen cups. The goal is to make LARGE size queens and to do this, I need copious amounts of royal jelly in each cup. So the bees in the starter nuc feed the queen cells. Because this hive only has nurse bees primarily, I close it off. Nurse bees do not need to fly out, so I close it off and keep it in a cool place for the 24-36 hour duration. Because I usually graft between 30-40 cell cups, I have to move this frame out to a larger hive that can continue doing what this starter hive started.


After 24-36 hours in the starter nuc, transfer cells into a queenright finishing hive.

The finishing hive must be very strong with two deep hive bodies with the queen in
the bottom hive body below a queen excluder. Leave the cells there until 8-10 days
old. Then, on day 8-10, transfer the cells into a queenless mating nuc. The mating nuc can be anywhere from a complete large hive that is queen less down to a mini-mating nuc with only 2 or three mini-frames.
It works best to transfer the 10 day old queen cell into a queenless nuc on day 10. Bees always accept a queen cell, much better than an emerged virgin queen in a cage.

When I graft, I make my own queen cups from my wax that I know is chemical free. Then, I attach the cups with wax and then I place large amounts of wax on the bar so the bees can use my wax to continue to draw out the queen cells.

I also make my own frames and cell bars. I dip my wax after melting it in a large electric pan that I bought at Wal-mart for $50.

I place my graft into a queen cell cup frame that I've just made up myself. They are easy to make by modifying a deep frame . The one in the picture, of course, is upside down. Don't worry, when you flip it over the larvae will not fall out. They are sticky and stay put. Also, you really do not have to worry about temperature when they are this young, 1-2 days old. Notice I graft with several layers of wet paper towels because the larvae do need to remain moist.

The grafting technique must be hands-on. For example the larva must only breathe on one side when they are this young. Therefore, you must place them in the new queen cell with that same side up. If you flip it over, they will suffocate because they are not yet breathing on both sides.

Then I go out to my bee yards and transfer the 10 day old cells into queenless mating nucs. I mainly use 5 frame nucs with deep size frames or 3 frame nucs with deep size frames. As you can see, these nucs make nice chairs too when working down the line. You can click on any of these images for a larger view. I work my bees with only a hat and veil because my bees are gentle and I hate wearing gloves. Though I do not have to wear a hat and veil, I feel it is essential to protect the eyes from stings. I never want to take a chance, nor should you.

The success of the beekeeper will be greatly increased by his or her ability to raise their own queens.

That's all until next time! If you'd like to contact us, please give us a call or email us. Here is our contact information:

GENERAL PHONE: 217-427-2678
QUESTION LINE: v217-427-2430
EMAIL: david@honeybeesonline.com
WEBSITE: www.honeybeesonline.com


Bee-have yourself!
David & Sheri Burns
Long Lane Honey Bee Farms

Just wanted to give everyone a heads-up that I'll be appearing on stage with Steve Blank tomorrow, April 30th, at the startup2startup event in Palo Alto. For more info, you can read the event description here. We'll be attempting some new material, so should be an interesting event.

As a reminder, on Friday, May 1 I'll be doing a free webcast with O'Reilly at 10am PT: "How to Build a Lean Startup, step-by-step." Although the event is free, it does require advance registration.

Later in May, I have a few events coming up. The first is a panel at TiEcon on May 15. I'll be moderating a panel on "Building an Internet Company for $50K." Then, on Thursday May 21, I'll be on the HP campus for a SIPA event that is open to the public; you can register here. And, of course, there's the all-day Lean Startup Workshop on May 29th in San Francisco. This is already mostly sold-out due to pre-orders from the customer validation survey (!), but I am investigating if we can accommodate any additional spots. If you're interested, please make sure to take the survey and then drop me an email to let me know.

For those of you in Austin, I'm currently working on a series of events there in early June. I'll have more details once it's confirmed, but mark your calendars for a likely TeXchange event the evening of June 3. I'm also going to meet with a few companies and VC's for some one-on-one and small-group consulting; if you're interested in something like that, please get in touch.

I'm doing my best to keep up with the current requests for speaking, so please don't be offended if you've written and I haven't gotten back to you. If you know people who might like to host or help organize events, I'm currently working on trips to Boston, New York, another trip to Vancouver, and even some possible events in Europe (around Øredev). Please drop me a line if you might be able to help.

Lastly, as always, if you do attend one of these events please come say hello. It's always great to meet and hear feedback from readers. Thank you all so much.

Leverage has once again become a dirty word in the world of finance, and rightly so. But I want to talk about a different kind of leverage, the kind that you can get in product development. It's a force that allows startups to build products at parity with much larger companies - cheaper and much faster. It's a key lean startup concept.

The idea of leverage is simple: for every ounce of effort your product development team puts into your product, find ways to magnify that effort by getting many other people to invest along with you.

Leverage was one of the big ideas we talked about early on at IMVU. We knew that we were only a small team, but we had big aspirations. We wanted to create a 3D product that could provide superior options for self-expression to millions of people. Other companies accomplish this by hiring a large staff of content production experts - and get a very good result. We didn't think we'd able to compete with that. Plus, we saw some of the intrinsic limitations of supporting such a large staff: slower cycle times, higher cost basis, and - most importantly - the ability to serve only a limited number of customer segments. For segments that were considered out of the mainstream or somewhat obscure, the ROI just isn't there for these established companies to serve them.

