They say there are two types of people in this world… those who divide the world into types of people, and those who don’t.

Gretchen Rubin falls into the first group and she’s been giving a lot of thought lately to how we think about rules.

As such, she’s divided the world neatly into 4 types based on how we feel about rules: Upholders, Questioners, Rebels, and Obligers.

Self-awareness being a good thing, I thought I’d share and think about how these types effect our ability to get shit done.

Upholders

Upholders are people who respond to rules – both external rules (laws, deadlines, requests from others…) and internal rules like New Year’s resolutions and working on personal projects.

Upholders are incredible self-starters. They’re motivated by fulfillment and love checking things off lists.

These people Get Shit Done. Gretchen herself is a great example. She wanted to be happier so she mapped out habits that would make her happier and spent an entire year sticking to them. I could only dream of such a thing… imagine how much you could accomplish!

But I also wonder… how do you know you’re working on the right things? Instead of just getting lost in regulations and other people’s biddings? Gretchen says Upholders can become so fearful of making mistakes and letting people (themselves included) down that they can be incredibly rigid and constrained. Even paranoid (which, of course, doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you. Oh, wait.).

So, I’m thinking not your quintessential entrepreneur who embraces risk and failure… but definitely a good get shit doner.

Questioners

I like these people. Questioners question All the rules. I’m imagining them as the disrupters. Always asking why why why?

When a Questioner gets out of bed in the morning they don’t ask what am I supposed to do? They ask what needs to be done?

It’s not that they won’t follow rules. They will – but only when they feel the rules make sense.

They focus on getting the right shit done, and when they’re working on something they believe in, they’ll be incredibly present and intellectually engaged. Beautiful.

But then, there’s the dark side… Questioners can get paralyzed if they feel they need more information. This can be exhausting – not only to others but even to themselves (!) – why? why? why? At these times they’ll have a hard time just Doing it.

I feel like there must be a very difficult conflict between wanting to disrupt, to find a better way to do something, and moving forward with the incredibly limited information one would have when trying to do something brand new.

Rebels

“Rebel rebel, how could they know?” – David Bowie

Rebels pretty much resist all rules. It’s kind of a wonder we get any shit done at all, really.

We basically do what we want to do and to hell with anything else. Although Gretchen says there are ways to trick us. Most especially if you tell us that we can’t do something – then we’ll go through hell & high water to prove you wrong. Yep yep, that psychology you use on 5 year olds… works on us too.

Rebels are motivated by present desire, we do what we want to do. If you tell us to do something, we’ll want to do the exact opposite. It’s not about being difficult so much, it’s about choosing to act from a sense of freedom.

We do have some positives though. We’re not constrained by things that hold others back. We can think in that outside the box way and do things that others wouldn’t even dream of doing.

And we are incredibly present and engaged in whatever we do because we’re doing what we want to do.

I think maybe rebels are the quintessential entrepreneurs. But… hopefully we’ve got some of the other folks to help us or surely we’ll never manage to get all the things done that need doing.

Obligers

Finally, the Obligers are those who respond quite well to external rules, but are horrible at internal rules like new year’s resolutions or working on personal projects.

Obligers are motivated by external accountability so they will seriously get shit done. But… only if someone else has asked them to do it. And they HATE letting others down.

They’re incredibly easy to work with (well, duh!) but can become very frustrated with themselves and are quite susceptible to burnout.

The rebel in me wants to go save these people and tell them it’s OK to do something for yourself! The world will love you for it!! 

(and then, maybe just a little bit, have them help me get some shit done that I really don’t want to do)

I just got back from the 99U Conference, which was filled with amazing speakers, but my absolute favorites were the ones who stood out as the scrappiest of the lot. The ones who stood on stage and you wondered briefly if they’d ever presented before as they stood up there so raw and authentic.

At the end of the second day, after hearing from a number of well-known authors and founders, this big, biker looking dude walks out on stage in jeans and a t-shirt, tattoos down his arms, on his neck – starts screaming "HEY!" … "HEY!#@$!" and then laughing with this total little kid’s smile and screaming some more.

