If you have the time and the skills, you should apply.

Why Apply?

Everyone wants to work with Seth Godin. Here’s a guy whose written over a dozen books, started two companies and launched a handful of other successful projects. He’s had failures to give him wisdom and successes to give him confidence. Who wouldn’t want to work with him?

Stop.

Before you apply, examine your reasons. Go ahead and apply to work with Seth. But also apply to:

1. Work With Smart People
   Sure, Seth’s a smart guy. But imagine the people he’ll hire. Working with Seth is one thing. Working with a team hand-picked by Seth on a project that could affect millions of people’s lives? That’s quite another.
2. Have a Transforming Experience
   Every found a startup? The intensity, the energy, the bonds you create with others. It’s like nothing you’ve ever experienced. It pushes you outside your comfort zone and forces you to grow. In the end, you create something beautiful that you can share with others.
3. Learn Awesome New Skills
   Building fast teaches you new skills. I’ve now gone through two Startup Weekends and helped run two others. Each time I learn new skills, new tools. I leave better than I arrived. If you go through this internship, I guarantee you will too.

But…I Can’t

Don’t think you can? Only you can decide that, but before making your decision, think outside the box:

• I have a job.
  Take 2 weeks vacation. No vacation? Take unpaid leave. Better yet, convince your employer to pay you to go. Call it continuing education. You’ll learn a lot more than that $2,500 conference you’re scheduled to go to.
• I don’t have money.
  Start a Kickstarter campaign. Find sponsors. Hell, if you decide to apply because of this post and get accepted, I’ll kick in $500 to help you get there. [Leave a comment below to let me know you're applying. No comment to verify you read this post, no money.]
• I have kids.
  Send them to camp. Or leave them with your spouse, grandparents or other caretaker. It’s only two weeks. Remember: happy parents make happy kids. Use it as a lesson for how to seize opportunities.

Ideas for Applying

Decided to apply yet? Before you jump in, make sure you:

1. Read the Instructions
   Don’t be sloppy. Read the entire announcement page before clicking through to the application.
2. Refer Others
   Seth asks to be impressed by you referring others to the internship. Sure, it’s a savvy marketing strategy. But it might help identify teams of people who might work well together. Why should all the interns be strangers to one another? So get others to list you on their application. And if you discovered the internship via this post, I’d love to be listed as your referral. Use “Trevor Lohrbeer” or “Fast Fedora”.
3. Don’t Wait to Be Picked
   Apply, then move on. Continue working to change your life, other people’s lives, the world. Don’t wait to be picked.

You might also want to check out previous internships. Read what Seth learned from one internship. Check out some bios from previous interns. Review the application that got Jeff Widman accepted or Lauryn Ballesteros’s web plea….yes, she got picked (read about her experience and why you don’t need to be Seth Godin or Richard Branson to achieve greatness). Read what Richard Millington learned during his 3 month internship.

What To Do If You Don’t Get Picked

Wondering what you should do instead of waiting to be picked?

• Attend the World Domination Summit
  A conference for people who want to change the world. Combine adventure and travel with a heavy measure of service to others. Amazing speakers, inspiring attendees. Tickets are sold out for this year, but  you can always join us in Portland for a world record float attempt.
• Join Code for America
  Think the Peace Corps for geeks. Join a brigade in your city or start a new one. Use your programming, project management, web design and marketing knowledge in the service of a better civic society.
• Participate in a Startup Weekend
  Take a business from idea to execution in 54 hours. Startup Weekend events happen in hundreds of cities around the world. Look for an upcoming event in a city near you.

Whatever you do, be awesome. And apply today.

Did you apply to Seth’s internship? Why?

Below I mix my own remembrances from Crossing the Chasm with my notes from today. To learn more, definitely check out Crossing the Chasm, Inside the Tornado and Geoffrey Moore’s more recent books on the subject.

About the Technology Adoption Lifecycle

If you’re not familiar with the technology adoption lifecycle, imagine it as a bell curve.

At the far left technology gets invented and created, after which adoption occurs until it peaks, then decline starts in until it gets discarded. The area underneath the curve represents the number of customers at each stage.

The traditional technology adoption lifecycle had five parts:

• Innovators
  Enthusiasts who love new technology, even when it doesn’t yet have a purpose.
• Early Adopters
  Visionaries who see how a technology can be used to solve a problem.
• Early Majority
  Pragmatists who want social proof that a technology has value before adopting it.
• Late Majority
  Conservatives who prefer old technology until its clear a new technology dominates.
• Laggards
  Skeptics who avoid adopting new technologies at all costs.

The Innovators and the Early Adopters form the early market. But the strategies that worked to acquire innovators and early adopters no longer work with the early majority.

To get from the early market to the mass market, new strategies must be adopted. Moore named this the Chasm, because companies frequently fail to cross it and move their product from the early market to the mass market.

Unlike the visionaries and early adopters, the early majority decide whether to buy based on information from their peers. They constantly ping their peers to find out what’s being talked about. When there’s enough validation for a new technology, they make the jump. This is why focusing on a niche helps: it allows you to focus your message on fewer people to generate the critical mass of social proof.

In Crossing the Chasm, Moore describes strategies for how to make this transition. First, establish a beachhead in a single niche that solves a pain point for the early majority. Secure that niche before tackling the next niche.

To avoid being stranded on a beach that leads to nowhere, Moore proposed a bowling pin strategy. Find an initial niche that has neighbor niches you can easily tackle if you successfully get strong adoption in the first niche.

Imagine each niche as a bowling pin, where by knocking down the first pin, you easily knock down the second pin, which knocks down the third pin, and so on. At some point, you might “enter the tornado”, which gives you rapid growth in the mass market.

Thus Moore elaborated on the initial technology adoption lifecycle, adding metaphors to help us understand the transitions along the lifecycle: the Bowling Alley, the Tornado, Main Street and Total Assimilation. View a diagram of the original technology adoption lifecycle with these additional metaphors here.

Aspects of the Cycles

Early Markets

Early market companies need to sell directly to the visionaries and early adopters that have a problem your product solves. All sales will involve complexity and customization, so ensure these sales have high price tags to make them worth it. Aim for Big Hairy Deals (BHDs). Avoid Small Shitty Deals (SSDs).

• Project Orientation (Custom)
  Think in terms of projects, not products. I interpreted this to include consulting and customization. At this stage, you’re essentially a custom design shop working to find the repeatable solution you can sell into the early majority.
• Sell > Design > Build
  To succeed in the early markets, you need to sell first, design second and build your solution last. I love this because it aligns well with the Lean Startup methodology.
• Focus on Customer Performance
  Improving a specific customer’s performance with your product. If you can’t achieve performance gains, the early majority will never adopt it.

The Bowling Alley

In the first stage of the early majority, sell solutions to business managers. Companies can comfortably grow to anywhere from $10 to $100 million in the bowling alley.

• Solution Orientation (Vertical)
  Find one (and only one) problem that can be solved with your product that the early majority has. The solution must be repeatable so you can scale it to the larger number of customers in the early majority profitably.
• Design > Sell > Build
  To succeed in the bowling alley, you design your solution first, then market it. Once sold, configure your product for each customer to implement your solution. Avoid custom solutions that require development, as the goal is repeatability.
• Focus on Performance/Price
  Provide high performance for the price customers pay. Be a solid return-on-investment.

The Tornado

Selling shifts to the CIO or other senior management as the focus shifts from business solutions to the core product. Engineers love this stage because they get to design first, build second and then finally sell their products.

• Product Orientation (Horizontal)
  Focus on extending your product and competing against other products in the market. As the market increases, creating solutions for all the problems your product solves becomes a limiter on growth. Instead, use channel partners to fill out solutions.
• Design > Build > Sell
  Use the traditional product development lifecycle at this stage, starting with design, then building and finally selling your product.
• Focus on Price/Performance
  Provide solid performance at a good price.

Main Street

The product becomes part of the mainstream, with all aspects of the company used to make buying decisions. At this stage, you move from the “doubt of the benefit” to the “benefit of the doubt”.