So we tried to craft a strategy that would give us the product development leverage we needed to serve all customers. We combined three tactics: extensive use of free software, an open platform for user-generated content, and leveraged distribution channels. Each of these tactics was effective, and I'll return to them in detail in a moment. The net result was powerful: within six months of starting the company, we were able to get a basic version of our product into open beta. Although customers didn't flock to this offering at first, we had enough of a developer program active to start recruiting early adopters to start creating 3D objects for sale in our catalog. That engine of creativity has led to a catalog of something like 2 million virtual goods authored by a hundred thousand developers. At no time did IMVU ever employ more than three full-time 3D artists. Most importantly, there is almost no niche or trend that is unserved by this community. Want emo shoes (172,190 available), goth earrings (152,996 available) or anime-themed furniture (55,240 available)? Yeah, we've got that.

Leverage is work, though. It has to be found and managed. For more on the specific trade-offs involved with IMVU's virtual good strategy, see Three decisions to make on virtual goods. In that same spirit, here are some suggestions for tactics you can use to increase the leverage of your product development efforts:

1. Free and open source software (and even hardware). When you participate in an open community like these you take advantage of tremendous amounts of effort. Even as "just a user" you make the community better by adding momentum. Even better, if you engage with the community in a mutual relationship, you can increase your leverage further. For example, IMVU early on decided on using an open source library for our 3D file formats, skeletal animation, and scene graph. As a result, we were able to get started more quickly, avoid writing a ton of art path tools from scratch, and even hire from within that community. It's an amazing thing when you can hire an employee who knows more about your code base than you do, and this turned out to be a big source of advantage. Over the years, we've made many contributions back to this community; if its formats become standard, the company benefits further. (Of course, there are ethical reasons to prefer free software to proprietary software, too - but they don't bear on this particular discussion so I am omitting them intentionally)
   
   
2. User-generated content. Our original mission statement for IMVU was "to fulfill the promise of online socializing and creativity." We hoped that user-creators would be part of our model from day one. Part of this was a values statement. We had been in a previous company whose pursuit of centralized control had proved damaging in many ways. But part was a recognition that we could gain substantial competitive advantage by leveraging a community of like-minded visionary customers to serve a wider (and more mainstream) audience than we could alone. Making UGC work requires good tools, open standards, and proper incentive design. Personally, the framework I've found most helpful is MTV's "create, share, validate" feedback loop. By focusing on giving creators all three, we were able to reap the rewards of their shared efforts. In the end, I believe they co-created our product with us.
   
   
3. Leveraged distribution channels. It's now possible to gain massive distribution for almost any product without asking anyone for permission or signing a complex contract. This is what Google AdWords, Facebook Platform, the iPhone App Store, and Salesforce AppExchange all have in common. If you have the opportunity to use these channels to reach customers, you can iterate much faster and gain traction before more established competitors can move to check your growth. Of course, all of these mechanism have their own attendant risks, two in particular: 1) that the platform provider will itself decide to compete with you or just limit your growth (as Microsoft has a long history of doing, and as Facebook and Google have occasionally dabbled in), 2) that the ease of distribution empowers new competitors to chase you more effectively. Still, these risks are thoroughly mitigated if you can iterate faster than either set of competitors - and, as a startup, you shouldn't have any excuse for allowing that to happen. (For a specific application of this idea, see How to get distribution advantage on the iPhone.)
   
   
4. Open API's and data-oriented architecture (aka "web 2.0"). The much-promised era of component reuse in software is finally upon us. Some of that is enabled by open source, but a lot more is enabled by simple services that allow apps to be composited in record time and without having to ask for permission. Many complex apps can now be prototyped as a simple mashup in order to prove market viability - and this is true beyond just software apps. For example, I recently created a customer validation exercise around the Lean Startup Workshop. It allowed me to assess the market demand for that offline product before I had the final product baked. Doing the market test required this blog, a SurveyMonkey account and a PayPal account - and nothing else. The response has been nothing short of amazing (thank you all so much!). I'll post more about the specifics of what I learned from this exercise in a future post, but for now I want to focus on how much learning it made possible for such a small amount of effort. And yet, even though it wasn't very costly overall, all of the players involved (including me, Google, PayPal and SurveyMonkey) were able to create and capture real value. Multiply that by the large numbers of similar "long tail" creators like me, and you can see how much leverage this ecosystem is creating.
   
   
5. On-demand utility pricing for services (aka "cloud computing"). This is really a specific instance of many of the above trends synthesized together. But it's had such an impact that I think it's worth itemizing on its own. Naturally, everyone is using tools like Amazon's AWS and Google's AppEngine to prototype their startup's first version, thus lowering both time to market and capital equipment costs. But I'd like to call out special attention to services like Amazon's new FPS payment platform, which allows people to create new web services that are charged on a cost-plus basis. In effect, this allows you to create a new AWS service, profit by it, and distribute it alongside Amazon's other first-party services. I believe this is going to unlock a huge wave of innovative services available with utility pricing.
   

