I also pre-ordered the book and got to review the PDF this past week. Here’s my take on it.

Table of Contents

• Ch 1: Startup Revolution
• -Case Study: 500 Startups
• Ch 2: Vision, Values, and Culture
• -Case Study: KISSmetrics
• Ch 3: All the Fish in the Sea
• Ch 4: Wading in the Value Stream
• -Case Study: AppFog
• Ch 5: Diving In
• Ch 6: Viability Experiments
• Ch 7: Data’s Double-Edged Sword
• Ch 8: The Valley of Death
• Ch 9: Real Visionaries Have Funnel Vision
• -Question & Answer with Rob Fan
• Ch 10: The Final Word

Something for Everyone

Whether you’re a developer, designer, entrepreneur, or intrapreneur, this book will help you quickly understand the key concepts around the Lean Startup.

Lot’s of Examples

Brant and Patrick have mentored hundreds of entrepreneurs on how to start businesses, and in this book they have a ton of case studies. From Intuit to KISSmetrics, these case studies contain detailed tips on how existing startups and companies are applying the theories.

Gorgeous (and smart) Illustrations

Overall

Brant & Patrick delivered on the hype. I highly recommend this book to all entrepreneurs. You can buy it on amazon here and get it in 2 days via prime.

The post Here it is! The Lean Entrepreneur Book appeared first on Lean Startup Machine.

As Chief Technology Officer, Obie’s primary focus will be on helping us build software tools that enable startups and large organizations to run their businesses using Lean Startup methodology. Obie is a one of the best technologists in the world and an entrepreneur in his own right. He previously led Hashrocket, one of the world’s top Ruby on Rails consultancies, to $7M in sales in just three years.

Over the past two years Obie has served as an advisor to the Lean Startup Machine team and his advice and feedback have been invaluable to our growth. Like with Ruby on Rails, Obie has a knack for identifying better ways to develop products and catching a movement before it takes off.

Lean Startup Machine is committed to advancing the science of entrepreneurship and improving the odds of success for those who aspire to change the world. We have no doubt that Obie will be a champion for this cause and a great addition to the team.

View Obie’s announcement here.

The post Obie Fernandez Joins Lean Startup Machine appeared first on Lean Startup Machine.

After Alex’s housekeeper complained about how difficult it could be to collect and track payments, his team at the workshop decided to help housekeepers and similar service people manage payments using a mobile app. In the workshop, teams use the Validation Canvas to explicitly list their core assumptions, the assumptions that if proved false would sink their business. Then they identify the assumption that is the most important and most risky and then test it, like “housekeepers find it difficult to collect payments.” That much of the method, for Alex, was familiar.

But what happened next was, as he says, the “big insight.” The first test “failed quite dramatically and sensationally. We heard a bunch of clear no’s right off the bat, the core assumption was completely invalidated.” But using the method, the team doesn’t simply throw out the whole business idea because of one invalid assumption. They record that the test failed, but they keep all the other assumptions that are still valid and then pivot, modifying an assumption about the customer, problem, or solution. “You build on your learning,” says Alex. “I previously thought it was all about learning within a silo and then pivot and throw out all the previous stuff. I realized the methodology helps you iterate on ideas you have.”

When the first test failed, they made a customer service pivot and tested the same business idea with small fashion industry businesses. That failed too. Then they pivoted again and tested the same idea but designed for freelancers. That worked.

The Validation Board helps teams track what worked and what didn’t throughout the course of several tests and pivots. This ability to iterate on business ideas has changed the way Alex approaches new ventures. “I spend 50% of my time consulting, and 50% running lean startup experiments on particular ideas. If one hits then I’ll shift to 100% of my time on that startup idea.”

An interesting parallel story was told by Malcolm Ong, co-founder of Skillshare, during the same weekend but at the Lean Startup Machine in New York. He and his co-founder spent months trying out ideas. Even as they enthusiastically worked on the Skillshare concept, he says, “We refused to write a line of code until we found a group of paying customers.”