• Systems Orientation (Ecosystem)
  Focus on the “whole product”: infrastructure, customer support, partnerships, etc.
• Build > Sell > Design
  Create your infrastructure and the whole product, then go out an sell it. Once sold, work on configuring it for your specific customers. [Note: I may have gotten this one and the Bowling Alley one confused; my notes on this are unclear].
• Focus on Price/Total Cost of Ownership
  Be a good long-term value for your customers.

When the Chasm Isn’t Relevant

The “chasm” isn’t always relevant. It’s only relevant for Complex Systems businesses.

Moore defined two sweet spots based on the size of the market and the business architecture:

• Complex Systems
  Aimed at a smaller number of customers, on the order of 10 – 10,000. Enterprises and certain government programs fall under this architecture. The technology adoption lifecycle and the Chasm model works well for these businesses.
• Volume Operations
  Aimed at a larger number of customers, on the order of 1 million or more. Consumer and social entitlement programs fall under this architecture. For this architecture, Moore proposed a different model.

Moore claimed that most Software as a Service (SasS) businesses start in the middle of these two, aiming at small businesses, then move toward one of these two models when they start scaling.

The Volume Operations Model

The volume operations model consists of four gears driven by a fifth central gear. The central gear represents the product. The four gears driving the growth of the business are:

• Acquisition
  The process of acquiring new customers.
• Engagement
  Getting customers to use your product. Equivalent to a “like”.
• Monetization
  Generating money from the use of your product.
• Enlistment
  Having customers get others to use your product.  Equivalent to a “share”.

Each gear connects through the product to drive the engine of growth. Gears interact and affect each other. So increase monetization and you might decrease engagement.

To build a business in this model, always focus on the slowest gear, as it limits your growth. Re-evaluate each quarter what gear has become your slowest gear and fix that one.

If done right, the gears can lead a company to jump straight from the early market into the tornado.

Driving these gears can be complicated. The gears can be viewed as two types:

• Performance
  Gears that improve the efficiency of the engine: Acquisition and Monetization
• Power 
  Gears that drive the engine: Engagement and Enlistment

Performance gears can slow the engine down if not managed correctly.

The 4 Quadrants of Innovation

Large companies do not, in fact, fail to innovate. Large companies can be as innovative as startups. They fail in deploying those innovations.

To understand why, Moore described the 4 Quadrants of Innovation:

In this model, a product gets invented and deployed. Once deployed, the business operations take over and start managing the product and optimizing it.

For the core revenue driver of a business, this works fine. Operations can manage and optimize the product to drive more revenue.

But new products suffer from a lack of resources. 90% of any company’s resources tend to be tied up in operations, leaving only 10% to help invent, deploy and then manage & optimize the product until it reaches scale.

This can work, but often doesn’t. The problem lies with the company: it tries to do too much at once. Instead of putting one product into deployment at a time, companies often do 5 or 10 (or upward of 30+ at one company Moore consulted for).

So the 10% of resources that could barely handle one new product get divided amongst all the new products, and ultimately fail due to lack of resources.

To solve the problem, focus on one problem at a time. Steve Jobs did a wonderful job of this at Apple. Each new product innovation became the sole focus: when the iPod came out, ads for the iMac nearly disappeared; when the iPhone came out, ads for the iPod disappeared; and so on. In fact, he had the idea for the iPad before the iPhone, but waited until he could focus only on the iPad.

In Conclusion

Talk about an information-packed morning! And I didn’t touch on the panel discussion between Geoffrey Moore, Andy Ory (Founder and CEO of Acme Packet, recently acquired by Oracle), Susan Hunt Stevens  (Founder and CEO, Practically Green), Michael Skok (Partner, North Bridge Venture Partners) and one other fellow who was a last minute addition and whose name I didn’t catch.

All of Geoffrey Moore’s books have been elevated on my reading list. And I look forward to checking out the new refresh of Crossing the Chasm that he mentioned would be coming out soon with modern day examples.

Hope these notes have been useful. As always, I may have gotten things wrong in my haste to take notes. If you see anything I forgot or messed up, just let me know.

As an exercise, he encouraged you to think of your funeral. Imagine how people felt about your death, what they say in your honor.

I encourage you to think even further. What is your 100-year goal?

Long-term goals help us orient our lives. They provide a compass we can use to make decisions and guide the course we take. Goals help us understand our progress, and give meaning toward our daily journey.

I am 40 years old. Baring major medical break-throughs, in 100 years I’ll be dead.

Earlier this year I went through an exercise and defined my goals at 2 months, 6 months, 1 year, 2 years, 5 years, 10 years, 20 years, 50 years and 100 years. Why? To gain a better understanding of where I wanted to head, what I wanted to achieve and the milestones I needed to pass along the way.

The 100 year goal inspired me the most. Creating goals for after you’re dead changes your perspective. It’s no longer about what your direct actions achieve, but what you leave behind. Your legacy.

But legacy doesn’t accurately describe what I want. Yes, I want to be remembered. That was one of my 100 year goals. To be remembered beyond just a name or stories of relatives. But that wasn’t all.

I don’t want to merely become a part of history in 100 years, but to have an ongoing impact on the world. To be part of the present that will exist in 2113, affecting the course of people’s lives.

It’s one thing to achieve greatness in ones life and be remembered for that greatness; it’s quite another to extend that greatness past your death.

Steven Covey continues to teach people how to put first things first. Dale Carnegie continues to help people win friends and influence people. Anaïs Nin continues to unveil the beauty of life and love.

It’s no coincidence most of these people are writers. Writing endures. 

For years I’ve focused on starting and growing businesses. But how many businesses last 100 years? IBM, Ford, a handful of others. How many will still exist 100 years from now?

If you want to make an impact on the world, you can do it in many ways. You don’t need a 100 year goal. But it helps.

Figure out how to change the course of history, how to create an ongoing impact that extends beyond yourself.

I want to help people make better decisions. For the past 10 years I’ve been doing this by building data visualization tools that help people see their data better. For the next 10 years or more, I want to focus on helping people frame their decisions correctly, then using effective techniques to improve their decisions. In 100 years, long after I’m dead, I want people to use my work to make better decisions and improve their lives. That’s my 100 year goal.

I may not achieve it. But that doesn’t matter. A 100 year goal isn’t about achieving, it’s about striving. Striving for a future you won’t be there for, but which matters deeply to you.

Notre Dame took over 100 years to build. The mason who laid the first stone was long dead when the cathedral was completed. Yet even today, that mason has an impact on our world.

Will you be that mason? What’s your 100 year goal?

There’s a difference.

I woke up this morning and went about my business. I created my to do list:

• Answer e-mails
• Talk to a customer
• Exercise

All sounds great, right? But I forgot one: writing.

Only 5 days ago I committed to writing 500 words a day in an effort to develop a habit of writing daily. I even created a spreadsheet to track how many words I write each day, to make sure I don’t miss days.

Yet today I almost did.

I went blissfully through my day checking off items on my to-do list. I went out for my “daily” run (which isn’t exactly daily yet). After I got back, I jumped in the shower. Then it hit me: I had forgotten to add writing to my to-do list.

More importantly: the only way I was writing daily was by remembering to add it my to-do list every day. And remembering to add it to my to-do list every day was not sustainable. Sure I could set it up to reappear each day, but often on the weekends I ignore my to-do list.

I was focused on creating a recurring task, not a habit.

Habits happen unconsciously. Recurring tasks require thoughtful initiation. Habits define the defaults for our lives; recurring tasks must be chosen to be done.

So what exactly is a habit then?

According to The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg, a habit consists of three parts:

• cue: the state or environment that triggers the behavior
• routine: the behavior itself
• reward: the pleasure we get by doing the behavior

This is called the habit loop: cue -> routine -> reward. No cue, no reward, no habit. Recurring tasks only define the routines, not the cues or rewards.

