Lessons Learned

A new field guide for entrepreneurs of all stripes

2012-05-09T07:38:00.000-07:00

TLDR: Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits, authors of The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development are back with a new book called The Lean Entrepreneur. Illustrations by FAKEGRIMLOCK. You can pre-order it starting today.

It's been just about two years since Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits released their self-published book The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development (you can see my original review here). It took the idea of Customer Development and made it accessible to a whole new audience. Since then, Brant and Patrick have been tireless advocates for the whole Lean Startup movement. From Lean Startup Machine, Lean LA and San Diego Tech Founders, to countless speeches and workshops, I have seen the impact that their leadership has had first hand.

There continues to be an incredible demand out there for actionable, practical lessons in how to apply this emerging set of ideas.

Today I am excited to be able to share that Brant and Patrick have taken a big step in meeting that need. They are launching their next book, a true field guide for entrepreneurs, called The Lean Entrepreneur: How to Create Products, Innovate with New Ventures, and Disrupt Markets. It will be published by Wiley this fall. And you can pre-order it starting today.

Brant and Patrick have set out to write and design a book that not only describes practical steps for implementing Lean Startup principles in your innovative endeavors – but to inspire your creativity as well by sharing diverse examples of what works, and more importantly, what often doesn’t work.

Their goal is to share stories of Lean Startup applied in many industries and domains outside of tech startups. While I got my start as a technology entrepreneur, I have always felt that industries such as traditional book publishing or Fortune 500 retailing will reap huge competitive advantages by adopting Lean Startup approaches.

Brant and Patrick strongly believe, like I do, that these principles will serve innovators of all types, whatever their industry. Wherever innovators and entrepreneurs face extreme uncertainty -- be it in social entrepreneurship or developing a new musical artist or a machine-vision startup -- a principles-based approach can help.

To that end, they've refined their thinking and have incorporated feedback about The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development into The Lean Entrepreneur. They’ve also augmented their writing with research and interviews, collecting the stories of dozens of entrepreneurs who are now applying Lean Startup thinking to all sorts of ventures, ranging from music and artist development: Legendary music producer Marti Frederiksen (Aerosmith, Def Leppard, Fuel, Mötley Crüe, Ozzy Osbourne), to finance and investment: Dave McClure of 500 Startups to apparel and ecommerce: Chris Lindland, Founder of BetaBrand to automotive manufacturing: Danny Kim, Founder of Litmotors, and of course, technology startups such as Lucas Carlson of AppFog, Hiten Shah of KISSmetrics, Nathan Oostendorp of Ingenuitas and many others.

These interviews, nuggets, hacks, insights and case studies have been abstracted into actionable tactics for entrepreneurs of all stripes.

The book is still in production, so I haven't seen the whole thing yet. But I've been impressed with what I've seen so far. To whet your appetite, I asked Brant and Patrick for permission to share a few excerpts from the draft manuscript. They are below, followed by one last surprise announcement.

In this excerpt from The Lean Entrepreneur, by using fishing as an analogy, Brant and Patrick reveal how market segmentation influences your business model and why “For Whom” is as important as “What” to build.

Market segments drive your business model. The process of segmenting your market is one of the poorest understood concepts in the business startup world, yet is one of the most powerful. The market segment you pursue is inextricably linked to the other aspects of your business model.

Segments determine how future customers will expect to interact with the product, how they will be marketed to, and their method of purchasing. Differences in how people are reached, their expectations of the buying process, how their trust is earned, the price point they’ll accept, what distribution methods are most efficient, the messaging that attracts them -- all these factors (and more) may represent different sub-segments.

A good way to think about market segment is by thinking about fishing.

In the kelp beds off the coast of Southern California, one can find thousands of species of fish, but two of the most sought after by commercial fishermen are the California Halibut and the White Seabass. Both fish are classified as “demersal”, meaning they live near or on the bottom of the ocean floor and catching fish of both species in the 20-30 lb pound range is not uncommon.

Halbut are flatfish. They make themselves effectively invisible by nestling into the sandy bottoms between patches of eel grass and when sardines swim by, they explode out of the sand to nab them. They have two eyes on one side of their body, which make them very adept at ambushing predators. Fishermen know that one of best baits for catching halibut is a fellow denizen of sandy bottoms, the lizardfish.

White seabass are long and cylindrical, and have a much more typical “fish” form. They cruise the kelp beds looking for squid or mackerel to eat. White seabass are very difficult to hunt with spear guns as they are very sensitive to noise, and the slightest inorganic noise will set them off.

Any amateur fisherman can throw a line off the end of the local pier baited with frozen squid and pull in a few mackerel, or maybe even a rockfish.

But commercial fishermen have to -- day in, day out -- in good weather or in bad -- acquire their target fish and then sell it for more than cost of catching it. To do that repeatedly and scalably, they have to develop a deep understanding of the ethology of the fish. They must learn what sort of bait to use with what tackle, the best time of day and what environment will maximize the potential to catch the particular fish they are looking for. Fish can only be caught when they are accessible -- it doesn’t help you to know that there are fish 1,000 feet below your boat, if your line cannot get down to depth.

What are the value propositions, benefits and the messaging (bait), the pricing structure and channels (tackle), and length of sales cycle (how likely a fish will snap your line)? Will you need a big net (full-page ads in the WSJ) to catch lots of small sardines? Or will you need to staff and finance a whaling ship to be out at sea for months at a time to catch two or three whales (enterprise sales model)? Or perhaps you need to chum (freemium) the waters a bit? Maybe you’ll be hunting on a reef with a spear gun for 20lb groupers (B2B sales at a conference)?