This is not meant to be an exhaustive list of leveraged product development opportunities. Instead, my goal is to give enough context to make this final point. The power of leverage is so high, it's a benefit that needs to be traded-off against explicitly in order to optimize total time through the fundamental startup feedback loop.

For example, I have wasted a lot of time in my career trying to argue for the superiority of open source solutions over comparable proprietary solutions. These arguments have ranged from the ethical, to performance comparisons, to feature-by-feature breakdowns. But I now realize that none of that was very useful. Instead, the real compelling reason to switch from proprietary platforms and vendors is the advantage you can gain in leverage, even if you give up other serious benefits. When proprietary vendors focus too much on value capture, their products become expensive, inflexible to change, and require too much permission to adapt to new contexts. All of which can slow down startups in just the places where they need to speed up. Thus, the right argument to make in evaluating proprietary alternatives is simply this: will this vendor speed us up or slow us down? If the latter, almost no benefit in terms of price, price/performance, product support, or lifetime total cost of ownership is worth it.

Once startups and vendors really understand this dynamic, we can all get past these legacy arguments and start focusing on building partnerships that truly make it easier to create companies that matter. In the meantime, I think we have a good explanation for what all those PR dollars are being spent trying to obscure. Don't fall for it - it's a trap.

APRIL 2009:
 
Hello From Long Lane Honey Bee Farms. We're David & Sheri Burns, working hard to encourage more and more people to become beekeepers!

It's been very busy around our bee farm the last few weeks. In addition to keeping up with the hive woodenware demand, we are working hard to make sure all the packages get delivered on time. And last weekend was a huge success. Beekeeper after beekeeper kept driving in and picking up packages and equipment, anxiously anticipating getting started keeping bees. I was totally exhausted from my trip down to the Orlando Florida area, but it energized me to meet so many new beekeepers.

It was a pleasure to spend 4 packed days with Larry. Larry is a Renaissance man. He has a broad intellectual interest in art, music, and has many other interests such as Persian rugs. But bees are his business and he knows the business of beekeeping. Larry is well liked and respected throughout his community in Florida and Wisconsin. He's a true gentleman and has supplied our local bee club with packages year after year.

Here's a video I took on my cell phone of us working 400 hives, shaking bees for our customers outside of Orlando. The weather was perfect and we found the bees to be very populous and healthy here in this common orange grove. Huge swarms would often collect on the Orange trees.

I also met another well known beekeeper in Florida, David Miksa. David has been a queen breeder forever. Miksa is on the right. We visited his operation to purchase queens for the packages. He had the queens all ready when we arrived. David's queens are well sought out by the beekeeping community. The European Discovery channel did a documentary of David's operation a few years ago. David has a excellent grasp of beekeeping and raising queens. Here's a few pictures we took while visiting David Miska.

David's hives are nestled under those tall, Florida Eucalyptus trees. David's family works along side of him and they have an efficient operation in a beautiful setting.

It was nice being in Florida, soaking up all the nice, warm weather! But, the day finally came when we had to load up all the packages and head north, back to our honey bee farm, knowing that customers would be waiting to receive the packages. So, we loaded them up and headed north, north through half of Florida, all the way through Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky and finally into Illinois. It's a long trip. And with bees as precious cargo, stops were kept to a minimal for the 20 hour drive. Larry, Henry and myself drove the truck back, each taking turns so others could get some rest.
Once we arrived home with all the packages, customers began arriving to pick them up. Most brought pickup trucks, a few brought cars, but the best one was Charlie, a good customer of ours, who put 20 packages in the trunk of his Cadillac!
Charlie is expanding his hives from last year, so he's an old pro. But many customers who picked up packages were new to beekeeping and picking up their package was very exciting for them. Most seemed overwhelmed at even seeing a package for the first time.

NOW FOR TODAY'S LESSON

We are now making splits and nucs. The weather appears to have broken for us. In fact, many beekeepers are reporting hives that are already swarming, so it is important to split hives to help cut down on the swarming tendency. It may not prevent all swarming, but some.

To make a split, it is best to pull out 3-5 frames from the strong hive. These frames should be of brood in various stages with bees on the frames. Find the queen and keep her in the main hive and place a mated, new queen in the split. It is helpful to place the split a few miles away so that the foragers don't return to the old hive. Or you can swap locations of the new split with the old hive which floods the new smaller split with foragers. We often make splits without worrying about moving them 3 miles away. Usually, the split has bees that are about to become foragers anyway so the force is not reduced that much for too long.

Before we started raising queens, we would let the split or the old hive raise a queen, which ever one didn't have one. But now, we realize that we can save a few weeks of waiting for the queen to lay by placing a laying queen in the split.

Some have asked us what to do if the weather is poor when a package needs installed. It is important to install the package as soon as possible. Most packages can last 5-6 days with the can of food inside, but who can be sure. So I would recommend installing the package the same day you receive it. BUT WHAT IF IT IS RAINING? If it is raining, install your package under a porch or overhang. Do not let your queen get wet from the rain. The bees really should not be rained on. Once installed, you can cover it and carry it to it's location.