So is Alex abandoning the Big Vision approach to startups? “I think the two fit extremely well together. It’s like the right brain and left brain coming together. The right brain comes up with something in the shower, and then the left brain says, ‘Hey, hold on a second. Is this really a good idea? Do you want to spend three years of your life doing this?’ I think the Lean Startup methodology is like a cool drink of water for entrepreneurs who have been struggling with this stuff.”

The post Don’t Trash It. Build On It. appeared first on Lean Startup Machine.

The cast: 6 creative entrepreneur teams, 10 Lean Startup mentors, 5 engaging speakers, and a panel of 5 expert judges

The flavor: IKEA meets Shark Tank with a generous dose of street-level reality

The mission: Get out of the building and test your awesome ideas with real, live people. Use what you learn to prove the potential of your concept (and your ability to pivot) before a panel of judges.

The post Inside Miami’s first Lean Startup Machine appeared first on Lean Startup Machine.

The winners of Lean Startup Machine Paris was Voizin – “a non-intrusive short-messaging social app that helps building residents get connected to one another, help each other, exchange tips & items.”

The Voizin team – Gilbert Val, Olivier Jaouen, Alexandre Cipriani, Stephen Bauer and Philippe Duhamel  – met for the first time on Friday night, when all attendees had a 1 minute opportunity to pitch their “next big thing” idea. During the pitches, Stephane and Philippe’s ideas were almost identical – To solve the problem of neighbours not knowing each other & helping them share useful information and items - prompting the two jokingly to question who stole whose idea. They soon decided to join forces to solve a problem they were both passionate about. Team Voizin was formed.

However, as with all Lean Startup Machine projects, their journey was not without its challenges.

The team believed they had a strong idea but they needed to validate some of their core assumptions – the first of which was a seemingly straightforward one:

Do people want to know their neighbours?

The Voizin team only had to read the LSM battle cry printed on fellow attendees’ t-shirts to know what to do next: Get out of the Building!

Getting out of the building can be one of the most nerve wrecking elements of any Lean Startup Machine team’s weekend, but Voizin and other LSM Paris teams were presented with an additional challenge: the Parisian culture does not lend itself to speaking to strangers on the street. Nevertheless, the Voizin team pushed through this challenge to speak to potential customers and gather feedback that would prove vital to their win.

And it was while out of the building, conducting Cust Dev (speaking to target customers, for those un-initiated into the Lean Startup methodology), that the team arrived at one of its epiphany moments. This was: people do realise the value of their neighbour network, but dare not take the first step to knock on the door.

Voizin’s Cust Dev had just uncovered a problem to get even the most hardened entrepreneurs salivating to solve, and is an example of just how powerful getting out of the building and speaking to customers can be! The challenge to the team was now – how do they break this hurdle?

The team had some ideas, and the only way to find which of these was the correct one, was test them using the next cornerstone of Lean Startup: the Minimum Viable Product (MVP).

An MVP is a way of testing problem and solution hypotheses in the shortest possible time. This test can take the form of a ‘smoke test,’ wireframes, a working prototype, or a manual solution, to name a few.

Voizin went through three MVPs. The first two came back with negative results before they arrived at their winning idea: the concept for a platform for sending short messages between neighbours that helps connect, without being intrusive. The team built landing pages as their MVPs to explain the benefits to users and help them visualise the concept. And it was this last iteration, which proved the winning formula as target customers were immediately interested. This gave them the confidence to produce a winning pitch on Sunday night in front of the LSM judges.

Alexandre said “the key to our success was that we iterated on our idea fast (3 MVPs) and Stephane’s final presentation was excellent.” Future Lean Startup Machiners, take note.

They have been contacted by a number of potential customers they spoke to over the weekend, asking when the finished Voizin product will be ready. It’s a great sign that there is an exciting future for Voizin after Lean Startup Machine Paris.

The post The Lean Way to Know Thy Neighbour appeared first on Lean Startup Machine.

Team Byoyo learned this lesson last weekend when the Lean Startup Machine workshop arrived in Shanghai, China for a sold-out event. The team – Yawen Hsu, Jack Wang, and Chen Ying – won the competition after a dramatic transformation in how they talked to their customers during the course of the 2.5 day event.