You can build a mobile app for senior citizens, launch a Facebook campaign targeting Fortune 100 CEOs, or charge $25 for a food cart hamburger if you’d like, but the mismatch between product, tactic, pricing and segment might delay that Hawaiian vacation you’ve been planning.

It may seem rather obvious, but as with many aspects of entrepreneurship, the practice of segmenting your market seems commonsensical, but is more complicated than it seems to put into practice. And the problem is that few take the time to really master it.

Entrepreneurs carry market segments around in the back of their minds, relying on gut-feel to determine whether customers they are seeing are the “right” customers. The problem is when you’re chasing revenue; any and all customers will seem like the right customer.

In another excerpt from The Lean Entrepreneur, Brant and Patrick describe BetaBrand’s fast, iterative, and MVP-driven approach to manufacturing and selling apparel.

Traditionally, the clothing industry is seasonal. Two to four times a year, large clothing companies release products to the world and eventually the make their way online, but it's an old-fashioned industry that moves at old-fashioned speed compared to the ways people interact with companies on the Internet.

But that's not what founder Chris Lindland had in mind for BetaBrand, an online clothing company. Not an online clothing catalog, mind you, but a clothing company. Chris explains:

“What I figured is that an online clothing company has to abide by the rules of blogging or Twitter, which people expect when interacting with companies online. The idea with BetaBrand is we're going to try to put up products as rapidly as we can.

In order to save on our costs we decided to make those batches very small and as a result of making small batches you can iterate on them if anything is successful. It was a fairly organic thing. It was really done to control our costs to begin with, but it's become a fascinating way to actually improve upon products as we go along."

Like Continuous Deployment, whereby IMVU deployed changes to their web application +50 times per day, BetaBrand's aim is to put out a new product every day. They manufacture only a small batch of a particular product, but enough to come to a decision point:

“If there's anything that we've learned from our customers, it's that with the first hundred to two hundred pair sold, we can make minor changes on it to improve it and retest, we can turn it into an entire line, or we can kill it.”

Reprinted from The Lean Entrepreneur by Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits. Copyright © 2012 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Reprinted by permission of John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

And, these days, no book launch announcement would be complete without a funny book trailer to go with it. Want to know what "Christopher Walken" thinks about The Lean Entrepreneur?

Lastly and perhaps most importantly, Brant and Patrick tell me that The Lean Entrepreneur will be heavily visual, filled with full-color illustrations of the concepts they're explaining. To that end, they've teamed up with the most unique startup artist there is...my favorite robot dinosaur, FAKEGRIMLOCK.

If that doesn't convince you pre-order, you're probably beyond help. But just in case you are right on the fence, and want one more reason to do it, you should know that Brant and Patrick are partnering with LA-based crowdfunding startup Invested.in, to let early adopters of their book become part of co-creating it. If you pre-order The Lean Entrepreneur from them, they'll list your name as a co-creator in the book and share material with you as they write.

The Lean Entrepreneur will be published by Wiley this Fall. You can order it on Amazon. But I suggest you pre-order it at LeanEntrepreneur.co.

Founder's Dilemmas: Equity Splits

2012-04-24T08:36:00.003-07:00

The following is an excerpt from HBS Professor Noam Wasserman’s new book, The Founder's Dilemmas: Anticipating and Avoiding the Pitfalls That Can Sink a Startup. Noam is one of a rare breed of business academics: he studies entrepreneurship using a rigorous empirical approach. The book taps Noam’s analyses of data on 10,000 founders, plus the personal stories of Evan Williams of Twitter, Tim Westergren of Pandora, and two dozen other founders.

As an example of the kind of insight that this data makes possible, take a look at this diagram, which is one of my favorites in the whole book:
Noam calls this the Rich vs King tradeoff, and it's a remarkable finding. On average, the founders who keep the most control over their company make the least amount of money. As with any data-based result, this raises more questions than it answers. For example, most entrepreneurs know that the most successful entrepreneurs - from Bill Gates to Jeff Bezos - kept tight control over their companies. We therefore seek to emulate their approach, to our own detriment, because we're often emulating the wrong things. Having the real facts helps us ask better questions. We should be asking not "how much control did Bill Gates seek?" but rather "what else is exceptional about his decisions that allowed him to escape the more common fate?" If you're interested in answering questions like this, read on.

I was lucky enough to get to read a version of the book when it was still in draft form. Now that the final version has come out, I'm excited to share a bit of it with you. At the time, I was asked to give an official endorsement of the book. Here's what I said:

"If you're starting a new company, you probably already know that a crazy variety of landmines await you. What if you had a map that showed exactly where they are and how to avoid them? Having seen these dilemmas derail countless startups, I wish every entrepreneur and prospective founder would read this book." - Eric

The following is an exclusive excerpt which sets up a common pitfall regarding equity splits. In Noam’s dataset, 73% of founding teams split equity within a month of founding, a striking number given the big uncertainties early in the life of any startup. The majority of those teams set the equity in stone by failing to allow for future adjustments to equity stakes if there are major changes within the team or the startup.

After this excerpt, the book outlines specific solutions that help founders avoid this pitfall.

Setting the early equity split in stone is one of the biggest mistakes founders can make. With their confidence in their startup and themselves, their passion for their work and their mission, and their desire not to harm the fragile dynamic within the nascent founding team, cofounders tend to plan for the best that can happen. They assume that their early, high levels of commitment will last long into the future, rather than waning as the challenges of founding begin to sap their passion for the idea and for each other. They assume that no adverse events will change the composition of the team.They also tend to take a very short-term view of the factors that should affect equity splits. They assume that the tasks that they are performing during the early stage of startup development are the same tasks that will be performed during the next and very different stages. They assume that their skills will remain as valuable to the startup as they are right now. They overestimate the amount of value that they will build in the first months compared to the value they hope to build over the subsequent years, and thus overweight their past contributions compared to the future contributions that will be required of them. Each founder places more value on his or her own contributions than on the contributions of the other cofounders,knowing the cost and extent of his or own efforts in a way that he or she cannot know the cost and extent of others’ efforts.