I installed packages last week in the cold rain, hail and lightning. So cowboy up and get-er done. What we want is to get the queen released as soon as possible. She is taken care of in the cage, but not as well as if she was out and about. If you want to take a chance and wait a day or two for better weather, keep your bees in a dark place around 50-60 degrees and spray them with 1:1 sugar water lightly a couple of times a day. Be careful not to spray the queen cage if she is visible.

If it is going to be below freezing after you install your package you should worry...I do. Namely because I have lost packages to those sudden cold snaps at night. If you only have a few, and you have a strong back, seal them off and move them into a garage or area that will stay between 35-50 degrees. Then, take them back in the morning when the temperature rises above 37. Be careful in trying to put a heat pad or lamp around the hive. You can easily overheat them or burn your hive and house down. Be careful! That's why we never like to ship packages until the very end or first week of May.

Also, those of you calling in for questions, please be patient because this is the time of the year when we work away from the phone most of the day. Leave a short message and we'll get back to you in 48 hours. Thanks for understanding.

That's all for now. Enjoy your bees.

Until next time, BEE-have yourself.

David & Sheri Burns
Long Lane Honey Bee Farms

217-427-2678

http://www.honeybeesonline.com/

EMAIL: david@honeybeesonline.com

Coq au vin is a peasant recipe, As Anthony Bourdain has said "Coq au vin is an old, tough bird you have to drown in wine to get it to taste good. That'll be $28.95 please."

This is one of those recipes that is deceptively hard, with a little prep work it is easy as pie, maybe even easier. The secret is the mise en place. do it all ahead, stuff it in the fridge, and throw it all together when you are ready.

Excerpt from the Les Halles Cookbook, by Anthony Bourdain...

"Another easy dish that looks like it is hard. It is not in fact, this is the kind of dish you might enjoy spending a leisurely afternoon with. There are plenty of opportunities for breaks. It’s durable, delicious, and the perfect illustration of the principles of turning something big and tough and unlovely into something truly wonderful. Knock out your prep one thing at a time, slowly building your mise en place. Listen to some music while you do it. There’s an open bottle of wine left from the recipe, so have a glass now and again. Just clean up after yourself as you go, so your kitchen doesn't look like a disaster area when you start the actual cooking. You should. with any luck, reach a Zen-like state of pleasurable calm. And like the very best dishes coq a vin is one of those that goes on the stove looking, smelling and tasting pretty nasty, and yet later, through the mysterious alchemical processes of time and heat turns into something magical."

Coq au vin
from the Les Halles Cookbook, by Anthony Bourdain, Serves 4

1 bottle/1 liter plus 1 cup/225 ml of red wine
1 onion, cut into a 1-inch/2.5 cm dice
1 carrot, cut into ¼-inch/6-mm slices
1 celery rib, cut into ½ inch/1-cm slices
4 whole cloves
1 tbs/14 g whole black peppercorns
1 bouquet garni
1 whole chicken, about 3.5 lb/1.35 kg, “trimmed” – meaning guts, wing tips and neckbone removed

salt and freshly ground pepper
1 tbs/28 ml olive oil
6 tbs/75 g butter, softened
1 tbs/14 g flour
¼ lb/112 g lardons
½ lb/ 225 g small, white button mushrooms, stems removed
12 pearl onions, peeled
pinch of sugar

Equipment:
3 large, deep bowls
plastic wrap
fine strainer
large Dutch oven or heavy –bottomed pot
tongs
wooden spoon
small sauté pan
small sauce pan
1 sheet parchment paper
whisk
deep serving platter


DAY ONE
The day before you even begin to cook, combine the bottle of red wine, the diced onion (that’s the big onion, not the pearl onions), sliced carrots, celery, cloves, peppercorns, and bouquet garni in a large deep bowl. Add the chicken and submerge it in the liquid so that all of it is covered. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and refrigerate overnight.

DAY TWO
Remove the chicken from the marinade and pat it dry. Put it aside. Strain the marinade through the fine strainer, reserving the liquids and solids separately. Season the chicken with salt and pepper inside and out. In the large Dutch oven, heat the oil and 2tablesppoons/28 g of the butter until almost smoking, and then sear the chicken, turning it with the tongs to evenly brown it. Once browned, it should be removed from the pot and set it aside again. Add the reserved onions, celery, and carrot to the pot and cook over medium-high heat, stirring occasionally, until they are soft and golden brown. That should take about 10 minutes.

Sprinkle the flour over the vegetables and mix well with the wooden spoon so that the vegetables are coated. Now stir in the reserved strained marinade. Put the chicken back in the pot, along with the bouquet garni. Cook this for about 1 hour and 15 minutes over low heat.

Have a drink. You’re almost there…

While your chicken stews slowly in the pot, cook the bacon lardons in the small sauté pan over medium heat until golden brown. Remove the bacon from the pan and drain it on paper towels, making sure to keep about 1 tablespoon/14 g of fat in the pan. Saute the mushroom tops in the bacon fat until golden brown. Set them aside.