And then proceeds to tell us that he’s going to talk to us today about… Escaping Success.

This dude is Joshua Davis, a digital designer who’s had unbelievable success, including having his art featured in the Smithsonian.

But he doesn’t want to talk about that.

He talks instead of years following success where his work stagnated, where he wasn’t doing anything new.

“I had goals… I reached them…. I got fucking lazy.”

The industry ends up holding us back because people hire us for the type of work we make. They want us to just keep regurgitating what we’ve done before, rather than innovating into new areas. And we end up holding ourselves back. After reaching our goals, we find ourselves stuck in that same space. Bored. No longer pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. He went through a period where he’d just stay up all night, sleep till late afternoon, churn out only 1 or 2 new personal projects over an entire year – what the fuck am I doing?

“Creativity doesn’t care if you’re successful. But success will fuck your creative game up if you’re not careful.’”

He talks about the horror of the easy and the sluggishness of the comfortable.

And he talks of how, when we’re able to escape success, we can remain in a constant state of wonder and constantly be the student. He tells us how when he found himself stagnating, he tried to find fear because in fear, his greatest thinking occurs. To create, he told us, we have to get uncomfortable. We must take pride in our fear of the unknown.

“I was trying to get back to the enthusiasm of ‘I don’t know what I’m doing!’ and the wonder that comes with that.
And I love that.”

(and, of course, he has – just look at http://www.joshuadavis.com/ for a peak into his stream of work, including – pretty cool – being the digital artist for deadmau5!)

So inspiring. I have a new hero. Thank you, Joshua.

Below is a video of the presentation I did at Harvard Innovation Lab last month – I initially called it Creating Your Minimum Viable Product, but it’s really about: how can I validate that I’m creating a viable business (as opposed to a very expensive, time consuming hobby) before going off and building it?

I include a bunch of case studies of what other startups have done – successful or otherwise – and provide some tools to help you along the way. Hope you enjoy!

The Anti-MVP: If we build it, they will come

The Point – Before Groupon, Andrew Mason created a not-so-well-known startup called The Point. The Point’s vision was to harness the collective power of all of the people on the Internet.

Whether you’re raising money, organizing people, or trying to influence change: if you can’t do it alone, you can do it on The Point.

Awesome idea, right? Andrew and his team thought so. They went off and spent 10 months building it. When they put it out there only to find that people weren’t using it (at least not in any kind of numbers that could lead to a sustainable business), they spent another 10 months back tracking only to realize that the Right product to build was a totally different one (Groupon).

» Andrew Mason discussing what happened with The Point

Moral of this Story: Don’t be like The Point. Instead, try one of these MVP ideas…

Landing Pages: Will anyone actually buy this?

Buffer – Buffer is this awesome little app that allows you to queue up your social media posts/tweets so that it can post them out for you according to the schedule you choose. But before going & building it, Buffer’s founder, Joel Gascoigne, wanted to see if anyone would even want to use it.

So he created a simple landing page (right) that described what Buffer “did.” If people were interested, they could click the Plans & Pricing button and be taken to a page that said “Hello! You caught us before we’re ready” leave your email address & we’ll let you know when we’re ready.

Of course, Joel hadn’t actually started developing Buffer yet. He tweeted out the page, people came, some left their email addresses – that was a good signal. So, he moved onto step #2.

Was step #2 to build it?

Nope. It was great people were interested in using it, but the real question was would people pay money to use it. So, he updated his landing page (left) to add a Plans & Pricing page with 3 plans: Free, $5/mo, $20/mo.

He continued to let people know about the page, people continued coming and now, a small number were even clicking on paid plans. Excellent! Now it was time to build – not a 10 month version of the product – but a simple, minimum feature set that he could get out there in under a week to start having people actually use it. Shortly after, Buffer had 500 users and were generating revenue from the paying ones.

» Joel Gascoigne’s blog post on Buffer’s MVP

KickStarter: Collecting revenue before building

Pebble – if Landing Pages are awesome to validate that people are interested in your product before building it, what’s even better is getting people to pay for your product before building it. That’s where KickStarter comes in.