But such a best-case approach is hazardous. Uncertainties abound. At the company level, founders learn about the flaws in their initial plans and adjust the startup’s strategy, business plan,and business model. Professor Scott Shane reports that “almost half(49.6 percent) of new firm founders indicated that their business ideas [had] changed between the time they first identified them and the time when they were surveyed about them.” Such adjustments can cause major changes in the obstacles that the startup faces, the skills needed to address those obstacles, and thus the roles that each founder (or perhaps a new founder or a nonfounder) will have to play in building the startup.

At the individual level, as the strategy and business model shift,the skills of some founders become more important than the skills of others and roles often shift. As each founder learns about the demands of building a startup, reflects on his or her motivations,and sees how well his or her abilities address the startup’s needs, his or her commitment to the startup may change. The founders also come to understand each other’s abilities and commitment at a far deeper level than was possible at the beginning. Yet founders tend to overestimate how much value they will build during those early days, which can cause even bigger problems when a cofounder’scontributions wane later on.

A founder’s personal life may also affect his or her commitment and contributions. At Ockham Technologies, all of the founders were aware of the imminent arrival of idea-person Ken’s first child. However, even Ken was unsure how this would affect his willingness to quit his full-time job and focus on building Ockham.Extreme and unexpected health problems can catch all parties by surprise. For instance, while Microsoft was still a private company, cofounder Paul Allen was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma,which caused him to quit the company, leaving Bill Gates as the sole active founder during the crucial three years before it became a public company.

In such ways, even the most comfortable equity split can be thrown into disarray. For instance, when Robin Chase and her partner, Antje, founded the car-sharing startup Zipcar, they agreed with a quick handshake to split the equity 50–50. The team believed it had avoided destructive tension over the equity split and could now focus on building the startup. “We shook across the table,50–50,” Robin recalls, “and I thought ‘great.’” Robin had heard about other teams that had faltered because of tough equity-split negotiations, and she breathed a sigh of relief that she and Antjehad avoided such problems. Robin poured her heart and soul into the startup, making major contributions to its growth, and was fully expecting Antje to do the same. Antje, however, remained at her full-time job and, by the summer, was expecting her second child. Robin wondered when her partner would be able to become more involved, but, in the end, Antje never joined full-time. Knowing that Antje still owned the same percentage as she did ate away at Robin, who later reflected, “That was a really stupid handshake, because who knows what skill sets and what milestones and what achievements are going to be valuable as you move ahead. That first handshake caused a huge amount of angst over the next year and a half.” Eventually Antje left the company altogether while continuing as a shareholder.

The cost to fix such problems can be very high, ranging from Robin Chase’s “angst” to more tangible financial costs. At govWorks.com, founders Kaleil and Tom had a cofounder, Chieh,who put up $19,000, worked “after hours” for five months (he had kept his day job instead of joining govWorks full-time), and then dropped out. When the remaining cofounders were about to close their first round of financing, their potential funder, Mayfield, was not willing to close until Kaleil and Tom bought Chieh out and reclaimed his equity. The VCs were willing to do a $410,000 “sweetheart deal” to facilitate the buyout. However, Chieh wanted $800,000. Amid the pressure to close the round, Kaleiland Tom ended up settling with Chieh for $700,000, making up the $290,000 out of their own pockets. Kaleil felt he was “beingextorted.” Although the risks of this kind of outcome are real,teams often fail to address them proactively. In my dataset, half of the teams had neglected to include any dynamic elements (vesting, buyout terms, and the like) in their equity agreements, sentencing themselves to the same risks faced by the Zipcar and govWorks.com teams.

How should founders deal with such developments? In short, by assuming when they do the initial split that things will change, even if the specific changes cannot be foreseen, and therefore structuring a dynamic equity split rather than the static splits used at Zipcar, govWorks, and many other startups. As important as it is to get the initial equity split right—by matching it as closely as possible thefounders’ past contributions, opportunity costs, future contributions, and motivations—it is equally important to keep it right; that is, to be able to adjust the split as circumstances change.

Doing > Talking

2012-03-19T07:13:00.000-07:00

I had an incredible couple of days at SXSW. The Lean Startup track was successful beyond my wildest imaginations (we'll have video up soon). My personal highlight was watching newly-appointed United States CTO Todd Park receive a standing ovation from a crowd that is decidedly skeptical about government. What inspired the crowd that day was not just his personal charisma or what he said, but rather, what he had done. He told us stories of specific examples of "lean government" in action, ranging from HealthCare.gov to a new approval process for medical devices at the FDA. And many in the audience took away a simple message: if they can do Lean Startup in government, what's my excuse?

Here are Todd's slides: (You can also sign up to see the video when it's available.)

Todd Park & Macon Philips, Lean Startup SXSW

For the past three years, I have worked to bring the Lean Startup message to SXSW by showcasing our community, presenting real-life case studies, and trying to connect the tactics and advice into a coherent whole. I am proud of all that we have accomplished together.

And yet, each year, I also try and get beyond talking. My number one goal, after all, is to change real-world entrepreneurial practice. If all we do is talk, pontificate, and speculate together, this will have been a gigantic waste of time. I continue to experiment with ways to get us all into action. And today I want to share another attempt. For last year's experiment, I teamed up with my friends at Appsumo to create a contest with epic prizes, including angel investment, spots in Silicon Valley incubators, and tons of mentorship. Some of last year's winners, such as Tout, continue to impress. But overall, the contest was only a mixed success. Launching it into the maelstrom of SXSW didn't work - there was simply too much noise. And the contest and bundle were far too complex. We had fallen into that classic trap of "more = better." (And how many startups have I advised not to do that over the years?)