Now, in the small saucepan, combine the pearl onions, the pinch of sugar, a pinch of salt, and 2 tablespoons/28 g of butter. Add just enough water to just cover the onions; then cover the pan with the parchment paper trimmed to the same size of the pan. (I suppose you can use foil if you must.) Bring to a boil, reduce to a simmer, and cook until the water has evaporated. Keep a close eye on it. Remove the paper cover and continue to cook until the onions are golden brown. Set the onions aside and add the remaining cup/225 ml of red wine along with salt and pepper and reduce over medium-high heat until thick enough to coat the back of the spoon.

Your work is pretty much done here. One more thing and then it’s wine and kudos…

When the chicken is cooked through – meaning tender, the juice from the thigh running clear when pricked – carefully remove from the liquid, cut into quarters, and arrange on the deep serving platter. Strain the cooking liquid (again) into the reduced red wine. Now just add the bacon, mushrooms, and pearl onions, adjust the seasoning with salt and pepper, and swirl in the remaining 2 tablespoons/28 g of butter. Now pour that sauce over the chicken and dazzle your friends with your brilliance. Serve with buttered noodles and a Bourgone Rouge.

Tips
1. An old bird is best, hard to find though. Ideally you are looking for a stew chicken or an old rooster, I recommend a Kosher or Halal meat market (remember they have no pork though).
2. Bouquet garni is a bundle of herbs usually tied together with string, most recipes include parsley, thyme and bay leaf
3. Lardon may refer to different pork products cut from a pig's belly and used for larding in French cuisine. In this case you are looking for slab or country bacon, cut into small oblongs (lardons) about ¼ by 1 inch. I used salt pork, which did not smell like bacon cooking but tasted pretty good. Either way a good thick bacon with alot of nice fat and not alot of additives is what you are looking for.
4. the wine should be red, other than that pick what suits your pallet and wallet. But here is a helpful guide as well, Wine With...Coq au Vin

Quotes:

Natalia of Gatti Filie Farina said, "I made this great chicken for Easter and everybody loved it ! It became even better the next day !!"

Lauren of I'll Eat You Delish said "Just ate ours for dinner- quite tasty!"

Picture #1 Temperance of High on the Hog
Picture #2 Kat of A Good Appetite
Picture #3 Lori of Lori's Lipsmacking Goodness

Would you rather have $30,000 or $1 million in revenues for your startup? Sounds like a no-brainer, but I’d like to try and convince you that it’s not. All things being equal, of course, you’d rather have more revenue rather than less. But all things are never equal. In an early-stage startup especially, revenue is not an important goal in and of itself.

This may sound crazy, coming as it does from an advocate of charging customers for your product from day one. I have counseled innumerable entrepreneurs to change their focus to revenue, and many companies who refuse this advice get themselves into trouble by running out of iterations. And yet revenue alone is not a sufficient goal. Focusing on it exclusively can lead to failure as surely as ignoring it altogether.

Let’s start with a simple question: why do early-stage startups want revenue? We all know why big companies want revenue – it’s one of two critical halves of the formula for profit. And big companies exist to maximize profit. Don’t startups exist for the same reason? I think such reasoning is an example of the “startup dollhouse fallacy” – that startups are just shrunken-down big companies. In fact, I don’t think revenue is in and of itself a goal for startups, and neither is profit. What matters is proving the viability of the company’s business model, what investors call “traction.” Demonstrating traction is the true purpose of revenue in an early growth company. (Of course this is not at all true of many profitable small businesses, but they are not what I mean by startups.) Before I explain what I mean, let me add an important caveat: traction is not just important for investors. It should be even more important to the founders themselves, because it demonstrates that their business hypothesis is grounded in reality. More on that in a moment.

Consider this company (as always, a fictionalized composite): they have a million dollars of revenue, and are showing growth quarter after quarter. And yet, their investors are frustrated. Every board meeting, the metrics of success change. Their product definition fluctuates wildly – one month, it’s a dessert topping, the next it’s a floor wax. Their product development team is hard at work on a next-generation product platform, which is designed to offer a new suite of products – but this effort is months behind schedule. In fact, this company hasn’t shipped any new products in months. And yet their numbers continue to grow, month after month. What’s going on?

In my consulting practice, I sometimes have the opportunity to work with companies like this. Diagnosis is easy: they are exceptionally gifted salesmen. This is an incredible skill, one that most engineers overlook. True salesmen are artists, able to hone in on just those key words, phrases, features, and benefits that will convince another human being to give up their hard-earned money in exchange for even an early product. For a startup, having great sales DNA is a wonderful asset. But in this kind of situation, it can devour the company’s future.

The problem stems from selling each customer a custom one-time product. This is the magic of sales: by learning about each customer in-depth, they can convince each of them that this product would solve serious problems. That leads to cashing many checks. Now, in some situations, this over-selling would lead to a secondary problem, namely, that customers would realize they had been duped and refuse to re-subscribe. But here’s where a truly great sales artist comes in. Customers don’t usually mind a bait-and-switch if the switched-to product really does solve an important problem for them. These salesmen used their insight into what their customers really needed to make the sale and then deliver something of even greater value. They are closing orders. They are gaining valuable customer data. They are close to breakeven. What’s the problem?