Writing for me has no cue. Thus, I need to find one. Ideally it should be a cue that happens naturally each day at a time when it’s convenient for me to write. Some ideas:

• Finishing breakfast: I often read articles or watch informative videos during breakfast. The perfect time to get my head filled with ideas to write about.
• Making a cup of tea: I already associate drinking tea with writing. Perhaps if I could pick a specific tea to make in the morning and use that as my cue.
• Bathroom rituals: I have time to think while going through my morning routine. One of these rituals could be my cue.

For now I plan to combine the first two: make a cup of tea after breakfast and use that as a signal to write.

What about the reward?

Turns out I’ve been sabotaging myself. I set a threshold of 500 words a day. But my joy from writing comes not from the writing itself, but from having written. I take pride in the finished work, not the process.

Yet I’ve set the exact opposite as my goal. Quantity gives me no pleasure; I need accomplishment.

Thus, instead of trying to write 500 words a day, I should aim to finish a piece of writing each day. The writing doesn’t have to be the complete work. It can be a chapter or a section of a long post. But it must be fully formed. Not perfect, not edited, but at least a finished draft. 

That will be my reward: a finished piece of writing. 

That’s about it for now. I’ll be writing again tomorrow, this time working to incorporate a cue and a reward into my routine so I can work toward creating a true habit. Since they say it takes 21 days to create a habit, by the end of this month I should hopefully have a daily writing habit fully engrained.

What do you think? Do you use cues and rewards when creating your habits? What other tips do you have?

I want to improve my personal habits, skills and behaviors. I strive to be healthy, happy and productive.

And, for the most part, I am.

One way I achieve this is by tracking my life. Self-tracking for me has two benefits:

1. Increased Awareness
   The simple act of tracking makes me self-aware and helps me to change my behaviors. Tracking calories helps me lose weight, even when I don’t consciously change my diet. Wearing my FitBit causes me to exercise more, even though I rarely look at the data afterwards.
2. Actionable Data 
   Memory can be unreliable. Not only do we forget details, we alter them as new experiences change our perception of old ones. Confirmation bias can make us conveniently forget details that don’t support the conclusion we want. Tracking information gives me a more objective view, helping me to make better decisions.

Today I track data in Excel spreadsheets. While versatile, they lack a couple key features:

• Mobile Access
  I’m not always near my computer when I want to track, and often forget to record an item when I get back to my desk. I need a mobile app that allows me to enter data quickly and easily. Visualizations of my data that help me analyze my data and take actions would also be nice.
• Sharing
  Sometimes I want to share my data with others. Certainly I want my doctor to have access to my health data, and when I get a personal trainer again, I want them to have access to my exercise data.
• Attachments
  In some cases, a picture works  so much better than a number or text. Recordings could be useful too. I’ve been using SnoreLab to track and reduce my snoring, which records samples throughout the night so I can listen exactly how I snore (no sleep apnea here, thankfully!).

With the rise of personal informatics and the quantified self movement, you’d think there would be dozens of apps and web sites out there that are ideal for self-tracking. Unfortunately, too many have been shuttered. And the ones that remain, I’ve found so far lacking in one aspect or another.

So what am I looking for in my ideal universal quantified self app?

1. Track Any Data
   My biggest requirement: don’t limit me. Tons of apps out there only let you track a subset of metrics: weight, food consumption, mood, exercise. I want to track everything in a single place. TicTrac almost gets this right, with dozens of trackers for everything from weight to how much e-mail you get. But TicTrac doesn’t allow custom trackers.  So you can only track what they want you to track, not what you want to track.
2. Mobile & Web Access
   Any tracking app has to let me enter data either via a phone or the web. I need mobile access to track stuff when I’m not near my computer. I need web access because it’s easier to do data entry and analysis on a full-size keyboard & monitor. Both should be fast and reliable.
3. Data Export
   Exporting data serves two purposes. It allows me to analyze my data in ways the tracking app doesn’t support (such as moving averages) and allows me to backup my data in case the app stops being supported.
4. Contextual Factors
   Not all measurements are equally valid. Body fat depends on your level of hydration. Weight can vary based on salt intake (or, for women, menstrual cycles). Being able to add context to data being entered allows a more nuanced analysis later. Tagging measurements based on these confounding factors allows you to filter out potentially bad data, or see underlying causes. SnoreLab gets this right; it lets you record both special factors and remedies being used, then provides charts on which factors contributed to more or less snoring.
5. Linked Accounts
   I only own a few Internet connected devices, like my FitBit. But connecting the data from these devices into any tracking app could help me find correlations. Does my activity level affect my mood? If I’m tracking my mood in an app and it can import my FitBit data, then that analysis becomes so much easier. Exporting data takes priority over this, however, since with data export I can always do my own analysis.
6. Sharing
   Can I share my data with others? While not critical, it’d be nice to share my data with a doctor, personal trainer or friend. Permissions that would allow me to share a single metric or only aggregate data would be useful. 
7. Attachments
   Photos can tell stories that words simply can’t. Mostly I don’t use photos, but when I do need them, I feel the lack of any good way to integrate them into my tracking. Other files may be useful too: PDFs of  lab tests or audio recordings.
8. Data Ownership
   My data should be mine. For most sites this is true. The Carrot has clauses in their Terms of Use that seem to indicate they own the copyright in anything I submit (though the language is far from clear). This alone makes me recommend against using The Carrot (they also have different Terms of Use in their text box versus the link they provide, which is negligent at best and deceptive at worst).

It doesn’t feel like I’m asking for much, but I haven’t yet found a site that meets my needs. A few of the apps and sites I’ve looked at include:

• TicTrac
  Pros: Tons of trackers, analysis tools, linked accounts, mobile & web access, allows sharing.
  Cons: No custom trackers, no contextual factors.
• The Carrot
  Pros: Tons of trackers, linked accounts, mobile & web access.
  Cons: No custom trackers, no contextual factors.
• Daytum
  Pros: Track anything, personal dashboards, mobile & web access.
  Cons: Mobile app reviews says it crashes often, hasn’t been updated since 2010. Developers left to join Facebook, then development stopped.
• TallyZoo
  Pros:  Track anything, personal dashboards, mobile & web access, great analysis tools.
  Cons: Blog hasn’t been updated since 2010. Site appears abandoned. 

Though there are dozens more. If you’re interested, check out the tools listings at Quantified Self and Personal Informatics (check out the ”anything” tag for universal tracking tools).

What features are you looking for in a self-tracking application? Do you have any recommendations for me?

I derive pleasure from seeking out new things. Too often that squeezes out the old, even when the old helps me live my life more effectively.

Luckily, I’ve discovered it’s easier to re-ignite old habits than to start new ones. Each time I fail to maintain a habit, I don’t beat myself up. I let it go until I’m in a place to rekindle. Until I have the energy to fan the flames and build my habit anew.

I am in that place again.

Last month I started lifting weights again after a five month hiatus. While hard at first, I quickly grew in strength over just a few weeks. Then three weeks ago I started running again. I barely ran all winter long, and my body felt it. But instead of taking months to return to my old performance levels, it happened in only two weeks.

Our bodies and minds remember. Developing a habit once makes it easier to return to in the future. Every little bit helps.

I often forget this. If I have a trip coming up where I think I won’t be able to maintain a habit, I’ll wait until after the trip to start it. But this is wrong.

I should start now, and then if I falter during my trip, re-ignite the habit when I return. It’s easier to start a fire from simmering embers than cold, tired wood.

Last Friday, Leo Babauta of Zen Habits wrote a post on why you should write daily. It reminded me of my previous experiments of writing regularly, a habit that has grown cold from disuse.

Today I’m re-igniting that habit and challenging myself to write at least 500 words every day for the month of May. At the end of the month I’ll re-evaluate and decide whether to continue or modify the habit.