This year, we're trying again. But instead of launching at SXSW, we used those few days to experiment and test a few different concepts. And today's post represents the results: The 2012 AppSumo Lean SX Bundle. I hope you'll find a way to use these tools to build something truly awesome:

Batchbook: 6 months of the Indigo plan
Chargify: $99 credit
Clientbiller: 1 year of any package
Crazy Egg: Lifetime account for one page
FileSquare: 3 months of service
Geckoboard: 3 months of any package
HelloFax: 3 months of 50 pages/mo + unlimited doc signing & templates
HipChat: 6 months of the Unlimited plan
KISSmetrics: Lifetime account with 50,000 events/mo
LaunchRock: $50 credit towards premium features
LessAccounting: 3 months of the LA plan
MediaLoot: 3 months of the professional plan
New Relic: 6 months of the Standard package
Olark: 4 months of the "Lost Silver Plan"
Pandaform: 3 months of any plan + 70% off the following 3 months
PeepCode: One PeepCode screencast of your choice
Sanebox: $14.85 credit toward any paid subscription
Sauce Labs: $150 of automated testing
SendGrid: 6 months of the Silver plan
Server Density: 1 year of server monitoring
Sticker Mule: 20% off your sticker order
Sucuri: $50 off the Premium plan
Trada: $500 marketplace credit
Twilio: $30 Developer credit + $50 extra when you upgrade to a full account
UserVoice: 3 months of any package
Venture Hacks: PDF edition of the Venture Hacks Bible
WhatRunsWhere: 1 month of the Advertising Awareness Package
WP Engine: 6 months of the Personal hosting plan
Zencoder: $50 in credit towards encoding

But wait, there's more! Many of us are able to easily afford tools like these to experiment with. But we all know promising potential entrepreneurs who cannot. So the first 100 people to buy the bundle through this special link will receive two additional copies of the bundle that they can gift to whomever they want.

Want to save an additional $25? I always want to include books in these bundles, but we've had a lot of difficulty in years past delivering all the physical copies. So this year we're trying something new: anyone who buys a copy (during this promotion) of my book The Lean Startup or Ash Maurya's new book Running Lean can submit their receipt and save $25. Details here.

So what are you going to do with all that awesome stuff? Join the Lean Challenge: Kill the Wantrapreneur, aimed at those who are ready to take action and win over $50,000 in prizes. Use the tools from your AppSumo Lean SX Bundle to create a killer idea and put it out on Kickstarter. Then submit your idea here. Winner will be selected by community vote. Did I mention the prizes? Use these tools to build a simple prototype and then win a $50,000 production-ready Minimum Viable Product built by the experts at New Context, one-on-one time with me and other startup mentors, PLUS lifetime personal hosting plan from WPEngine AND up to $1,000 in AppSumo credit.

The AppSumo Lean SX Bundle and the Lean Challenge are open to everyone, so don't worry if you didn't make it to SXSW this year.

SXSW Update

2012-03-09T07:58:00.000-08:00

Greetings from Austin, TX! For those of you on your way to SXSW, I wanted to give a few updates of opportunities to say hello. All of these events are free with a SXSW badge, none will be livestreamed (that I'm aware of), and a few are open to those without a badge. See you soon...

Friday March 9
3pm: I'll be signing books at 3pm at the SXSW Bookstore (Ballroom G Foyer in the Convention Center). Come say hi.

5pm: My Featured Session talk is in the big room, Ballroom D at the convention Center. I'm especially honored that Steve Blank will be introducing me!

In the evening, come join me at the Startup America "A Celebration of American Startups" party at ACL.

Saturday March 10
Dave McClure and I will kick off the official Lean Startup track at the Hilton. If you haven't seen our updated agenda, you're missing out. We've added a raft of new amazing speakers and case studies, including startups like AirBnB, Hipmunk, Etsy, and more. We also have a ton of new mentors who will be there for one-on-one meetings, including Aneesh Chopra, Mary & Tom Poppendieck, and Robert Scoble.

Here's a brief summary of the agenda:

9:30am – 10:30am
Dave McClure & Eric Ries Uncensored

10:30am – 11:00am
MENTOR MEETUPS: 1 on 1 sessions with leading entrepreneurs + advisers

11:00am – 12:00pm
Ash Maurya, Running Lean
Chad Dickerson, Etsy
Mary & Tom Poppendieck, Poppendieck.LLC

12:30pm – 12:45pm
MEET THE AUTHORS
Steve Blank, Stanford University
Patrick Vlaskovits, Drumbi
Ash Maurya, USERcycle
Jeff Gothelf, Proof
Janice Fraser, LUXr

12:45pm – 1:30pm
STEVE BLANK: Advice for Today's Startup Entrepreneurs

1:30pm – 2:00pm
MENTOR MEETUPS: 1 on 1 sessions with leading entrepreneurs + advisers

2:00pm – 3:00pm
Aaron Batalion, LivingSocial
Dharmesh Shah, HubSpot
Joe Zadeh, Airbnb
Zach Nies, Rally Software
Moderator: Thomas Korte, AngelPad

3:00pm – 3:30pm
MENTOR MEETUPS: 1 on 1 sessions with leading entrepreneurs + advisers

3:30pm – 4:00pm
Macon Phillips, U.S. White House
Todd Park, U.S. Department of Health & Human Services

4:00pm – 4:30pm
Scott Cook, Intuit

4:30pm – 5:00pm
TWILIO BEER BREAK

5:00pm – 6:00pm
Andy Rachleff, Wealthfront
Janice Fraser, Luxr
Adam Goldstein, Hipmunk
Victor Echevarria, TaskRabbit

6pm: And we've just added an amazing Minimum Viable Party sponsored by New Context. See you there!