A great example is Pebble, an e-paper watch for smart phones, which raised the largest kickstarter yet: over $10M! While Kickstarter is meant as a crowdfunding platform, it easily serves as a pre-order platform – where funders are rewarded with the promise of your product once you hit your minimum funding goal.

» Pebble’s Kickstarter page

CrowdTesting: How much will people pay?

Bounce – Bounce is a mobile app that helps you to never be late by looking at your calendar and your current location and telling you when you need to leave.

Awesome, but what’s the right price point? Bounce used an open source Kickstarter platform called Selfstarter, which allowed them to A/B test different price points.

They still get the benefits of Kickstarter – getting pre-paid so they have income to build the product. But now they also have data to show how much people are willing to pay.

The results? At $5, 1.4% purchased, at $10, 1.7% purchased.

» Justin Wilcox explaining crowdtesting at Lean Startup Conf.

Video: Does this solution resonate with people?

Dropbox – The farther along you get with your idea, the more concrete you want your demo to be. It’s one thing to ask people if they’d pay you to solve a really big problem for them (yes, of course we would all pay for that!).

It’s another entirely to see if they’d pay for the actual solution you’re proposing (just think of all the failed photo sharing apps).

A great way to do this is with a video of a mockup or prototype of your solution so people can really get a feel for how it will work. This is particularly true when you’ve got a unique spin on the problem, something people haven’t seen before and thus have a hard time envisioning through words alone.

The most famous example of this is probably the 3 minute video that Drew Houston created for Dropbox, walking through using the product. He posted it to HackerNews and overnight they went from 5,000 to 75,000 people on their beta list.

» TechCrunch: How DropBox Started as an MVP

For more examples and thoughts on MVPs, check out: How To Build Your MVP

I wanted to show them that they didn’t have to (in fact, shouldn’t!) just go off and build some big product. Instead, start small, get a little something out there, see how people react. Even better, talk to the people you think are your target audience – what problems do they have? How are they solving those problems today?

Here are my slides from that presentation and stay tuned… I’ll follow up with a post walking through the MVP Examples I give here.

To celebrate, I decided it was about time to create some new content – including this new Lean Startup 101 that I presented at Northeastern Entrepreneur Club’s Husky Startup Challenge this weekend – which was a ton of fun!

Here are the slides (and there’s a video of the presentation below):

And here’s a video of the presentation:

BUT, this is really hard at a startup precisely because everything is always changing.

It’s essential that your developers are okay with these points. It drives me a little crazy every time I hear a startup developer complain that things are changing all the time. Well… what’d ya expect?

BUT… in their defense, I’ve seen many a startup do a truly horrible job managing their developers so that every ounce of chaos comes flooding down on them to the point where they can’t get a thing done.

This often plays out something like this.

The Ineffective Way to Build Your Startup’s Product

Founder: We need to get this “MVP” out the door to start bringing in revenue if we’re going to survive. How long will it take you to build this?

Dev: I can do it in 2 weeks.

Founder: Great, go for it.

Two days later…

Founder: I just spoke with some potential investors and they said we need to do X if we want to raise money. Do that instead. How long will it take you to do that?

Dev: Well, if I stop working on the MVP…

Founder: Yes, stop working on that – raising funds is the most important thing

Dev: Then… I can probably do X in 3-4 weeks.

Founder: Great, get to it.

The next week…

Founder: We found a company that’s willing to pay us money if we give them Y. Can you work on Y while you’re building X?

Dev: Sure, but it’s going to take more time if I have to work on both of them at the same time.

Founder: That’s fine, do it. We need both to survive.

Dev: *grumbling* okay…

3 weeks later:

Founder: I’m ready for X, where is it?

Dev: I’m not done with it yet because you asked me to spend time building Y as well.

Founder: Damn it. Why can’t you ever get anything done?

This is, of course, a ridiculously tame version, but… you get the idea. We’re now 1 month into our startup without a thing to show for it.  This method is NOT effective.