Before the workshop, the team read the Lean Startup book and understood the theory but only in a theoretical way. Yawen, the Byoyo team lead, said, “I thought I was practicing the methodology but I was struggling to put the theory into practice.”

Yawen’s vision is to provide parents with a safe online community to share information about raising children. “Especially after the cultural revolution, a lot of Chinese parents no longer know how to convey values to their kids. And they don’t have the opportunities to learn what Western culture has to offer…. people don’t have as high a moral standard as what we see elsewhere.” While parents in China commonly use Renren, which is similar to Facebook, they don’t feel that’s a private place to post intimate information about their children, and there’s no domestic equivalent of BabyCenter. The potential opportunity is tremendous.

YES ladder to invalidation

After discussing their assumptions and forming their initial hypothesis, the team got out of building to talk to parents at a local mall. But the trip was fruitless. The team asked “Yes/No” questions about whether their interviewees would use the service, to which their polite interviewees usually answered “Yes.” A “yes” answer might sound reassuring, but it hardly counts as validating your hypothesis. It just means people are being nice to you. As Jack put it, “If you don’t ask the right question, you will always get the wrong answer.”

When the team returned to the workshop venue, Ray Wu, the New York City-based Lean Startup Machine facilitator, did not spare the criticism. Ray pushed the team very hard to get organized and understand what really counted as validation and challenging them to improve. The team was shocked. Yawen was literally speechless, later admitting, “it was extra dramatic for me to see it differently and throw away my original thoughts and build something new.” The team had limited time to focus on their riskiest assumptions and turn them into working hypotheses.

The 21 mentors at the workshop helped. Hailing from companies as diverse as Appconomy, IDEO, and Baidu, the Byoyo team had plenty of input and guidance to turn things around.

The team also used the Validation Canvas to record their assumptions explicitly and facilitate an honest discussion among the team members. Yawen says, “We realized that it’s very important to find that one single most important hypothesis, and… which is the single riskiest assumption we need to identify.”

Discovering target behaviors

Team Byoyo got out of the building again, this time discarding their useless “Yes/No” questions in favor of probing “Why?” and “How?” questions that illuminated how parents capture information about their children and how they want to share it. The team discovered many vital, nuanced offline customer behaviors and the barriers to translating them into online ones. For example, parents organized their print photos, but couldn’t easily do that online. Jack says, “We could help them structure their child’s history, turn it into a book, and so on.”

The team returned to the workshop with a new concept of what to build. For example, they originally wanted to create a web-based social network, but realized a monolithic platform would be harder for their target audience to adopt. Instead they decided to start with a mobile app that could highlight emotional interactions, like immediately sharing smartphone photos of their children.

Ultimately the team won the workshop competition after validating and invalidating the most assumptions and pivoting based on validated learning. Chen Ying concluded, “The workshop definitely helped me learn more tools and methods to start my own business.”

The post Wrong Question -> Wrong Answer appeared first on Lean Startup Machine.

• One, they were able to validate some of their riskiest assumptions.
• Two, they were able to collect currency on both sides of a two-sided market.
• And three, their pitch focused on the photo-sharing space on the web.

The latter doesn’t exactly relate to Lean. But it’s timely.

The photo-sharing space is now big, especially after the photo-sharing juggernaut Facebook bowed down to Instagram, to the tune of $1 billion in shares. Impressive? Yes. Normal for mobile apps? No.

Instagram created a more compelling mobile photo experience by simplifying the process. Take a photo. Add a filter to make it look professional. Add a caption. No status involved, no signing into a social network, no creating a photo album.

Demonstrating that users wanted or needed this no-hassle photo app—despite Facebook’s apparent hold on that market—was a call for Lean Startup practitioners to test their way into other problem hypotheses. Now it was PhotoCache’s turn.

Riding the Wave

With the idea to infiltrate the photo app world, LSM DC’s winning team had to find a way to make that experience unique.

The juggernaut: Geocaching (www.geocaching.com), a huge community of real-world treasure hunters that allows users from around the world to find hidden containers (geocaches) using GPS. From there they can share their experiences online.