Sunday March 11
9:15am: Join me bright and early for Startup America Live.

11am: Do you host or run a Lean Startup community event, such as a Lean Startup Meetup? Come join our meetup-of-meetups meetup. We did this last year and it was amazing. (real community leaders only)

5:30pm: I'll be teaching a brief class at the Skillshare & AMEX party.

7pm: I'll be doing a brief Q&A with Jeff Gothelf at the DeLUX Lean UX event at Adaptive Path.

Monday March 12
This will be my last day in Austin, sadly. I'm working with Startup America to arrange office hours at the Startup Village for those who've been asking for one-on-one meetings. I'll announce details on twitter if we get that figured out.

Phew! I'm getting exhausted just typing out this list. Hope to see you here. Happy SXSW!

The Lean Startup at SXSW 2012

2012-03-05T06:25:00.000-08:00

SXSW is less than a week away. Lean Startup ideas will be a big part of the festival this year. Last year SXSW invited me to produce an official Lean Startup track for the conference, which I did in partnership with 500 Startups. For those that were able to join us, you'll recall that we were in a pretty small venue far from the center of town. Apparently, they liked what they saw, as we've been seriously upgraded this year. And so I've once again partnered with 500 Startups in an effort to bring you the most comprehensive Lean Startup event ever.

First off, SXSW has asked me to introduce the Lean Startup to the broader conference, which I'll be doing on the big keynote stage. They've been at pains to remind me that room holds more than 2000 people - so please tell your friends to stop by. Mark your calendars for Friday, March 9 at 5pm, when I take the stage. Details:

The Lean Startup: The Science of Entrepreneurship Friday, March 9, 2012 5:00pm - 6:00pm Austin Convention Center Ballroom D

Then, on Saturday, March 10, The Lean Startup return for a second year with an official track at SXSW Interactive at the Hilton Austin Downtown. Along with 500 Startups, I've put together a full day of case studies, panel discussions, and mentoring sessions with an all-star lineup.

As usual, our day will be structured around three big keynote speakers: Dave McClure, Steve Blank, and Scott Cook (founder of Intuit). Our case studies span a wide range of company sizes and contexts (including the White House) and will explore some of the roots of lean thinking that have been a big influence on my own thinking. In 2012 there are at least five new books coming out that explore some aspect of Lean Startup. As a special treat, we'll have all of these authors present for a special "meet the authors" session where you'll be able to learn more and - we hope - get a sneak preview of some of them.

Our complete agenda is here.

Throughout the day, we'll have a line-up of amazing speakers, including Aaron Batalion, Chad Dickerson, Victor Echevarria, Brad Feld, Janice Fraser, Adam Goldstein, Thomas Korte, Ash Maurya, Zach Nies, Todd Park, Macon Philips, Mary & Tom Poppendieck, Andy Rachleff, Dharmesh Shah, Joe Zedah, and many more.

Check out the full list of speakers here.

More details on The Lean Startup at SXSW here and below.

The Lean Startup at SXSW Saturday, March 10
9:30am - 6:00pm Hilton Austin Downtown
(across the street from the Convention Center)

Sadly, due to SXSW restrictions, this event will not be simulcast.

Thank you for your continued support. If you happen to be at SXSW Interactive, do come say hello.

See you in Austin!

March 9, 2012
The Lean Startup: The Science of Entrepreneurship

March 10, 2012
The Lean Startup at SXSW Interactive, an official SXSW Track

(For the past two years, I've put on the Startup Lessons Learned conference in the spring. It's a chance for the Lean Startup community to come together and share case studies of what's working and what's not from all corners of the startup ecosystem. Both years, I also agreed to do a Lean Startup track at another conference (first Web 2.0 Expo and then SXSW), also in the spring. This has led to a lot of confusion and duplicated effort, so I decided to focus my energy this spring on SXSW. I hope to have news about SLLCONF soon - thanks to all of you who've been asking about it.)

The Hacker Way

2012-02-01T14:39:00.000-08:00

I don't normally comment on the day's news, but I want to make an exception today to share something from Facebook's S-1 filing. Over the next few days, astronomical amounts of attention are going to be paid to Facebook's incredible business results: the 800+ million active users, the $3.7 billion (!) in revenue, and their growth rates, too. I hope at least some of that attention will be paid to the culture and process that made those results possible. To that end, I want to quote briefly from Mark Zuckerberg's letter to shareholders. He calls their internal approach to continuous improvement and iteration The Hacker Way. It is a 21st-century manifesto for a new way of doing business. Here's a brief excerpt:

Simply put: we don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services.

And we think this is a good way to build something. These days I think more and more people want to use services from companies that believe in something beyond simply maximizing profits.

By focusing on our mission and building great services, we believe we will create the most value for our shareholders and partners over the long term — and this in turn will enable us to keep attracting the best people and building more great services. We don’t wake up in the morning with the primary goal of making money, but we understand that the best way to achieve our mission is to build a strong and valuable company.

This is how we think about our IPO as well. We’re going public for our employees and our investors. We made a commitment to them when we gave them equity that we’d work hard to make it worth a lot and make it liquid, and this IPO is fulfilling our commitment. As we become a public company, we’re making a similar commitment to our new investors and we will work just as hard to fulfill it.