Let’s try something else…

A Better Way: Kanban, MVPs & Slowing Down (kind of)

Rule #1: Keep tasks small enough to be completed within your minimum time between changes (MTBC)

If your startup needs to be able to change what’s being developed on a daily basis, then don’t give your developer 2 week long tasks. Instead, determine your minimum time between changes & keep tasks small enough to fit within that.

For an early stage startup, I’d recommend starting with an MTBC of 1 day.

In Kanban, we set up a simple task board with To Do, In Progress & Done columns.

In our To Do column, we put up some cards representing the tasks to be completed. Make sure that each of these tasks feels like it can be completed within our MTBC.

Rule #2: Limit the “To Do” column to a ridiculously small number of items

I’d recommend starting with a maximum of 5-10 tasks, or about 1-2 weeks of work.

Your Kanban board should be displayed largely and prominently for everyone to see. This keeps the team focused. It doesn’t mean you might not have a billion and 3 other things you’d love to do, but that can be confusing and – at a startup where things are constantly changing – can send developers spinning. So keep those other items in a spreadsheet or notebook for yourself. And keep the Big, Visible focus on what we need to be doing Right Now.

Rule #3: Once a person starts a task, it can’t change while they’re working on it and they must complete it before beginning the next.

This is Super Important as it allows the developer to get into a cadence of continually delivering value (no more “Why can’t you ever get anything done?”).

Occasionally you’ll find it was the wrong task or defined incorrectly but our tasks are tiny (e.g., 1 day) and I promise you the value of all the correct tasks that get completed will greatly outweigh the occasional wrong task that does.

Rule #4: Go only as fast as you can learn

It doesn’t help to build product at lightning speed if you’re never stopping to validate that you’re building the Right Thing. As Eric Ries says, this is like praising ourselves for driving at the proper speed with great gas mileage as we drive off a cliff.

I like Ash Maurya’s idea of inserting a Validated Learning column onto the board. You don’t actually count something as “Done” until you’ve validated whatever it is you were hoping to achieve with that feature.

I’d recommend defining how long you think you can afford to go between validating ideas. In an early stage startup, you probably want to keep this to 1-2 weeks at most. So incorporate this into your planning process. I’d recommend using Hypothesis-Driven Development:

1. Figure out what the riskiest assumption is in your business model.
2. Figure out how you can learn (validate) whether your assumption is true or not.
3. Figure out what the smallest possible thing is that you can build in order to validate it.
4. Break this down into tasks that are <= your MTBC & place them in your To Do column.
5. Once the tasks are completed, take the time to learn whether your assumption was right or not.
6. Use what you learned to determine what the most effective next thing will be for you to focus on developing

If you’re new to Kanban or want a little more info, check out Kanban is the New Scrum.

• I finally managed to update my About to reflect that I’m no longer at Microsoft (yeah, I’m a bit behind) and to use a picture of me that’s not as old as my blog is (ahem).
• Added a link (up top) to my slideshare where I’ve been putting several of my presentations. If there’s one you’d like but don’t see, just ask.
• Also to my resume, if you want to hire me to do awesome shit for the startup community, that’d be cool. Just sayin…

Finally, I pushed my WordPress theme up into github in case that’s useful to anyone creating their own theme. You can find it here: https://github.com/HackerChick/WordPress-theme/tree/master/hackerchick.

That’s all for now. More posts coming soon. Until then – Happy New Year!

[Update 11/29 – I’ve moved The Hacker Chick Blog to http://www.HackerChick.com instead of just having that redirect to the blog. If you were getting here through another URL, everything should start redirecting as soon as DNS propagates. If you’re having any issues though, just let me know.]

When I first started writing The Hacker Chick Blog, I was incredibly taken by Kathy Sierra and her Creating Passionate Users blog.

I loved how fun and edgy she was. I was in awe of her fearlessness in advancing her own ideas even when they flew in the face of conventional wisdom. Not only was she unapologetic for this, she clearly reveled in the idea. The mere thought of publicly standing up for my own ideas when they went against what others thought scared the hell out of me. But here she was – not only doing it but thriving from it. She was a huge influence in how I did The Hacker Chick Blog and I really tried to match her in both courage and style.