The challenger: PhotoCache, a virtual treasure hunt that allows users to explore their surroundings with just the use of their mobile phone.

The difference? Accessibility.

“Geocaching requires a lot of dedication and it’s a little inaccessible. You have to find an object and trade it in. I thought, to bring this idea to the greater community, we could make it a photo scavenger hunt. It’s a great way to explore your surroundings. I want people to be able to show off their city, and we wanted to put a fun twist on that,” said Rohan Puri, team leader for PhotoCache and creator of Wahoobus, a bus finding mobile app.

Currency from the non-paying side of a two-sided market

The PhotoCache team (Avi Edery, Patrick Costello, James Stern, Ricardo Saavedra and Puri) initially assumed that the Geocaching community would be interested in the app. However, they didn’t find many of them, and decided to test a different customer persona. Through a weekend of experimenting, and luckily encountering the Cherry Blossom Festival in DC, they validated their real niche market: tourists and families with children.

Building a concierge minimum viable product, Patrick Costello passed out images of the Lincoln memorial to tourists in DC, instructing them to hunt for the same angle and take a picture using their phones. Of the 20 people they asked, 17 went out and did it without incentive or reward, verifying that users were willing to participate in the photo scavenger hunt.

This form of currency—users being willing to give up their time to participate in the activity requested by the experimenter—provided the necessary validation around their first riskiest assumption. PhotoCache was born.

Validating the paying side of a two-sided market

PhotoCache quickly turned the other side of its market—the businesses—to validate their assumption about the problem that they might be able to solve for them.

The team hypothesized a business model. If users of the app were able to complete the scavenger hunt, they may be able to receive discounts from nearby businesses. Although this incentive wasn’t needed to validate their audience, it was needed to garner some money for the business. “At that point, we ventured into businesses to see if they were willing to pay commission for foot traffic,” Rohan said.

Forming a letter of intent, PhotoCache asked businesses if they were willing to come on board. Out of eight managers, seven were willing to sign the form, promising a dollar to PhotoCache each time it delivered a visitor.

More Experiments Needed

In true Lean fashion, validating never ends. Even though the team was able to secure letters of intent and broadly identify their customer persona, they are aware that there is still work to be done.

“Currently we have a list of assumptions that we are exploring. First, if businesses are willing to pay $1, how much more are they willing to pay commission per person?

Second, are people going to be willing to do this without human interaction? Remember, we had Patrick there to pass out packets the first time. Would they do this without a representative?” Puri said.

With potential for sticky growth, some currency on both sides of the market, and customers “foaming at the mouth,” the PhotoCache team will be successful in the future because they recognize one thing: validation is key.

The post Taking on a Market Leader through Validated Learning appeared first on Lean Startup Machine.

Max Cameron (@MaxCameron) is the CEO & Co-Founder of Big Bang Technology and creator of http://Kera.io. Based in Toronto, he is an alumnus of Lean Startup Machine and a Founding Organizer of LSM in Toronto.

In this interview, Max reflects on his key insights from LSM Toronto as an entrepreneur and an executive.

The post Lean Coffee with Max Cameron: Why You Won’t Do Lean Startup appeared first on Lean Startup Machine.

After years in advertising, Tran knew his strengths: selling, building solid revenue models, and working on marketing strategies. He had learned about Lean Startup a year earlier from Dan Martell, then attending Mesh in Toronto, and eventually reading Steve Blank’s and Ash Maurya’s books, as well as other blogs for tactical ideas. In January, he decided to come to LSM Toronto to validate his understanding of Lean by working on a brand new product: “I had no biases and [therefore] I could apply Lean to its fullest.”

He also looked beyond the apparent benefits of the workshop, such as the guidance provided by mentors and speakers, the three-day dedication to experiments and pivoting, or networking with some of the top folks in the Lean Startup community. Tran wanted to validate his understanding of management, to see if he had “the right blink factor for picking people, quickly assessing their strengths, and designating tasks.”

“I had no biases and [therefore] I could apply Lean to its fullest.”