The Hacker Way

As part of building a strong company, we work hard at making Facebook the best place for great people to have a big impact on the world and learn from other great people. We have cultivated a unique culture and management approach that we call the Hacker Way.

The word “hacker” has an unfairly negative connotation from being portrayed in the media as people who break into computers. In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done. Like most things, it can be used for good or bad, but the vast majority of hackers I’ve met tend to be idealistic people who want to have a positive impact on the world.

The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration. Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it — often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo.

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

Hacking is also an inherently hands-on and active discipline. Instead of debating for days whether a new idea is possible or what the best way to build something is, hackers would rather just prototype something and see what works. There’s a hacker mantra that you’ll hear a lot around Facebook offices: “Code wins arguments.”

Hacker culture is also extremely open and meritocratic. Hackers believe that the best idea and implementation should always win — not the person who is best at lobbying for an idea or the person who manages the most people.

To encourage this approach, every few months we have a hackathon, where everyone builds prototypes for new ideas they have. At the end, the whole team gets together and looks at everything that has been built. Many of our most successful products came out of hackathons, including Timeline, chat, video, our mobile development framework and some of our most important infrastructure like the HipHop compiler.

To make sure all our engineers share this approach, we require all new engineers — even managers whose primary job will not be to write code — to go through a program called Bootcamp where they learn our codebase, our tools and our approach. There are a lot of folks in the industry who manage engineers and don’t want to code themselves, but the type of hands-on people we’re looking for are willing and able to go through Bootcamp.

The examples above all relate to engineering, but we have distilled these principles into five core values for how we run Facebook:

Focus on Impact

If we want to have the biggest impact, the best way to do this is to make sure we always focus on solving the most important problems. It sounds simple, but we think most companies do this poorly and waste a lot of time. We expect everyone at Facebook to be good at finding the biggest problems to work on.

Move Fast

Moving fast enables us to build more things and learn faster. However, as most companies grow, they slow down too much because they’re more afraid of making mistakes than they are of losing opportunities by moving too slowly. We have a saying: “Move fast and break things.” The idea is that if you never break anything, you’re probably not moving fast enough.

Be Bold

Building great things means taking risks. This can be scary and prevents most companies from doing the bold things they should. However, in a world that’s changing so quickly, you’re guaranteed to fail if you don’t take any risks. We have another saying: “The riskiest thing is to take no risks.” We encourage everyone to make bold decisions, even if that means being wrong some of the time.

Be Open

We believe that a more open world is a better world because people with more information can make better decisions and have a greater impact. That goes for running our company as well. We work hard to make sure everyone at Facebook has access to as much information as possible about every part of the company so they can make the best decisions and have the greatest impact.

Build Social Value

Once again, Facebook exists to make the world more open and connected, and not just to build a company. We expect everyone at Facebook to focus every day on how to build real value for the world in everything they do.

Thanks for taking the time to read this letter. We believe that we have an opportunity to have an important impact on the world and build a lasting company in the process. I look forward to building something great together.

The true test of corporate pronouncements and mission statements is not whether they sound good, but rather whether they reflect a real commitment. So on its eight-year anniversary, I think it's appropriate to take a look at what Facebook looked like at the beginning. Here's a brief quote from Zuck's very first press interview, when Facebook had less than one-millionth the users it has today:

After about a week of coding, Zuckerberg launched thefacebook.com last Wednesday afternoon. The website combines elements of a standard House face book with extensive profile features that allow students to search for others in their courses, social organizations and Houses.

“Everyone’s been talking a lot about a universal face book within Harvard,” Zuckerberg said. “I think it’s kind of silly that it would take the University a couple of years to get around to it. I can do it better than they can, and I can do it in a week.”

As of yesterday afternoon, Zuckerberg said over 650 students had registered use thefacebook.com. He said that he anticipated that 900 students would have joined the site by this morning.

“I’m pretty happy with the amount of people that have been to it so far,” he said. “The nature of the site is that each user’s experience improves if they can get their friends to join it.”

Here's to the Zuck I admire, the one that had the courage to launch a simple, useful app in a week, celebrate his first 900 customers, and - for eight straight years - insist on iterating, executing, and building for the long-term. Kudos to the whole Facebook team. I hope your next eight years are just as impressive.

London Calling

2012-01-06T23:02:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year!

Four months ago, The Lean Startup debuted at #2 on the New York Times bestseller list. Since then, I have been immersed in a non-stop whirlwind book tour of North America, filled with as many events, interviews, and talks as I could physically manage. On Monday, I’m taking The Lean Startup across the pond to the UK to launch the first international edition.

A complete list of book tour stops for my journey is below. I hope you'll join me, either in person or virtually. You can also stay up-to-date by following me on Twitter or on Plancast.

And for those that have been asking, yes, a host of translations are in the works. I've included a preliminary list at the end of this post.

Tuesday, January 10- Dublin, Ireland

Dublin Lean Startup Meetup

I’ll be there as The Dublin Lean Startup Meetup Group hosts its first meeting at 6:45pm.

Tickets are $25 Euros, and the first 50 registered will get a copy of my book. Register here
Hilton Hotel
Northern Cross, Malahide Rd
Dublin, Ireland D17
Eric Ries will be launching 'The Lean Startup Meetup Group' Dublin on January 10th "Lean startup" is a term coined by Eric Ries. His method advocates the creation of rapid prototypes designed to test market assumptions, and uses customer feedback to evolve them much faster than via more traditional product development practices.

Wednesday, January 11- Dublin, Ireland

I’ll be facilitating in the Internet Growth Acceleration Programme (iGAP) program. For iGAP participants only.

Thursday, January 12- London, England

London School of Economics
At 6:30pm, I’ll present a public lecture at the Department of Management. This event is free and open to all with no ticket required. Entry is on a first come, first served basis.