Later, while watching the early seasons of Criminal Minds, I became captivated by Penelope Garcia’s character. This crazy, edgy, ingenious hacker who was not only a girl (that parts okay) but she was downright flamboyant about it.

As someone who’d been coding and doing all sorts of other primarily male activities my entire life, I’d been a tomboy since I was a kid. I made it a point of pride that I personified J. Random Hacker – right down to my obsession with wearing hiking boots everywhere (you know, in case a mountain should suddenly spring up in the middle of the machine room).

When I saw Penelope, I thought this is what a hacker chick should be (duh!). And so I changed my own style to be more colorful and edgy and to just have fun with the fact that I ama chick (huh).

When I started at Microsoft, I immediately adopted Gus Weber as my mentor. He wasn’t even on my team or anyone that I was supposed to be working with, but there was no way to miss the awesomeness he was doing for the Boston startup community. And so I did everything I could to ignore my official direction and instead follow in his footsteps. I thought, okay, I’m probably going to be fired for this – but it was so powerful what he was doing, that was more important to me then keeping my job. The entire experience would have been drastically different if I hadn’t decided to take that risk and imitate Gus’s actions, ideals and love for the community.

I am so glad every day that I did because I’m such a different person now and in a totally different place. In fact, for all of them for making me who I am today.

And so now, as I’m wondering what my next “big thing” will be (no pressure, Abbs) – I also wonder who might be next. Am I exposing myself to enough awesome to let me grow or am I getting too comfortable with who and what I know today?

It’s not that I haven’t done a damn amazing job of surrounding myself with awesome (you all know who you are). It’s just that I wonder… maybe there’s someone else out there doing something totally unthinkable to rock my world and flip it on it’s head… I sure hope so. Life is too short to stand still.

What about YOU? Who are you imitating?

And the people who applied completely blew my mind. From biotech and life sciences experts who want to use data to improve our health, to an MIT robotics student with a passion around using real time data for autonomous cars, to a Media Lab researcher using data to study gender equality, to a weather geek who wants to use real time weather data to keep people safe while fighting wild fires!

It reinforced everything I believe about the brilliant and passionate people we have here in Boston and how much amazing potential there is in this community.

And so I’m incredibly proud to have been hack/reduce’s Founding Executive Director to bring this community space into being because I believe that if we can provide resources and infrastructure to bring people together to create, that only more greatness will ensue.

It is therefore with some sadness that I write this post announcing that I’m moving on from hack/reduce. In the end, it seems we had different visions for what the space will become and how the to bring in the community.

Not to fear though, as Boston’s startup guardian angel and crazy child, I believe there is more great work to be done. And so, I wish hack/reduce the very best of luck as I look forward to my next endeavor. Have some awesome ideas bouncing around – if you have some thoughts, I’d love to hear from you too. In the meantime, keep pushin’ the edge & I’ll see you around the community (Boston Startup School, Babson Enterprise Forum, TechStars Demo Day, MassTLC unConference, Lean Startup Circle… well, you know where to find me ;) ).

This is the ninth in a series of posts exploring the personal stories of real women in technology. Every woman in tech overcame, at the very least, statistical odds to be here; this blog series aims to find out why, and what they found along the way. This time around we chatted with Abby Fichtner (t|ln), better known as Hacker Chick for her devoted work with Boston startups. Recently named Founding Executive Director of hack/reduce, a non-profit big data hacker space, Abby is in constant search of shaking up conventional wisdom and finding out what lies beyond. If reading her story inspires you to share yours, please feel free to email me.

Hi! I’m Abby Fichtner – although more people probably know me as Hacker Chick. I write The Hacker Chick Blog on how we can push the edge on what’s possible, and I’m about to launch a non-profit hacker space for big data called hack/reduce.

Prior to this, I was Microsoft’s Evangelist for Startups where I had the most incredible experience of working with hundreds of startups. I’ve been alternately called the cheerleader and the guardian angel for Boston startups. I love this community and am super excited to launch hack/reduce to help Boston continue solving the really hard problems and keep our title as the most innovative city in the world.