This approach is fundamentally non-scalable. These founders have not managed, to borrow a phrase from Steve Blank, to create a scalable and repeatable sales process. Every sale requires handholding and personal attention from the founders themselves. This process cannot be delegated, because it’s impossible to explain to a normal person what’s involved in making the sale. The founders have a lethal combination of insight about what potential customers want and in-depth knowledge about what their current product can really deliver. As a result, potential customers are being turned away; they can only afford to engage with the customers that are best qualified.

And what of the product development team? They are busy too, but they are not creating value for the company. They are trying to build a product to an ever-changing spec, based on intuitions from the founders about what might be able to sell itself. Worse, the founders are never around – they are too busy going out and selling! Without access to customer data, or even a clear product owner, the product development team keeps building feature after feature based on what they think might be useful. But since nobody in the company can clearly articulate what the product is, their efforts result in incoherence. Worst of all, their next-generation product is so bad they are not allowed to try it out on any customers. The team is thus completely starved of any form of external feedback.

Let me describe a different company, one with only $30,000 in revenue (again, pure fiction). This company has a large long-term vision, but their current product is only a fraction of what they hope to build. Compared to the million-dollar startup, they are operating at micro-scale. How does that stack up?

First of all, they are not selling their product by hand. Instead, each potential customer has to go through a self-serve process of signing up and paying money. Because they have no presence in the market, they have to find distribution channels to bring in customers. They can only afford those (like Google AdWords) that support buying in small volume.

Compensating for these limitations is the fact that they know each of their customers extremely well, and they are constantly experimenting with new product features and product marketing to increase the yield on each new crop of customers they bring in. Over time, they have found a formula for acquiring, qualifying, and selling customers in the market segments they have targeted. Most importantly, they have lots of data about the unit economics of their business. They know how much it costs to bring in a customer and they know how much money they can expect to make on each one.

In other words, they have learned to grow renewable audiences. Given the data they’ve collected about these early customers, they are also able to estimate with modest precision how big the market is for their product in its current form. They may be at micro-scale now, but they are in a very good position to raise venture money and engage in extremely rapid growth.

Our million-dollar startup, by contrast, is stuck in the mud.

Stories like these are what has led me to this definition of progress for a startup: validated learning about customers. (Steve calls this just Customer Validation, but I like to emphasize the learning aspect, so I accept a far more awkward phrase.)

This unit of progress is remarkable in several ways. First of all, it means that most aggregate measures of success, like total revenue, are not very useful. They don’t tell us the key things we need to know about the business: how profitable is it on a per-customer basis? What’s the total available market? What’s the ROI on acquiring new customers? And how do existing customers respond to our product over time?

Secondly, this definition locates progress firmly in the heads of the people inside the company, and not in any artifacts the company produces. That’s why none of dollars, milestones, products or code can count as progress. Given a choice between what a successful team has learned and the source code they have produced, I would take the learning every time. This is why companies often get out-competed by former employees (Palm vs Handspring to name just one), even though the upstart lacks all of the familiar resources, tools, processes, and support they used to have. (Incidentally, it’s also why these upstarts often get sued for bogus reasons. Companies can’t believe they didn’t steal any of their “precious” assets.)

But learning is a tricky thing to quantify, which is why the word “validated” is so important in this definition. Validation comes in the form of data that demonstrates that the key risks in the business have been addressed by the current product. That doesn’t always mean revenue, either. Some products have relatively obvious monetization mechanisms, and the real risks are in customer adoption. Products can find sources of validation with impressive stats along a number of dimensions, such as high engagement, viral coefficient, or long-term retention. What’s important is that the data tell a compelling story, one that demonstrates that the business is on a solid economic footing. (It being so easy to convince yourself that you’re in one of these “special case” businesses, I do recommend you give revenue a long, hard look first.)

For example, I’ve talked a few times about how IMVU raised its first venture round with monthly revenues of around $10,000. This wasn’t very impressive, but we had two things going for us:

1. A hockey stick shaped growth curve. People often forget the most important part of the hockey stick: the long flat part. We had months of data that showed customers more-or-less uninterested in our product. We were limping along at a few hundred dollars a month in revenue. All this time, we were continuously changing our product, talking to customers, trying to improve on our AdWords spend. Eventually, these efforts bore fruit – and this was evident in the data. This lent our claims about learning and discovery credibility.
   
   
2. Compelling per-customer economics. We had only a small number of customers – if memory serves, only a few thousand active users. But a little math will show that we were making over a dollar per-user per-month. Our cost to acquire a customer on AdWords was only a few cents. Our eventual VC’s were quick to grasp what this meant (in fact, they understood it better than we did): that if our product achieved significant scale, it would be wildly profitable.
   

These two aspects could be plotted on one simple graph, which tells this equally simple story: if there is a market out there for this kind of product, we are the team that will find it and profit from it. That turned out to be a compelling investment thesis, despite our micro-scale results.

Let’s return to my example of the million-dollar-revenue company. If you find yourself in this kind of situation, what can you do? I’d suggest a few things, each rooted in the idea of breaking down the wall between the two halves of this company.