London School of Economics and Political Science
Sheikh Zayed Theatre, New Academic Building
54 Lincoln's Inn Fields, WC2A 3LJ
Most new businesses fail. But most of those failures are preventable. The Lean Startup is a new approach to business that's being adopted around the world. It is changing the way companies are built and new products are launched. The Lean Startup is about learning what your customers really want. It's about testing your vision continuously, adapting and adjusting before it's too late. Now is the time to think Lean.
This event marks the publication of Eric Ries new book The Lean Startup

Friday, January 13 - Cambridge, England
On Friday morning, I’ll take a train North to Cambridge. The day kicks off with a corporate event at RedGate Software. Employees only. That evening, there will be a casual talk followed by a book signing at The Hauser Forum.

The Hauser Forum

Registration is from 4pm with the talk starting at 4:30pm with an opportunity for Q&A afterwards, followed by drinks and light refreshments. To sign up Please register here.
The Seminar Centre
The Hauser Forum
3 Charles Babbage Road
Cambridge, CB3 0GT
His book, 'The Lean Startup', is an incredible work. Its only flaw is its name. Eric's principles of innovation apply to any organisation of any type and of any size, and not just startups.
Lean is one of the major trends shaping our world and its impact goes beyond just optimizing our supply chains. Lean startups can be the most capital efficient companies in the world, because they strive to prevent energy from being expended uselessly. Human talent, passion, and wisdom is too precious a commodity to allow it to be wasted.

Saturday, January 14 - London, England
On Saturday, I return to London and will pay a virtual visit to the Lean Startup Machine event that is taking place in Palo Alto, California. Sign up here.

Sunday, January 15 - London, England

The LeanCamp Unconference

Topics will be focused on current challenges of the Leancamp participants. Early bird tickets are sold out, but more tickets will be released on Saturday, January 7. Register here .
Roberts Engineering Building
University College London
Torrington Place (@ Malet Place)
WC1E 6BT London

Monday, January 16- London England

Business Leaders Network Event

At 6pm I’ll take the stage to talk about the ideas behind The Lean Startup and what it means to apply those ideas in practice. After the talk and Q&A, there will be a networking reception and everyone will leave with a complimentary copy of the book.

Ticket information here
Mermaid Theatre
Puddle Dock
Blackfriars, London, EC4V 3DB

Tuesday, January 17- London, England

TechHub
I’ll return to TechHub, where I will coach three TechHub Member companies live on stage. This will be followed by plenty of time for Q&A with the audience. This event sold out last year.

Register here .
TechHub
76-80 City Road, EC1Y 2BJ
London

As always, if you're able to come by an event, please do say hello. See you in Europe!

Coming Soon: other international editions of The Lean Startup

Germany - Muenchner (March 2012)
France – Pearson (March 2012)
Spain - Planeta / Gestion 2000 imprint (February 2012)
Brazil - Leya / Lua de Papel imprint (first half of 2012)
Japan – Nikkei BP (Spring 2012)
Taiwan - Flaneur Co. (Summer 2012)
Russia – Alpina (July 2012)
Thailand - WeLearn
Korea – Insight Press
China - China Citic Press

STARTUP IS VISION

2011-11-28T07:47:00.000-08:00

The following is a rather unusual guest post. One of the more surreal parts of speaking publicly and putting ideas out into the ether is to watch other people run with them. I can't seem to help tuning into comment threads on blogs, news aggregators, etc. Internet people being what they are, a lot of these comments are nasty, brutish, and short.

However, every once in a while, I come across someone who consistently corrects other people's mistakes. Someone who seems to get it. And who am I to complain if that someone happens to be a giant robot dinosaur named FAKEGRIMLOCK? As it turns out, FAKEGRIMLOCK is a writer and artist with a unique style. This guest post has been authored entirely by him, and views expressed are his own.

What follows is FAKEGRIMLOCK's perspective on the importance of vision in a startup. He understands that vision and iteration are allies, for there can be no science without vision. Only vision is worth testing. I'll let him take it from here...

STARTUP MORE THAN BRAIN, MORE THAN MONEY, MORE THAN WORK HARD.

STARTUP IS VISION.

STARTUP IS MAKE FIST OF CODE, PUT IT THROUGH THE WORLD.

VISION IS PUT FIST IN RIGHT PLACE, BREAK WORLD IN HALF.

FIRST THING DISRUPT SELF

EVERYONE GOOD AT SEE CAN'T. EVERYONE LIVE IN WORLD FULL OF IMPOSSIBLE.

EVERYTHING THAT MATTER IMPOSSIBLE UNTIL SOMEONE DO IT ANYWAY.

STOP BEING EVERYONE. STARE AT WHY NOT UNTIL IT GIVE UP AND BECOME HOW TO.

STARTUP IS DO THING EVERYONE HAVE EXCUSE NOT TO.

VISION IS STOP EXCUSES, MAKE FUTURE INSTEAD.

NOW GO BIG. THEN BIGGER

WHAT YOUR PRODUCT CHANGE?

IF ANSWER NOT "WORLD", GO HOME. WORLD HAVE ENOUGH LITTLE IDEA. GET OUT OF LINE, DO SOMETHING BIG. NO CAN HAVE VISION LOOKING AT SOMEONE'S BACK.

WHAT IF ONLY HAVE LITTLE IDEA? SMASH IDEA. THROW AWAY DETAIL. THROW AWAY FEATURE. THROW AWAY CAN'T.

INSIDE LITTLE IDEA IS BIG PROBLEM HELD DOWN BY CAN'T. SET IT FREE.

STARTUP IS SOLVE PROBLEM NO ONE ELSE WILL.