To keep myself from getting bored, I’m planning to vary my writing. Ways I may write include:

• Blog Posts
  Posts for this blog or Lean Decisions. I need to rebuild my backlog for Lean Decisions, so won’t publish all those posts immediately. I may also do some guest posts if the opportunity arises.
• Journal Entries
  I haven’t regularly kept a journal in over 15 years.  Yet writing in a journal helps me recognize my accomplishments and think about my needs, desires and goals. Reading old entries has always brought me immense joy, bringing me back to a past that I only vaguely remember otherwise.
• Guides
  I want to experiment with writing guides to help people, such as ways to improve your decisions or how to use shelves from Lowe’s to build a standing desk for under $100.

Writing e-mails and social media posts won’t count. Writing e-mail and social media updates may feel like writing, but it’s not nourishing for me. It doesn’t build long-term value. Instead, it’s a sugar rush, satisfying short-term desire, but not helping me to build a writing habit long-term.

What habits have you let go that you could re-ignite easily?

If you’ve read Why Economic Developers Need Lean Startups or Lean Startup Conference Notes, you already know some  resources for learning about Lean Startup. Below I update this list to include resources I missed in those posts. Please add other resources I missed in the comments.

Online Courses

• An Entrepreneur’s Checklist by Steve Blank – Free
  Learn how to be an entrepreneur from revered serial entrepreneur Steve Blank.
• Build. Measure. Learn. Lean Startup SXSW 2012. - Free
  Become a Lean Startup Guru. Learn Lean Methodology from Lean experts like Eric Ries, Steve Blank, and more.
• The Lean Startup Talk at Stanford E-Corner by Eric Ries – Free
  Debunking Myths of Entrepreneurship.
• The Lean Startup by Eric Ries - $150
  Learn how to apply the method that is transforming how new products are built and launched.
• Running Lean Workshop by Ash Maurya – $297
  Learn how to apply Lean Startup techniques to your product and raise your odds of success.

Videos

• The Science of Lean Startups
  Eric Ries giving an introduction to Lean Startup at Business of Software 2010. 
  
• Lean Startup Conference 2012
  Talks from the Lean Startup Conference 2012
• Lean Startup Ignite 2012
  15 five minute Ignite talks from the Ignite portion of Lean Startup Conference 2012
• Startup Lessons Learned Conference 2011
  Talks from the Startup Lessons Learned Conference, the old name of the Lean Startup Conference.
• Google Hosts Eric Ries
  Eric Ries talking at Google about Lean Startup.
• Lean Startup 101 for Developers
  Abby Fichtner giving an overview of Lean Startup from a developer’s perspective.
• The Lean Startup, Part I & Part II 
  Older interview of Eric Ries by Robert Scoble about Lean Startup

Books

• The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
• The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products that Win by Steve Blank
• The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development by Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits
• Running Lean by Ash Maurya
• Lean Analytics by Alistair Croll, Benjamin Yoskovitz
• Lean UX by Jeff Gothelf

Articles

• Teaching a ‘Lean Startup’ Strategy
• Business Planning for the ‘Lean Startup’
• The Rise of the Fleet-Footed Start-Up
• Philosophy Helps Start-Ups Move Faster
• The Promise of the Lean Startup

Blogs

• Startup Lessons Learned by Eric Ries
• Steve Blank
• Harvard Business Review: Articles by Eric Ries
• Dan Martell’s Customer Development articles

Other

• How To Build a Startup: The Lean Launchpad
  Step-by-step guide for applying the principles of Customer Development and Lean Startup
• KQED: Eric Ries on The Lean Startup
  Interview with Eric Ries about the Lean Startup before the Lean Startup Conference 2012
• Re-Tooling Early Stage Development
  Podcast of one of Steve Blank’s lectures at Stanford University
• The Lean Startup Wiki
  Wiki with information about Lean Startup, links to tools and listings of Lean Startup Circles around the world.

If I missed a resource, please leave it in the comments. If you want to continue studying Lean Startup, look for a Lean Startup Circle in your area or start your own.

If you have other notes that you’d like to link from here, tweet them to me at @FastFedora.

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My Conference Notes

Todd spoke about the way the U.S. Federal government has been entrepreneurial, including an overview of the Presidential Innovation Fellows program, which has five projects:

1. MyGov (@ProjectMyGov)
   Reimagining the relationship between the federal government and its citizens through an online footprint developed not just for the people, but also by the people.
2. Open Data Initiatives (@ProjectOpenData)
   Stimulating a rising tide of innovation and entrepreneurship that utilizes government data to create tools that help Americans in numerous ways – e.g., apps and services that help people find the right health care provider, identify the college that provides the best value for their money, save money on electricity bills through smarter shopping, or keep their families safe by knowing which products have been recalled.
3. Blue Button for America (@ProjectBlueBtn)
   Developing apps and create awareness of tools that help individuals get access to their personal health records — current medications and drug allergies, claims and treatment data, and lab reports – that can improve their health and healthcare.
4. RFP-EZ (@ProjectRFPEZ)
   Building a platform that makes it easier for small high-growth businesses to navigate the federal government, and enables agencies to quickly source low-cost, high-impact information technology solutions.
5. The 20% Initiative (@ProjectTwenty)
   Creating a system that enables US government programs to seamlessly move from making cash payments to support foreign policy, development assistance, government operations or commercial activities to using electronic payments such as mobile devices, smart cards and other methods.

Tendai spoke about how to get out of the building. The 10 ways were:

1. Don’t Ask Your Uncle
2. Set Up a Booth, Do a Public Demo
3. Interview Potential Customers
4. Put Your Office Where Your Customers Are
5. Throw a Party
6. Talk to Experts in the Field
7. Find the Decision Maker
8. Listen to What Customers Are Demanding
9. Pre-Order, Landing Pages, Analytics
10. Ask for the Introduction

Discuss & add additional ideas under the #GetOutOfTheBuilding hashtag.

Tereza tried launching a company and failed. She discussed some of her mistakes, including:

• Accepting a Vanity Metric in Term Sheet
  VCs want some way to track you. Be careful. Tereza accepted a term sheet that included specific traffic metrics, when her business didn’t depend on traffic. Eric once accepted a term sheet that included how many press releases they would send out.
• Preparing Metrics Only for Presentations
  Creating reports of metrics only when preparing for a board meeting or presentation, instead of reviewing them regularly and using them to run the company.
• Being Afraid to Pivot
  It’s hard to tell your investors you need to pivot. It can cause a loss of trust.  Investors have a third option beside pivoting or persevering. They can go and focus on other companies in their portfolio.

Some facts:

• 5 billion un-utilized car hours
• 19% of household income used to own and operate a car.

Getaround allows people to rent other people’s vehicles.

Prototyped Getaround in 4 ways:

1. Used University Campus to Test
   Just got owner’s to hand off their keys to a stranger.
2. Built an iPhone App
   Built their prototype at Yahoo iPhoneDevCamp in a weekend.
3. Hacked the Hardware on a Car
   Used off-the-shelf parts to show you could unlock a car with a cell phone.
4. Tested in a Larger Market
   Entered a competition that gave them access to a larger market. Won the competition and had 1,600 car owners sign up in 24 hours–20% of the inventory Zipcar took 10 years to build. Now at 10,000 cars.

Take the romance of a motorcycle and combine it with the comfort of a car.

• 80% of financing went into proving there was a market.
• De-risked market by building a test dealer showroom. When bringing potential customers into the showroom, 52% went on a test drive and 15.7% pre-ordered. The pre-order conversion rate was far greater than they needed to make the business work.
• Built a prototype, which helped them determine the weight and de-risked the hardware components of the vehicle.

• Everyone can draw
• Sketching is a shorthand for thinking through ideas
• Use team sketching
• Aim for lowest responsible fidelity
• Cross-functional pairing: designers & developers should work together

Worked with a company called Innovation Games that decided to build a consumer pass & play game, Knowsy, to learn how to build an mobile platform. Decided to get into the iPhone app store in 1 month when they hadn’t build an iPhone app before.

They had mockups of the screens. Then asked developer to build out his idea of the flow by sketching it out. That helped build a shared understanding.

Then Lana made a mistake. She spent the weekend making wireframes based on a scenario and making it all clean and annotated.  Worked well, but then she became the bottleneck.