The A Team

His first test was attracting the right people. A few months earlier, a tattoo store owner told him during an cust dev interview for a different product that he’d buy a tattoo business management application if Tran could build it. Tran used that story in his pitch of the management tool, purposely mentioning that there were seven tattoo stores just down the street, making the validation process easier. This way, his “early adopter” team would be attendees like him, interested in learning and reinforcing their knowledge of lean principles as efficiently as possible within the three-day time limit.

Tran’s pitch attracted nine, three of which he had to cut. But besides attracting a large group, he found that his pitch connected with the right people, who shared a key trait: practicality. By focusing on the accessibility of their target market and proposing a realistic idea, he’d attracted a team of like-minded people sharing a common set of values, something he believed was crucial to his Lean Startup Machine victory.

Customers Down the Street

The team’s focus on applying Lean Startup principles to a practical idea meant two things: heated arguments were avoided and validation was made easier. Working with strangers to develop a new idea in just three days is a situation naturally conducive to high emotions and heated debates. With a team focused on learning, they were able to look past the natural tendency to defend their opinions at the expense of productivity.

Every difference of opinion led to an experiment. Every point was either supported with a test or killed. There was no time or need for debate, increasing efficiency and productivity. The accessibility of their target market made it easier to test: they worked down the street, available all three days. Little time was wasted exploring all the possible features they could offer due to using a similar business management tool as the model. With a clear vision of the product, explaining their idea to their prospects was easy. The customers quickly and easily understood the concept. Picking a business idea with customers literally down the street saved them much of this logistical effort and allowed them to focus on Lean Startup principles.

Data-driven Decisions

The first time they got out of the building, they talked to the ten tattoo store owners and came back with disheartening news: six of the ten owners weren’t interested in management software. They were happy with paper pushing. After a few pivots, one of which abandoned tattoo stores entirely, Tran’s team decided to revisit the data.

When they went back and looked at why these six stores were disinterested, they noticed a crucial part of the story: the prospects that said “no” were the parlors that only attracted a few customers a day. Paper pushing was easy for them. The customers that were interested in a management tool were parlors with four or more artists and attracted at least 20 customers a day. For these larger tattoo parlors, management software would not only help them organize their information, but would help them easily follow up with customers and handle referrals. This would mean increased customer lifetime value and word of mouth marketing.

Tran found that his team needed to look beyond the simple yes and no to focus on understanding the customer’s why. Doing so helped them make a critical customer segment pivot, focusing on a specific type of tattoo shop owner rather than targeting all of them. This pivot would also allow them to demonstrate a clear learning path to the LSM judges.

A Strong Finish

His focus on creating a strong team that stuck to Lean Startup principles led to their LSM win. During his presentation, one of the tattoo owners came with a $3,000 check, and another store owner from Los Angeles faxed a letter of intent for the same amount.

While he and his Lean Startup Machine team members were toying with further pursuing the idea, Tran didn’t see LSM as simply a way to launch: “This is a great way … if you are an entrepreneur, and most entrepreneurs have more than one idea … to filter through your list rapidly to find the gem.”

Beyond winning that weekend, it was Tran’s ability to build a strong team on that first day that he’s most pleased with. The team’s intense focus on learning Lean Startup principles on a practical product was key in their ultimate success.

The post How David Tran Packed Months of Lean Startup Education into 3 Days appeared first on Lean Startup Machine.

For instance, there once was a place where lone profile pictures congregated, there were no photo albums, and the “poke” button reigned supreme. That place was Facebook. But less than ten years later, Facebook’s 845+ million users need more.

Yet, that simple blue and white design released in 2004 was enough to demonstrate that Facebook could grow virally. It grabbed hundreds of users within the first week and eventually knocked other flashy social networks off the grid.