Questions:

1. Can you take us back to your “eureka!” moment—a particular instance or event that got you interested in technology?

I like to joke that programming is in my blood.  My Dad has been programming since the 1960’s and my brother followed him into Computer Science. So when we were kids, my parents told us that whoever made the honor roll first would get an Atari. This was 1980 and so Atari game machines were The Thing to have.

Sufficiently motivated, I made the honor roll and my Dad came through – with an Atari 800, the PC!  Pretty much nobody had PCs in 1980, so this was pretty elite. For games, we got these Atari magazines that had pages and pages of source code in them and our father-daughter bonding experiences were typing in the machine language to build our own games. Talk about hard core, right?!

2. Growing up, did you have any preconceived perceptions of the tech world and the kinds of people who lived in it?

Growing up I did not want to be a programmer! I thought that was something my Dad and my brother did. I was an independent woman and going to follow my own path. I heard that if you’re really good, they make you a manager. So my goal was to be on the business side of things.

Fortunately, my first job out of school tricked me by putting me to work programming. The first time they had me do something that I’d been told was “impossible” (and I figured out how to do anyway), I was hooked! There is nothing I find more exciting than doing things that nobody has ever been able to do before. Except, perhaps, helping others to experience that same awesomeness.

3. hack/reduce is an exciting hacker space launching in Boston. Can you tell us a little bit about hack/reduce and your involvement with it?

hack/reduce will be Boston’s Big Data hacker space. Imagine a place where people come together to create. To take vast amounts of information and turn it into knowledge that we can use for making smarter decisions, for finding better ways to conserve energy, smarter ways to improve our economy, for identifying cures for diseases. The applications become endless as we learn to process the vast amounts of information that are now being created.

hack/reduce is a non-profit whose mission is to help Boston create the talent and the technologies that will shape our future. I can’t possibly think of anything I’d rather be working on.

I just started 2 weeks ago as the Founding Executive Director, so this is all very exciting and new to me. I love coming in at the very beginning when everything is still chaos but there are endless possibilities for what you can shape it into.

4. Did you experience any personal or systemic setbacks at any point of your academic or professional career?

My first job out of school was incredibly disheartening. I had worked so hard to get top grades and held part time jobs throughout high school and college – all to land that “perfect” job out of college.

And I landed it.

And I HATED it.

I felt like the biggest failure because I’d worked so hard my entire life to land this job and here I was completely miserable. I don’t think I understood that there were options. I thought I’d taken the wrong path and now I was stuck with it. For the rest of my life. I can’t even explain how horrible that feeling was. Thank God I was wrong. And thank God the feeling was mutual so they fired me after only 10 months, forcing me to find something else. I promptly found a startup and from that moment on have been completely addicted to the wonder of startups.

5. Whom do you look to as mentors and/or sources of inspiration?

Wow, where to start?

Kathy Sierra was probably my biggest influence in starting The Hacker Chick Blog. I’d be hard pressed to think of anyone more passionate than her and I love that she gets out there and just says what she believes without worrying what others will think. She’s incredibly smart and edgy; it’s a thrill to read and listen to her. I love that.

Lisa Crispin, for reasons I’ll never fully understand, took an interest in me before anyone knew who I was and used her substantial influence to become my biggest cheerleader. And not just me, but countless others as well. She was a huge inspiration for me in becoming an Evangelist. I thought if I can gain influence, I can follow her lead and use it to help promote others that are doing wonderful things.

Leslie Sturgeon who runs the fabulous Women Inspiring Women taught me that it’s okay to be yourself. That while people might judge you for not being perfect, there is little more endearing than true authenticity.

6. Do you have any advice for women interested in computers and computer science?

There is SO crazy much that can be done with computers and computer science. Never be limited by what you “think” your job has to look like. The most exciting innovations happen when someone brings a new perspective to the table. And with so few women in computer science, that gives us a huge opening to bring our own spin to things and craft new opportunities that build on what we love and are passionate about.