To solve this, she did a paper prototype. They played the game using sticky notes on paper. The team played the game together, and then they understood the game a lot better.

Sincerely – help the world be more thoughtful

First product was postagram: send a postcard from your phone. Started with simpliest gift you can send in the world, a postcard. Now sending full physical gifts.

Built 9 products in 12 months on mobile using a team of 6 people.

10 Tips for Rapid Development

1. Build a Minimum Viable Product
   First they build Postcards from Santa, which allowed a parent to send a postcard from Sanata to their kid. This helped them solve the billing & printing issues. Then they launched 99 cents Prints by Mail, where people could mail themselves photos. This helped them create a library of photos and image upload. They used these products to them launch Postagram.
2. Off-Brand Testing
   Tested product off-brand & in Canada.
3. De-Emphasize Visual Design
   Can’t afford to do great design on everything, especially in off-brand products. But they don’t de-emphasize interaction design, since that’s where their learning comes from. To speed the process & minimize costs, they let engineers do design for experiments.
4. Reuse Common Components
5. Buy Cheap, Disposable Users
   For their experiments, they don’t worry about cross promotion or PR. They buy cheap users from Stumbeupon, Google AdWords, etc. to test their ideas. This allows them to kill the product more easily without affecting their core brand.
6. Be Willing to Kill Apps
   Once an app is no longer serving your core mission, kill it. They are killing a product this month. You will have upset customers.
7. Use Android for Quick Testing
   Android apps have no approval process. Android updates go live within hours. Apple updates take up to 7 days. Closest thing to the web in the mobile world.
8. APIs Are Everything
   Both internal & external. Product engineers never touch their database. They build an internal API that all their product engineers use. This has then allowed them to make internal API external so partners can use the API.
9. Focus on Team Structure
   One team focused on the internal API. Then product teams have one developers & one designers to build apps on that API. Off-brand tests might only have a single engineer and no designer.
10. Minimize Interdependencies
    Empower your engineers to have 4-6 hours of uninterrupted magic each day.

Meetups measure their success using RSVPs. But RSVPs are the ultimately vanity metric.

The 3 myths:

1. People Give a Damn About “Lean”
   No one wants to buy process. You can’t just sell others in your organization on the lean process. You have to start doing it. Started with a single usability session. Now do 600 usability sessions a year for about $30,000. Shifts the conversation about how you or I would use a product to how a user would use a product. People give a damn about doing their job better.
2. People Want to Test Things
   People want to build things, not test things. Meetup had a culture where they wanted to take big bets. Started testing easy things. Tested in the sales funnel. Tested 10 things. 9 failed, but one got a 10% lift. Then expanded a little bit into subject lines, buttons, algorithms. What would you attempt to do if you knew you couldn’t fail? What would you do if you knew you would fail? Go after the things that will cause us to fail as fast as you can.
3. You Can Test Your Way to a Great Experience
   At Meetup, they’ve made design an important part of the development process.

Live chat is Hipmunk’s secret weapon to get feedback from their users. From day one, they integrated Olark on their web site.

Most people wouldn’t have bothered to send an e-mail about problems they had with the product. But people were willing to chat about problems that they wouldn’t e-mail about.

They learned that people liked the basic layout through chat, and when they rolled out a feature that limited the number of hotel results, they heard an outcry immediately through chat and were able to roll it back rapidly.

It’s important that people manning the chat system can actually interact with the engineers who can change the product. Sometimes they have the engineers actually sit on the chat.

A startup is not a business, it’s a hobby. A business brings in more money than you spend.

Pebble went from hobby to business before they built their product by using Kickstarter. Kickstarter tells you if people will pay at a specific price point. But what you really need is a crowd-testing site.  Lockitron & App.net both raised money outside of Kickstarter.

Selfstarter is an open source platform that let’s you run A-B tests on your price points by running fundraising campaigns on your own site, allowing you to test price points before you build your product.

Read more at  Crowdtesting: Using Crowdfunding to test an MVP

People choose what they understand.

Business Goal: To be chosen. Lean content speaks tot he first-time user (not to you).

Marketing Goal: Be understood.

Understand your users by trying these things:

1. Interview Your Users
   1. What for ah-ha body lanugage
   2. Write down their questions
   3. Iterate to get to (a) faster
2. Apply the Mom Test
   Does your Mom understand your marketing?
3. Ask Users 2 Questions
   1. Why did you sign up?
   2. Why do you keep coming back? (or why not?)

Growth Goal: Be Found

1. Test message in AdWords. Write user-oriented messages to test for clicks, not conversions.
2. Embrace the unsexy words people use in searches.
3. Look at Entry Points & Top Content in GA. Then create more of that.

Lean content – drop the crap. Learn and use the real person workds that make it easier to find, understand and choose.

Ratio should be 100:1 of practice to theory.

Used to believe entrepreneurship can’t be taught. But the real question is: who can it be taught to?

Entrepreneurship can be taught to those who volunteer.

Used to believe that entrepreneurship education took years and lots of money. Now we know entrepreneurship is a little theory and a lot of practice.

Entrepreneurship education is like a priest teaching you sex.

Three components to teaching entrepreneurship (the “Entrepreneurial API”):

• Business Models
• Customer Development
• Agile Engineering

Alex Osterwalder takes the stage and describes the Value Proposition Canvas.

To reach 10,000 startups, you need to teach more people:

• How to Build a Startup is free online at Udacity and have 60,000 people currently taking the course.
• Partnered with Startup Weekend to create a 3 week course called Startup Weekend Next.

Return Path’s primary business is e-mail deliverability. Recently they launched two new products:

• A competitive intelligence product, targeting existing customers, that  allows an e-mail marketer to know if their e-mails are doing as well as their competitors.
• An anti-phishing, anti-spoofing product sold into a new customer base, security companies.

Because they were entering a new market with high uncertainty, they applied the Lean Startup process to the second product.

They thought of the sales process in terms of the three horizons framework, which helps companies balance future business opportunities with their current business:

• Horizon 1: Improve performance of existing products & services
• Horizon 2: Invest in promising projects that have shown potential
• Horizon 3: Research & grow longer-term projects.

In terms of developing products & services at these levels:

• At horizon 2: Take gem of idea & turn it into significant revenue for a business. Involves significant sales and marketing investment.
• At horizon 3: Figure out how to get product-market fit.

The sales process differs between horizon 2 & horizon 3. Horizon 3 buyers are early adopters and product evangelists.

Likewise, the people doing the selling are different in horizon 3 than horizon 2. At Horizon 3, the CEOs or product owners do the selling. At horizon 2, salespeople do the selling.

Focus on the Key Items You Need to Teach

Identify both what you need to teach your sales team & what you need from marketing. Ask the questions:

• How do you get leads in the door?
• How do you qualify them
• What are the key questions you’ll ask?
• Who are the key buyers?

Try to Get As Much Sales Learning in Horizon 3 As Possible

Get a salesperson into the process as early as possible. Don’t leave it just to product people.

But make sure the salesperson likes experimentation. It should be someone who is curious & disciplined.

Compensation should be different for these salespeople: higher base, lower variable. And have the variable portion tied to validated learning.

Assume you’ll get things wrong. Don’t think you’ll get all your learning in Horizon 3. You’ll do some learning in Horizon 2.

Consider creating experimental sales teams.

Your existing salesforce will want to sell your new products to everyone on their contact list. Avoid that temptation.

Keep training. Training is not just up-front.

Vanity metrics are accurate, but not relevant.

They blind you to a lack of product/market fit, commits you to your original vision without agility and gets you invested in appearance, not reality. If you’re looking through your metrics looking for one that makes you look good, then you’re searching for a vanity metric.

Vanity metrics are success theater.

Vanity metrics attract the wrong type of people. They attract the type of people who want to be with a company that looks successful, not help a company be successful.