Learning as you go

I stumbled upon an Eric Ries’ blog post focused on “The Hacker Way,” which, in short, is the process of building something quickly and then improving it as the product grows. It couldn’t have come at a better time. He celebrated Zuckerberg for creating a simple and useful app that changed over time with constant iteration and execution. Take it from The Zuck himself:

“Hackers try to build the best services over the long term by quickly releasing and learning from smaller iterations rather than trying to get everything right all at once. To support this, we have built a testing framework that at any given time can try out thousands of versions of Facebook. We have the words ’Done is better than perfect‘ painted on our walls to remind ourselves to always keep shipping.”

If “The Hacker Way,” worked for the Facebook team, it will work for other start-ups too, right?

Just in Time Jewelry

Courtney McColgan, co-founder of Wokai.org, would soon learn the meaning of that old adage at the January 2012 LSM workshop in Palo Alto. The idea for Crowd Jewel, a community-driven jewelry website, came from McColgan’s interest in crowd-sourcing web innovation such as Quirky and Threadless.

She wanted to figure out, however, why women-focused businesses—like Velvet Brigade (acquired by Modcloth), Garmz (restarted as Lookk), and and Fashionstake (acquired by Fab)–were, in her opinion, stagnant. “All failed to meet big success because it is hard to nail customer experience (fit, wait times), manufacturing (long lead times, high minimums), and designer acquisition (hard to find lots of them online).”

“I thought it was because manufacturing, product fit and community building were just too darn hard.” She added, “why not focus on an easier category like women’s accessories; and go for a very sticky online-user community like women’s jewelry,” she added.

Her idea was to have designers submit designs to the user community’s vote. Reminiscent of the just-in-time lean manufacturing, Crowd Jewel would bring only the winners to market. The only thing to do was build her online platform.

No Shiny Product? No Worries

After two years of studying designers and manufacturing, a month of meeting with high-end established jewelry designers, meeting with manufactures in Guangzhou, and a blow up with a technical co-founder, McColgan had all but abandoned the concept.

However, meeting Michele Battelli, an engineer at Google, and Hung Pham, a project manager at Cisco, only a day before the LSM workshop, the three decided to give it another go. After all, once there was a technical individual to bring McColgan’s ideas to life on a high design website, Crowd Jewel would flourish…right?

Learning as your company grows seems like a natural idea, but for many entrepreneurs, the thought of not having it all together before their service/product hits market can induce panic. McColgan remembers thinking, “I would have to build the whole thing. You think of this idea, and you think, ‘We’ll have a community, a form, and a manufacturer, and if I don’t have that from the beginning, people aren’t going to get it.‘”

There was one thing McColgan knew. She took time… and lots of it… to pinpoint her potential customers. She realized that there were over 2 million jewelry posts on Etsy. She also saw some research that suggested that 1 in 20 women might be or know a professional or amateur jewelry creator. “I knew I was targeting designers. And in my gut, I knew that the voters would in turn become customers.” This was her riskiest assumption.

Cue Crowd Jewel’s starting point.

Out With the Loftiness, in with the Lean

After figuring out that they needed to target designers to build their community, McColgan, Pham and Battelli decided that there didn’t need a “shiny” product to gain an online presence. Introducing the contest, in less than ideal ways according to McColgan, by spamming Etsy users, didn’t push them away; in fact, it bulked up CrowdJewel’s user community.

What worked in Crowd Jewel’s favor was McColgan’s relentless work to validate her market. It took only 24 hours at LSM for the team to validate assumptions without the product that took nine months to build: jewelry designers like competitions, there isn’t a model identical to Crowd Jewel, and voters will convert to customers. With this information, McColgan, Pham and Battelli realized they could build a successful beta, even without sequin.

“I just came to the conclusion that it’s a marathon and not a sprint when building a company. Lean helped me realize that,” McColgan said. A few weeks after LSM, the company wasn’t doing any manufacturing, but was successfully building a database and focusing on developing interesting features to separate designers by types of jewelry that their 500 voter community base would utilize.

And this, they say, works in the meantime. By throwing away the idea that you need to have it all or you will fail, they are solidifying a foundation and serving their customers’ needs by learning as fast as they can. Here’s to Crowd Jewel adding a chapter to “The Hacker Way.”

The post The Hacker Way: Minimum, Viable and Viral appeared first on Lean Startup Machine.