1. Go on an agile diet quickly. With a product development team that is not shipping, any agile methodology will surface major problems quickly. Force anyone who is in customer contact to take the role of the Product Owner and insist that they deliver something new on a short regular interval.
   
   
2. Get product into customers’ hands. The sales strategy currently leaves many customers completely un-served (those that don’t qualify for the founders’ personal time). Start using some of those customers as guinea pigs for a self-serve version of the product. Even if the product is absolutely terrible, it will establish a baseline against which the product development team can try and improve.
   
   
3. Build tools for the sales team that reduce the time investment required for each sale. Instead of devoting all product development efforts to building a full-blown product, try building just those parts of the product that would allow the current sales process to go a little faster. For example, could we develop a simple landing page that would allow customers to pre-qualify for sales time? Iterating on these kinds of features has two benefits: it frees up time for the founders and simultaneously starts getting building a feedback loop with the product development team. Pretty soon, the text on that landing page is going to become an effective explanation for what the product does, because if it’s not the salesman will have to spend time re-explaining the product to potential customers. Time-to-complete-a-sale is not a bad metric for validated learning at this stage.
   

This last point is especially important. Although this kind of team may understand their customers well, they don’t yet know how to talk to them in a standardized way. Without that, they probably won’t achieve significant scale. (For more on how this plays into the process of scaling up, see the Customer Creation stage of the customer development model.) Perhaps they’ll be able to hire someone especially skilled in the marketing skills needed to find this positioning. But in the meantime, by iterating on their product with customers, they have a chance to get there on their own.

Hello from Long Lane Honey Bee Farms. We are David & Sheri Burns, working hard to help others enjoy being beekeepers!

With winter gone and spring finally here, we are starting to dig out of winter. We live in Central Illinois...the North! People who live up north are a different lot of folks. In the fall, we look forward to winter because we like the changing seasons. We get tired of the hot, dry days of summer. In the fall, we welcome winter because the first snow is beautiful. But by the end of winter, we hate it. We are tired of snow and cold temperatures. In March and April, we fuss and complaint about lingering winter cold snaps. So by digging out, I mean we are cleaning up and shifting our honey bee farm from winter mode to summer mode. As you'll see in some upcoming photos, we clean out hives by shaking out the bees that gave their lives keeping the place warm during our harsh winters, but didn't live to see spring. Spring is fun and always forward-looking. New flowers, green grass, the smell o f dirt being tilled up for a garden, and the fragrant smell of Easter Lillies all cause us to feel better and to live better as we eagerly face another great bee season.

Bees are out and here's one on a Box Elder plant. Her back legs are stuffed full of pollen and she's hoping to find some nectar in the small flower. You can click on the photo to enlarge it. My wife, Sheri, has planted a few of these plants around our house and the bees love it.

We are still expecting Dandelions to bloom any time and that will send the bees out if full throttle. Also, we are near many maple trees and they are an early provider of nectar if a late frost does not kill the maple flower.

Every winter we experiment with beehive survivability. I believe beekeepers lose more hives to winter die-outs than all other problems combined. In fact, many beekeepers are caught on a dreadful treadmill, a rat race of methods that are proving to be be unsuccessful. Something has to change! The idea of a sustainable bee farm seems impossible, but it is not.

Beekeepers are a breed of folks who will not give up. Our tenacity and persistence can be very beneficial. Yet, when we become so stubborn that we refuse to re-tool our methods, we might be the reason so many of our colonies are disappearing.

It is my opinion that we are too quick to think that dumping medication and pesticides in the hive will solve all our problems. Our culture has taught us that there is a pill for every ill. Some medications do heal, if used temporally. But when we become dependent upon medications the balance of nature is upset.

I believe years of dumping medications and pesticides in the hive has now produce new problems. Wax is absorbent. We now know that what we put into the hive stays within the wax. We know that some harsh chemicals that were put into the hive years ago still lingers in the wax and we also now know that certain chemicals used to control mites can effect the drone and queen's ability to reproduce. Come on, enough is enough.

I was once told that people will change only when they have hurt enough. Finally, beekeepers have hurt enough. Beekeepers are tired of watching 50% of their hives die. The answer is not to do it all the same next year and hope for better results. The momentum is shifting to a new and modern type of beekeeping which I have subscribed to for years. But what's really interesting is that the new and modern way is really a return to the old ways, a more simplistic and natural way of keeping bees. This is at the heart of our honey bee farm and, in my opinion, will bring hope back to sustainable beekeeping.

In our operation here's what we subscribe to: 1) We use no medication on our hives 2) We are working hard to raise queens that have proven genetics for survivability and 3) We are using IPM (Integrated Pest Management) solutions that are natural and safe. So, I'll focus on number two above.
Here's a picture of the queens that we raise. You can click on the image to see a larger photo. I've heard people refer to older people who are tough and strong as "pioneer stock". It's a way of saying that early settlers went through a lot of challenges, harsh winters and diseases but survived the worst of circumstances.