Metrics you should not be using:

• Pageviews
• New members
• Total members
• Unique visitors/visit
• Percent growth
• Conversion rate
• Twitter followers
• Facebook friends/likes

Characteristics of  actionable metrics:

• Messures success at your core business
• Shows or directly relates to revenue
• Tracks real, individual customers
• Tracks cause & effect
• Tells you what to do next

Can you replicate or expand these numbers? If you don’t know how you got that metric or how to do it again, it’s not a good metric.

Four most important metrics:

• Revenue
  Must be scalable, repeatable revenue.
• Sales Volume
  Are you making enough?
• Customer Retention
  Use funnel analysis and cohort studies.
• Relevant Growth
  Must capture your engine of growth. How the behavior of your customers creates new customers.

In a world where we can measure anything, we often measure too much. Focus on standard metrics that measure progress.

Measure everything as a cohort. As they get more customers, it gets harder to measure progress. First, more customers mean more products & tests. Cohorts allow you to see cause & effect better.

Spark59 focused around a single key metric: the activation rate.

Build a continuous feedback loop with customers for rapid hypothesis generation. Spark 59 did this by:

1. Building their dashboard to show not only who was successful at activation, but those who weren’t.
2. Then creating an automated e-mail to ask why people weren’t activating. Top 3 reasons were too busy, need more info and just kicking tires.
3. Then focused on “need more info” & built a 7-day course with an A/B test. But activation rate actually lowered.
4. But since they allowed comments below the video course, and the comments were overwhelmingly positive, they didn’t kill the experiment.
5. Why? Always monitor the entire customer lifecycle. While the activation rate dropped a bit, later metrics down the pipeline improved.
6. Now all their experiments also track the entire customer pipeline in addition to the  metric they are testing.

Read more at Not More Numbers, But Actionable Learning.

If you only have $1 more to spend, where would you spend it? Trying to do everything at once will just make you do everything poorly.

Understand where you want to hone in.

Test everything, not just channels:

• Brand
• Design
• Geolocation
• Messaging
• Value Proposition
• Channels

View the Slides

5 Whys help you do a post-mortem when things go wrong. But there are problems we have when doing 5 Whys.

One of the key problems with the 5 Whys is shame. Known in psychology as the Fundamental Attribution Error: humans dramatically underestimate the power of the environment when you’re not in a situation.

Solution: Adopt an economic, not moral mindset

Assume two factories. Both are missing their monthly goals. One factory has a broken machine. Questions this factory might ask are:

• What is it costing us?
• What will it cost to repair?
• Can we kludge it to create a partial fix?
• What are the risks if we delay the fix?

The other factory has an axe murderer who keeps killing their workers. For this factory, the questions don’t seem to make sense. How can we get the axe murderer to kill fewer people? Instead, the questions focus around:

• Search for villains
• Elevation of accusers
• Mobilization of authority to mete out punishment

Most companies will treat failures like they are looking for axe murderers instead of trying to fix a broken machine.

Use humor to break people out of the moral mindset and bring them into the economic mindset. Some techniques to do this:

1. Always Share Worse “Bad Things”
   Put things into perspective. Did we lose all our customers? Did the building catch on fire?
2. Mock Hindsight Bias to Cause an About Face
   Avoid hindsight bias. If a step in the process was missed, the person might say, “I totally forgot, I won’t do this again”. Reframe it as “I was stupid once, I won’t be stupid again”. Let’s assume we’re going to continue to be stupid.
3. Relish Absurdities In Your System
   All successful businesses have hacks someone in their process or codebase. Accept it.
4. “Broadest Fixes” vs “Root Causes”
   Had a problem where a mistake caused a problem in the database, then their reporting system started generating 100s of e-mails a second. At which point their e-mail provider shut them down, so they didn’t discover the original problem for 3-4 hours. So there were two issues: the problem with the database and the failure of the monitoring. The lesson: There’s never a single cause. There’s always contingencies. Instead, ask the question: if we made a slight investment, which one would solve the most problems going forward. In this case, the monitoring was the clear investment.

Note: Audrey Reynolds (@helloaud) took the original notes for this talk while I took a break. I just did the re-formatting.

Scott spoke about how to do Lean Startup at scale. For the last 4 years, they’ve been converting Intuit to work on Lean Startup principles by creating innovators inside Intuit.

To do so, they’ve needed to change how decisions are made in company and change how leaders operate. Typically, large companies stop innovating and stop reinventing themselves. They make decisions based on hierarchy, politics and PowerPoints.

To fix the situation, you need to:

• Move decisions from politics and PowerPoint to enable decisions to be made by the best idea that can find a market
• Move decisions from a boss to customers voting with their feet

This involves changing role of leaders and making leaders apply the principles of Lean Startup to themselves as well.

Change the questions you ask employees from “What is your answer and analysis behind it?” to “What’s the fastest way to experiement and find answer?”

Leaders have 4 roles:

1. Set the Grand Challenge

For instance: “Create new businesses that improve the financial lives of Indians”.

For this, they used small 3-4 person empowered teams that choose a narrow problem to solve, eg “how do I know which market to take my produce to each day in order to gain the best price”. One idea was that since all Indians have cell phones, we could send them text messages with personalized market prices. They had product in a few days where they manually sent daily market prices via text messages. They used this to assess the reaction from customers. After 4 years they are giving 20% more farm income to farmers, have 1.2 million active users and are adding 20k farmers a week.

The team has now done 20+ major experiments. Experiments are hard to shut down because spending so little money.

2. Create the Systems & Culture

Install the systems and culture that enable people to run fast experiments, even junior people. Keep asking: how do we remove barriers? What speedbumps stand in the way?

For Intuit, they included the lawyers and built system that allows lawyers to remove barriers.

They installed 3 cultural principles:

• Mindset
  Shifted from a risk-adverse place of “no” to “how do we get to yes?”

• Tools
  Gave people tools that democratized teams. Asked how to reframe guidelines to empower teams to go out and experiment and take legal out of the way. Legal worked with teams as the guidelines developed to reduce the cost of failure for the teams.

• Experiments
  Made experimentation how you work. The legal guidelines themselves were experiments.

3. Learn from Experiments

Pull insights from experiments regardless of success or failure. Experiments don’t always turn out as expected. Often the market is trying to teach you something you don’t yet. Great leaders help team pull those insights.

In Lean Startup, the example is given about the Intuit mobile app for filing taxes. People love it now, but the initial concept was a document capture app for Turbo Tax Onine. When they took the concept to market, customers were amazed by document capture capabilities and kept asking “Why can’t I finish it on the phone”? Why do I have to go home and log in?”

They discovered customers relied more and more on phone, and were really excited about the idea of a start-to-finish app. The original concept had a positive reaction, but was mild by comparison.

This became their pivot point and they decided to go forward with mobile app. To test, they launched only in California for simple filers (those with no home or kids). They knew they had something when other customers complained they couldn’t file on their phone too.

4. Model the Right Behavior

As a leader, you must live by same rules and discipline yourself. Ask yourself questions like “I have a strong belief—what are the fundamental assumptions they are based on? And how can I experiment to test them?”

Lean Startup can uncork innovative juice in all of your people—young and old. It’s the only way to change people’s lives profoundly.

Q: What are the top 3 metrics you focus on at all times and what do they tell you?

Active users & engagement. But it’s not specific metrics. In the short-term, we monitor metrics for unexpected changes to see if something happened due to a recent change in the product. Otherwise, look at trends over time, such as the platform mix, which has changed over time. Learning the seasonality of the businesses.

Q: What methods or techniques do you use to prioritize new product features?

Formally, they have a quarterly & annually planning process. Informally, Drew goes down to visit his sister down at college and talks to her friends to learn what they do. Then he synthesizes the knowledge.

Q: Describe your first 25 hires.

First 10 were engineers. When they needed to hire business people, since they didn’t have experience to evaluate who were great business people, they hired consultants. This let them avoid not having a hole in their team, or hiring someone full-time and having that person suck. They were then able to learn what they needed in a business person before hiring a full-time person.

Panda Games started off 100% focused on the Android platform. Allowed them to describe themselves as “the Android guys”. No good games existed on the Android platform at that time and user adoption hadn’t hit it’s curve yet. But they could see where things were going.