And that is how we not only make our mark but how we change the world!

Reposted with permission from: SoftArtisans Blog.

I spent months trying to figure out what my next thing would be. Talking to to people, brainstorming ideas. I wanted to help the community – but how? What did I know? What could I possibly do as an individual that would make more impact than what I could do with the resources of a big company behind me?

And then, when I figured it out, it was so obvious:

I need to build a hacker space!!

And so, I’m crazy excited to be launching hack/reduce. hack/reduce will be Boston’s big data hacker space with the mission of helping Boston create the talent and technologies that will shape our future in what I believe will be a very (big) data-driven future. A non-profit that I’m creating in partnership with the State of Massachusetts and a kick ass board, whose sole mission will be to help Boston retain it’s title as the most innovative city in the world.

Imagine a place where people come together to create. To take vast amounts of information and turn it into knowledge that we can use for making smarter decisions, for finding better ways to conserve energy, smarter ways to improve our economy, for identifying cures for diseases. The applications become endless as we learn to process the vast amounts of information that are now being created.

And Boston is SO the place to do this. We have all of these wicked smart people working in areas that really matter like life sciences and biotech and clean energy. Pair that with the fact that, per capita, Boston has more programmers and R&D investment than anywhere in the world. Oh, and let’s not forget education: MIT, Harvard… there are 85 colleges & universities in the Boston area. Yep, we can seriously kick ass in any area that has to do with knowledge and solving tough problems.

So – this might be totally crazy. But, I like crazy so I’m giving it a go. And I could super use your help:

If you’d like to use hack/reduce, take this quick survey to help me understand what you’re looking for: http://bit.ly/hackreduce1

You can also like our Facebook page to join the discussion & stay up to date as hack/reduce readies for launch: http://www.facebook.com/hackreduce

And wish me luck! :-) Hope to see you in the space when we open this Fall.

In each case, without their community (testers, teachers or engineers, respectively) – there is no business.

Getting the Community Engaged

The general rule, per uTest’s CEO Doron Reuveni, is 99:1. You tend to get 90% stalkers (“just watching”), 9% of your users do a little, and then you have 1% that are really active. If you want a thriving community, you need to tap this 1% and really engage them. uTest’s top testers proudly sport uTest t-shirts, meet up at conferences, and help spread the word.

“Find these guys and they’ll lead the way for everyone.”

uTest has done so well at creating a loyal community that Doron told a story of a scary incident when uTest accidentally double-paid their testers. It was through PayPal, and there was no way for them to reverse the transaction. At the time, their revenue was about $1M/month and the extra pay was around $250,000 – so this was significant. Unsure what to do, they put up a blog post explaining the error to their users (a little self-deprecating humor in there – yes, we test our own software, but we still found a bug), and within 1 week, 99% of uTest’s testers voluntarily returned the excess pay.

Can you imagine that kind of loyalty from a traditional, big company’s customers??

Control it or Leave it to the Masses?

Of course, there’s a trade-off you have to make between centralized control for creating an amazing user experience (think: Uber) and a decentralized model where users rule and you can really tap the power of the community (think: Kickstarter). The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations says the most powerful organizations will be those that can strike the right balance between the two.

They all obviously want quality contributors so people view them as a top source of testers/teachers/3D CAD Models. However, GrabCAD found when they’re too strict in what they expect from engineers, it leaves people intimidated and they get less engagement, so they’ve found themselves lowering their preferred bar to find that right balance.

Per Michael Karnjanaprakorn, Skillshare’s CEO, all communities need some type of trust and rating system. Skillshare bases theirs on positivity – highlighting what’s good about teachers and what the students would like to see.

uTest has created a whole system around incentivizing testers who do well. As testers do better, they increase in levels – which means higher rates and more visibility, leading to more work and more money. If someone “misbehaves” or doesn’t do a good job, they end up not getting work and eventually leave. Thus, the system perpetuates advancing quality testers while strongly dissuading the bad apples so they no longer have a reason to stay.