That's why we finally decided to name our queens and call them "Pioneer Queens". There are several definitions for pioneer in the dictionary. One says, "Leading the way; trailblazing". We hope to join many others, like us, who feel the importance of seeking greater diversity within the queen genetics, traits and characteristics that show resistance toward pests, diseases and harsh winters. Most of our pioneer queens are dark in color, more along the line of being Carniolan or Russian. We open air mate our queens and this year we are planting mother drone colonies around to control genetics a bit more.

If you are interested in purchasing one of our Pioneer queens, please call. We plan to start grafting the last week of April and will start having queens available mid to late May through September.

LESSON 50: CLEAN UP YOUR OVERWINTERED HIVES

Here my daughter Karee is setting up more hives to expand our numbers this year. Here in Central Illinois it's time to head out to the hives and clean up. It's not quite time to reverse the deep hive bodies because we still might have some cold snaps. And you NEVER want to reverse the hive bodies when the brood nest extends into both boxes. I have hives that overwintered in various ways. Some clusters have moved all the way to the top box, which on some of my hives are medium supers. Others are in the top of the deep second deep hive body, and others have expanded their brood nest into every square inch in the hive.

Here's a picture of a hive that has a brood nest all the way through all boxes. Even the lower box is full of bees and brood. So, I do not reverse this hive. I simply keep it all the same. They are in good shape just to start up fast when the nectar flow starts. These hives will need to be split because they came out of winter already overcrowded. We sometimes cause this to happen by fooling the colony with brood patties and sugar water. Thus, the bees think they can start building up since pollen and nectar are available.


Here in the north, a typical colony would have moved up into the highest area in the hive leaving the lower section(s) unoccupied and the bottom board full of dead bees. If the hive has three boxes on, like the one in the picture, most of the bees will try to go in and out of the hive higher up so as not to go through the bottom boxes and near the dead bees. See how these bees are moving in and out through a crack at the top.

Let me walk you through how I clean up hives and "set" them for spring. First, I remove the bottom, unoccupied deep hive body by taking off the upper boxes. It was cool day to work, about 49 degrees and windy.

The hive in the picture to the left was hard to do because the second deep box had no handles so I had to hug it to move it. It was a strain. The reason the box doesn't have handles is because I bought a bunch of used materials years ago and this one didn't have handles. When it is full of honey, you cannot pick it up.

Once I have the upper boxes off which contain the cluster, the overwintered bees, queen and brood, I then take off the lower empty hive body and set it aside, which exposes the bottom board. The bottom boards can be filled with dead bees, those who died of old age and cold snaps. Last year, this bottom board was accidentally put on upside down which makes the screen sit below the actual bottom surface. A family member was helping in a hurry and didn't notice what they hand done.

So when the dead bee fell in this pocket, the bees did not attempt to drag them up and out, so I scraped them out with my hive tool. I carry a bucket of bleach water and thorough clean my hive tool and hands between each hive just in case nosema spores may be present in early spring.

Now I added another small pallet to the one it was on, because pallets sink a bit every year into the ground and another one is due to bring up the hive about 6" above the ground.


Now, I begin to muscle the handle-less hive back

onto the clean bottom board and once it is in place I will begin to inspect the hive. It is not uncommon to find dead bees throughout the hive even though the cluster is fine. Small pockets of frozen bees and sometimes be found, usually caused by a winter warmup followed by a rapid temperature drop which did not allow enough time for the bees all to recluster in one cluster.

This is what I found in this hive. So, I removed the frames of dead bees, scraping the bees and comb away. When the nectar flow starts, they will quickly repair all of these areas in the comb.

You can see the honey in the comb where they have been eating it, but then this group of bees were too small to stay warm. In the picture they look alive, but believe me they were not. Since I use plastic foundation, I can merely scrap out the comb on this side and it just leaves a small bald area that the bees will quickly repair.

It is very important that old, dead bees be cleaned out of the hive as soon as you can do that on a warm day. The bees will do it themselves eventually, but we feel it cuts down on possible spread of disease or moisture. Believe me, all beekeepers who have ever lost a hive know the smell of rotting bees. Clean up your hives!

In our next lesson we'll give several ways to make splits. That's what we'll be doing in the next few weeks, so we'll give you some pointers.

It was a pleasure to met many new beekeepers who dropped by our place over the last few weeks. We had fun talking with Leo from who stopped by driving up from Texas and Leo is a big fan of Studio Bee Live. Leo strongly encouraged us to get on the ball and get more broadcast aired and believe me we want to! We'll try and get on that!!

If you are still needing to purchase your hive equipment, do so as soon as possible. You can call us at: 217-427-2678 or go on to our website at: http://www.honeybeesonline.com and purchase online.

To order our Pioneer queen, just call us at: 217-427-2678.

Until next time, remember to bee-have yourself!

David & Sheri Burns
Long Lane Honey Bee Farms
14556 N. 1020 E. Road
Fairmount, IL 61841
(217) 427-2678
EMAIL: david@honeybeesonline.com

Omegle.com is one of those site that appears out of nowhere, catches people the right way and rises instantly. It has also been able to sustain traffic over 2 weeks because it keeps getting mentioned as new people discover it. Look at the Alexa rank:Alexa stats for OmegleHere's a typical blog post - the kind that has given this site traffic over the last two weeks:xkcd on OmegleOmegle has a Good,

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.