Platform choices matter. Besides the tech mattering, distribution of the platforms matters and design works best when you optimize for a specific platform.

But then they pivoted. Why? They couldn’t get the monetization on the Android platform. The built a game with a social feature that let you share with your friends when you were playing the games, and the biggest question they received was: when is this coming to iPhone?

Changing platforms can be one of the most disruptive things you can do. Make sure you have the right people and plan enough time.

Vision matters. Your vision guides how you pivot and change your startup. Your vision allows you to make judgement calls.

Your vision is a constant. In fact, it is the only constant on which you can rely in a vast plain of uncertainty and doubt and hope. You need to hold true to that vision. Don’t try to pivot away from it. Hold true to it. Set a vision that others can see where you want to go. Pick a mountaintop. The path may vary, but your vision remains. Hold your vision. You may wander, but you will never be lost.

“A pivot is a change in strategy without a change in vision.” - Eric Ries

Netscape started out as a company to build the first software company for Interactive TV. Then when they went to the market & realized there wasn’t any such thing as Interactive TV, they pivoted to working on a product similar to Xbox Live but for Nintendo. Finally they settled on the Netscape browser.

If you are calling Eric Ries if you have product-market fit, you don’t have product-market fit.

Product-market fit is a feeling that things are running away from you. ”The key to being successful in life is to find a parade and jump in front of it.” – Jim Barksdale

You don’t really have a company until you have product-market fit. Then you have to start hiring, do international expansion, etc. Sales and marketing becomes more important, as you need to then go and start selling your product.

Predictors of product-market fit: one is really smart people that look like they are doing something crazy, but that have a small dedicated base of early adopters which are huge fans. 3-D printing is going through this right now. Another is when the employees within a company are enthusiastically using a product.

Three types of companies:

• Founder-Market Fit
  Where the founders have a strong need for the product.
• Next Bench
  Build for adjacent markets. The HP way. Where the voltmeters were built for oscilloscopes that used those voltmeters. Then those oscilloscopes were built to make the radio transmitters.
• Building for Other People
  Where the founder doesn’t have a need for the product, but others do. Need to have good product management practices.

Entrepreneurs tend to pitch VCs with lean buzzwords. The big 3 problems Marc sees from entrepreneurs focusing too much on Lean Startup include:

1. Not every startup can be done lean. Ones that have audacious goals. For instance, the Macintosh. No one was asking for that. The Intel 8080 chip required a huge amount of upfront investment. When startups have significant technical risk, regardless of the market risk, then it’s difficult to do the startup lean.
2. Lean Startup methodology being used inappropriately by entrepreneurs to not take sales & marketing seriously. Hear from entrepreneurs that all they need to do is focus on product. If they build it, they will come. Entrepreneurs incorrectly extrapolate. They look at Salesforce.com and say they are only self-service, when they invested huge amounts into sales & marketing. Google has a salesforce. Or they take a consumer approach to selling business apps. Entrepreneurs think everything will be viral. The number of things that are actually viral are incredibly small.
3. Pivoting too early. Failures are acceptable as steps on the path to success. If a failure is a step through a search to find the right idea, that’s fine. But too often entrepreneurs give up too quickly.  There’s a culture where people celebrate failure too much. The failure fetish gets old. Time to add a bit more stigma to failing. Marc admires entrepreneurs who succeed, and most importantly, those who persist through the challenges. Part of Lean Startup is helping people measure progress when they are in that long, flat part of building a business.

“Being an entrepreneur is like chewing glass, eventually you start to like the taste of your own blood.” – ?

Entrepreneurs almost uniquely have a problem with timing. They think they are too late to the game. In reality, entrepreneurs, by definition, live in the future. For example, 2012 will be the year of Software as a Service (SaaS), 13 years after Salesforce.com was formed. This year will be the tipping point where large enterprises start seriously adopting SaaS.

Do not go public until you build a fortress. Make sure you have all vectors of attack covered: technology, a full executive team, an established brand, sales & marketing fully up & running, predictability of revenue for several years into the future at least, and a strong IP position.

Last piece of advice from Marc: Lean Startup methodology is like discovering the theory of relativity. We now have a system and method and science for thinking about entrepreneurship. But Newtonian physics still matter. When you’re building a company, it’s great to be good at Lean Startup principles, but be good at the old school stuff too: sales & marketing, etc.

A key contributor to Lean Startup concepts often overlooked is Mark Leslie, the founder of Veritas and his Sales Learning Curve.

More Notes

Sketchnotes by Sacha Chau

Sacha Chau does sketchnotes of talks. Below are her notes from the Lean Startup Conference livestream. You can view her other sketchnotes on her blog. Toronto hosted a full Lean Startup Day for the livestream that included other talks. You can view all of Sacha’s sketchnotes for Lean Startup Day here.

Click on any image to view the full sketchnote.

	Lean Government Todd Park | @Todd_Park | United States Chief Technology Officer Running Short Experiments During a Long Product Cycle Diana Tavenner | @summitps | Summit Public School
	Ten Ways to Get Out of the Building Tendai Charasika | @XcellentTea | EnterpriseCorp What Is Innovation Accounting? Tereza Nemessanyi | @terezan | High Ridge Group / Honestly Now Eric Ries | @ericries | The Lean Startup
	A Conversation with Beth Comstock, SVP at GE, about Bringing Lean Startup to Life at One of the World’s Biggest Companies Beth Comstock | @bethcomstock | GE Eric Ries | @ericries | The Lean Startup Prototyping to Validate a Big Idea at Getaround Jessica Scorpio | @jessicascorpio | Getaround
	Fast, Cheap and In Control: Testing the Market for a New Kind of Car Danny Kim | @LitMotors | LitMotors I (Heart) Ugly Lane Halley | @thinknow | Carbon Five
	Secrets of Rapid Mobile App Development Matt Brezina | @brezina | Sincerely
	On the Way to Lean Startup: Curvy and Working it Out Ron J. Williams | @ronjdub | Knodes Failure is Great and Other Myths About Adopting Lean Startup Andres Glusman | @glusman | Meetup
	How Engineers Embrace Lean Startup Even Henshaw-Plath | @rabble | Neo Sam McAfee | @sammcafee | Change.org Melissa Sedano | @BloomBoard | BloomBoard
	We Went to West Africa and Learned Our Key Assumptions Were Wrong Jocelyn Wyatt | @jocelynw | IDEO.org Moving Fast While Caring About Design at Hipmunk Adam Goldstein | @adamjgoldstein | Hipmunk.com
	Testing MVPs with Crowdfunding Justin Wilcox | @Justin_Wilcox | Customer Development Labs Making Decisions By Ignoring Sales Metrics Alejandro Velez | @BTTRVentures | Back to the Roots Nikhil Arora | @BTTRVentures | Back to the Roots
	10,000 Startups Steve Blank | @sgblank
	Running a Lean Startup Sales Process George Bilbrey | @gbilbrey | Return Path, Inc. Bonfire of the Vanity Metrics: Numbers You’re Still Using and Shouldn’t Ivory Madison | @ivorymadison | Red Room
	Innovation Accounting in Practice Ash Maurya | @ashmaurya | Spark59 Lean Marketing Leah Busque | @labusque | TaskRabbit
	How To Run a 5 Whys (With Humans, Not Robots) Dan Milstein | @danmil | Wingu The Challenge of Sustaining Disruptive Innovation When You Meet Success Robert Fan | @rfan | Sharethrough
	Creating a Culture of Experimentation: Ideas and Best Practices Scott Cook | @intuit | Intuit Carol Howe | Intuit Joe Hernandez | Intuit Dr. Bharath Kadaba | Intuit
	One Year Later: Dropbox Answers Your Questions Drew Houston | @drewhouston | Dropbox
	One Year Later: Lessons from Votizen Dave Binetti | @dbinetti | Votizen What I Learned: A Report from the Weekend Winner Mark Abramson | @mark__a
	A Conversation with Marc Andreessen Marc Andreessen | @a16z | Andreessen Horowitz Eric Ries | @ericries | The Lean Startup

Links

Several others have posted links to their notes from the livestream. These include:

• Lean Startup Conference 2012 - Blazing Cloud (@blazingcloud)
• Lean Startup Conference Notes – Mark Graban (@MarkGraban  @KaiNexus)
• Lean Startup Conference Live Blogging
• Scanned Lean Startup Conference Notes – Matt Ragland (@MattRagland)

If know of other notes I missed, tweet them to me at @FastFedora or add them in the comments below.