Which audience do you build up: The contributors or the buyers?

Another big question is which side do you go after? The supply (testers/teachers/engineers) or the demand (the people who pay for their work).

Skillshare said this was rarely in balance – they’d go after teachers, then students, then back. But now, they only focus on the teachers because if they get really awesome teachers, students will find them.

Learning from the Community

For all three, a critical role in their startups is Community Manager, someone whose job it is to listen to the community.

GrabCAD recognizes that their success is all about how healthy their community is and so it’s essential that the community manager report up to the very top of the organization.

“You can’t plan how people will use your community. They’ll do what they want.” – Hardi Meybaum, GrabCAD’s CEO

By listening, GrabCAD pivoted from a marketplace for engineers to being the GitHub for engineers. A move that they wouldn’t have predicted but today 10% of the world’s mechanical engineers are registered with this 3 year old company.

Best quote of the panel: when Eric asked the companies how their users use twitter, Hardi replied:

“Engineers don’t use twitter, they use GrabCAD for that.”

Boom.

You’ve also got a ton of unknowns and uncertainty. You know you can’t just go build it and hope they will come. You have to do it iteratively. Put a little bit out there, see how people react, figure out what to do next.

But where do you start? How much is enough to start getting feedback?

Josh Seiden gave this awesome talk at Boston’s Lean Startup Circle on replacing requirements with hypotheses. And it occurred to me that what he’s really talking about is hypothesis-driven development, which I love.

In Agile, we drive our development with tests. We say, “okay, I know what the product needs to do, so let me write the test first.” It’s an automatic check. If I accidentally develop the feature incorrectly, the test will fail and I’ll get immediate feedback that the feature isn’t ready yet.

But what about in a startup where we’ve only got guesses for what the product should do? Then the tests should not be whether features are implemented correctly. Who cares if nobody wants them?

What we do care about is creating a successful business. So those tests aren’t for if the product works, they’re for whether it’s the right product. Now we’ve got an automated check. We don’t waste our time & money building something until we’ve validated it’s the right thing to build.

How it Works

Start from your business model canvas (I like Ash Maurya’s Lean Canvas). This documents the assumptions you’re making about how your vision will become a successful business –  who your customers will be, why they’ll want this particular solution, how you’ll reach them, etc.

Now, pick your riskiest assumption and use Josh’s template to document it:

We believe that ____________________

We’ll know we have succeeded when we see: ____________________

Your signal needs to be clearly measurable. And it should be measurable within a short period of time (hours, not weeks).

Ash has a great blog post on running experiments to measure hypotheses. In it, he talks about how we tend to start with “Leaps of Faith” such as this:

Being known as an “expert” will drive early adopters.

But how do you measure that? You need to break it down into quickly testable parts. For example:

We believe that if we write a blog post on our new product, people will want to buy it

We’ll know we have succeeded when XXX people sign up within 24 hours.

Then, use the results to determine your next steps. If the expected number of people signed up, maybe you want to reach out to them and learn more about what they’re looking for so you can focus on building what’s most important to them. If nobody signed up, you know you’ve got more work to do at finding the right audience and appealing to them.

Don’t be afraid that your hypotheses will be wrong. Your goal isn’t proving to anyone that you’re right. Your goal is creating a successful business. Those hypotheses are just your tool to drive you there.

Learn More

Here are some great resources to learn more:

   » Replacing Requirements with Hypotheses by Josh Seiden
   » Lean Startup is a Rigorous Process by Ash Maurya
   » How to Evaluate and Implement Startup Ideas Using Hypothesis Driven Development by Daniel Tenner

The first week of the course is a series of guest lectures from industry experts on how to get shit done (that’s where I come in). After that, the course serves as a mini-accelerator with students applying what they’ve learned to their startups and receiving mentoring from myself and the other lecturers. The course concludes with a demo day at the end of the term – which I can’t wait to see!

Here are my slides – I actually beefed this up a little for SlideShare, adding some bullet points for the key talking points (I know, bullet points suck – but otherwise all you have are pictures). Hope you enjoy!