Resources

Books

• The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
• The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products that Win by Steve Blank
• The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development by Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits
• Running Lean by Ash Maurya
• Lean Analytics by Alistair Croll, Benjamin Yoskovitz
• Lean UX by Jeff Gothelf

Blogs

• Startup Lessons Learned by Eric Ries
• Steve Blank

Videos

• Lean Startup Ignite 2011
• Lean Startup 101 for Developers by Abby Fichtner
• Google Hosts Eric Ries

Audio

• KQED: Eric Ries on The Lean Startup

Also, if you want to continue studying Lean Startup, look for a Lean Startup Circle in your area or start your own.

If know of other resources I missed (highly likely!), tweet them to me at @FastFedora or add them in the comments below.

90% of those deaths come from children under 5 years of age.

But you can help.

Take 5 minutes today to make a donation.

In July I attended the World Domination Summit and saw Scott Harrison speak about being an greedy nightclub promoter. Then he joined Mercy Ships, helping to provide free medical care to the people of the world’s poorest nations. The experience transformed him.

He returned to the U.S. to found charity:water, a charity dedicated to providing clean water to everyone in the world. But he did more than form another charity. He transformed the charity model.

Instead of taking a cut out of each donation to fund the administrative operations of the charity, charity:water receives all its operating costs from private donors, foundations and sponsors. 100% of the money you donate goes to providing clean water to the 800 million people on this planet that drink dirty water.

Look at this photo. Imagine drinking muddy water filled with bacteria. Then imagine yourself as a six year old, having to trudge miles each day to carry that muddy water home to your family, the weight of the water warping your back. That’s how some in Rwanda live every day.

At the conference, I pledged my birthday, giving up all birthday presents, to help the people in Rwanda get clean water. My goal is to raise $1,000 so 15 more people can drink clean water. In the past three months, I’ve raised $600.

Today, on Giving Tuesday, I’m reviving my campaign to reach the goal of $1,000.

Join me in helping fund clean water in Rwanda. Donate to charity:water now.

So far 15 other have. Will you help us change the world?

One answer: template events.

Attendees for the summit include entrepreneurs, economic developers and government employees ranging from large, urban cities like Raleigh and Charlotte to small, rural communities like Cherokee and Chatham counties.

While larger cities may have the resources to plan, organize and host their own custom events, smaller cities can benefit from the trail blazed by others with template events. Even larger cities can find it valuable to tap into the network and resources of the communities that have grown up around these events.

What is a Template Event?

Template events are events that follow a proven formula. Template events provide:

• A Structure
  A framework you can follow for how to plan the event, host the event and do post-event wrap-up, usually collected into an organizer’s guide.
• Support Services
  Services ranging from pre-built web sites and advertising to financial management and support staff.
• A Network
  Conferences, online forums and peer groups that help you connect with organizers in other cities to share resources, best practices and mentorship opportunities.

Template events reduce the effort needed to throw an event, increase your chance of success by using a tested model and provide a greater value to your local community than can often be provided with custom events when using limited resources.

While some template events use a franchise model to control their brand and support the core organization, others are open, defined through wikis, web sites and discussion forums.

Examples of Template Events

Examples of template events we’ve hosted in Asheville, or thought about hosting, include:

• Ignite
  A lightning talk night focused on sharing inspiring ideas using a 5-minute, 20-slide format. Ignite nights inspire attendees and help presenters improve their presentation skills by focusing on technique, content and timing. Ignite events are sponsored at the local level, but O’Reilly Media sponsors the global IgniteShow.comweb site which showcases Ignite videos from various cities and provides a guide and forum for throwing an Ignite event.

  Resources: How to Produce an Ignite Event – Wikipedia: Ignite – Ignite – IgniteAVL

• Startup Weekend
  A weekend-long event aimed at teaching entrepreneur skills and starting new businesses. Startup Weekends connect entrepreneurs together, teach them new skills and develop relationships with potential co-founders & employees. Startup Weekends are organized locally, but managed by a 501(c)5 non-profit based in Seattle that provides a web site, organizer’s guide, financial management and trained facilitators.

  Resources: Organizer’s Guide – Wikipedia: Startup Weekend  - Startup Weekend – Asheville Startup Weekend

• Innovation Nights
  A product launch event aimed at increasing the profile of local products & startups using social media. Innovation Nights showcases local products to a social media savvy crowd and serves as a launch event for products incubated at local incubators, accelerators, Startup Weekends and other startups. Innovation Nights provides a web site, planning guide and communication templates.

  Resources: Be a Local Host – Innovation Nights

• TEDx
  An evening of inspiring local talks loosely around the themes of technology, entertainment & design, based on the global TED conference held in Long Beach and Palm Springs. TEDx provides a longer format than Ignite talks, helping to inspire attendees and providing presenters an avenue to present their ideas. Presenters tend to be a bit more polished than Ignite presenters.

  Resources: Organizer Resources – Wikipedia: TED  - TEDx – TEDxAsheville

• BarCamp
  One or two-day unconferences where attendees create the sessions for the conference. BarCamps usually have a technology focus, though not always. BarCamps provide a venue for attendees to share their knowledge with others and learn presentation, moderation and teaching skills. BarCamps are organized locally, but follow an open format defined on the BarCamp wiki.

  Resources: How to Organize a BarCamp – Wikipedia: BarCamp  - BarCamp

• PechaKucha
  A lightning talk event using a 20 slides for 20 seconds each format. Similar to Ignite, but topics usually focus on design, art, architecture and other creative fields. PechaKucha nights showcase local creative talent and hone presentation skills for presenters. Nights are organized locally, but managed through a “handshake” agreement with the global PechaKucha organization.

  Resources: Start a PechaKucha City – Wikipedia: PechaKucha  - PechaKucha – PechaKucha Night Asheville

Leveraging Template Events

Template events can be used to amplify your local efforts to build a scene by leveraging the work done by the creators of each event and other organizers around the globe.

To leverage template events effectively:

1. Start with One
   Don’t try to organize multiple events at once. Build your scene one event at a time. Finish your first event before starting your next event. Once you gain momentum you can be planning multiple events at once, but it’s difficult to do more than one first-time event at the same time.
2. Build Momentum
   Once you’ve thrown one event, focus on another event. Build momentum. Aim to host one event per quarter, and eventually, one event per month. Smaller, regular events create a scene more than larger, once a year events.
3. Create a Portfolio
   Focus on a single audience for your initial events. Don’t try to address everyone’s needs. As you expand, address the different needs of that audience by hosting events which target those needs. This will naturally draw in others and expand your audience without causing you to lose focus on your initial audience (hopefully).For instance, within your portfolio, consider events that improve presentation skills like Ignite or Pecha Kucha, along with events that create new businesses like Startup Weekend and events that promote finished products like Innovation Nights.
4. Foster Leadership
   Once you’ve built momentum and have a portfolio of events, remember that no one event matters. Another event always lies around the corner. So loosen the reigns and use template events to train new leaders. Be a mentor, but allow them to make their own mistakes. The framework of the event provides training wheels to help them grow into experienced community organizers.
5. Experiment
   Don’t be afraid to play around with the formula for an event. Your best events will come from template events that you’ve tweaked to your local culture and community.
6. Connect with Others
   Reach out to others who have organized template events in other cities to learn best practices and get mentorship while organizing yours. Once you’ve completed an event, share your experience with others so they can learn from you too.

What template events are you thinking of throwing in your city? What events did I miss listing? Post links to your local events or other template events below.