VISION IS SOLVE PROBLEM NO ONE ELSE SEE.

SET COURSE TO AWESOME

SMART STARTUP BUILD, ITERATE, FAIL FAST.

WITHOUT VISION FAIL FAST IS JUST LOTS OF FAIL.

VISION NOT HOW. VISION IS WHERE. TAKE EVERYTHING YOU DOING THAT NOT MOVE TOWARDS VISION.

STOP DOING IT.

NOW EVERYTHING MOVE IN RIGHT DIRECTION. TOWARDS WIN. EVEN FAIL.

STARTUP IS FAIL INTO BUILD IMPOSSIBLE.

VISION IS FAIL INTO WIN EVERYTHING.

TEST TODAY, NOT TOMORROW

TEST IMPORTANT. TEST TELL YOU IF BUILD THING RIGHT. TEST ABOUT DETAILS.

ONLY WAY TEST VISION IS WIN.

VISION NOT A BULLETPOINT. NOT GO IN SPREADSHEET. THERE NO ALGORITHM FOR AWESOME.

DETAILS IMPORTANT. FOR ENGINEER. BUILD TOMORROW NOT SAME AS WHAT TOMORROW TO BUILD.

STARTUP IS SEE WINDOW, START BUILDING WINGS.

VISION IS JUMP OUT WINDOW, TRUST WINGS HAPPEN BEFORE GROUND.

NOW MAKE FIST

INTERNET FULL OF WAY TO MAKE THINGS BETTER. LOTS OF STARTUPS OUT THERE MAKE THINGS BETTER THAN YOU.

ONLY YOU FULL OF SEE WHAT THING TO BUILD.

VISION IS SEE WHAT OTHERS NOT, DO WHAT OTHERS WON'T, WIN WHEN OTHERS CAN'T.

VISION LIKE STORY WITH MOUSE AND CHEESE. SOMEONE MOVE CHEESE, MOUSE FORGET CHEESE, INVENT MACHINE GUN AND EAT CAT.

BE THAT MOUSE.

That old-time startup religion

2011-11-15T05:25:00.000-08:00

Warning: the video below may be offensive to some readers. It contains irreverent use of religious language. Viewer discretion is advised.

So there I was, on stage in front of a large crowd, when Jason says "Has anyone seen the movie Apostle?" That's when I knew things were about to get interesting.

I was in Los Angeles on book tour a few weeks ago. The Los Angeles Lean Startup Circle arranged a spectacular event. I was interviewed - live on stage - by Jason Calacanis for This Week in Startups. The video became Episode #199, and you'll get to watch it below.

Jason's a controversial - and always entertaining - character. He's the founder and CEO of Mahalo, as well as the This Week In network. Oh and he also plays the occasional hand of televised high-stakes poker. So I really did not know what to expect when I met him on stage. For just about an hour, we had an in-depth interview, with Jason asking the kind of questions you only get from someone who has lived through the real highs and lows of entrepreneurship. I thought things were going well.

And then things took a pretty hilarious turn. Jason decides, on the spot, that we're going to have our very own revival meeting. In a full-on southern preacher accent, he invites entrepreneurs up on stage for some "hands on healing" as they share their real stories of problems, challenges, and obstacles in their startups. And, to my great surprise, people come forward. To be honest, I thought it was going to be a disaster, but I was wrong. The rest you have to watch for yourself.

Eric Ries of Lean Startup - TWiST #199

(The "Praise Jesus" starts at about 56 minutes in. Don't say I didn't warn you.)

I wanted to share this video with you, and not just because it is extremely entertaining. At the end of the session, I can tell that something is starting to bother Jason. We've been talking all along about pivots, vanity metrics, and validated learning. And I can see it start to dawn on him that, like the founders we've been "healing" all night, he has some questions about Mahalo that he wants answered.

And so we have a conversation, live on stage, about whether and how Mahalo should pivot from their current business (educational web videos) to a place where they're having unexpected success (paid iPad instructional video apps). A few days later, I noticed this in my newsfeed: Mahalo Lays Off 25 Percent for Shift to Apps From Video. And a few days after that, Mahalo got in touch to ask if I'd come into their studio to record a video instructional app based on The Lean Startup. After all that, how could I say no?

So if you'd like to see the next chapter in this story, you're cordially invited to a video shoot, which will take place next Monday, November 21, at Mahalo World HQ in Los Angeles. I'll be lecturing, we'll take questions from the audience, and - if anyone has the courage to come on stage - we'll even do some "hands-on healing" case studies with real entrepreneurs. Want to come? Sign up here.

See you Monday.

Case Study: The Nordstrom Innovation Lab

2011-10-25T06:57:00.000-07:00

Today's case study answers a bunch of questions all at once about Lean Startup principles: can they be used inside a Fortune 500 company? can they be used to sell physical low-tech products? can they be used in a retail store? I have been confidently answering questions like these non-stop for the past few months. I do believe the answer is yes. But, as the saying goes, seeing is believing. And now you won't have to take my word for it.

Nordstrom is currently ranked #254 on the Fortune 500 (yes, I looked it up) with over $9 billion in revenues. Scrappy startup they are not. And yet they face the same competitive pressures that are causing every modern company to take a long, hard look at the process they use to innovate. Anyone who has read The Innovator's Dilemma knows just how hard it is for a company that has been successful to invest in potentially disruptive innovations.

I have been talking to JB Brown, the manager of the Nordstrom Innovation Lab about publishing a case study. At the same time, Nordstrom had sent a camera crew to document the Lab at work. When I saw the rough cut of the videos they were producing, I knew they would be a powerful teaching tool. It's one thing to talk about "rapid experimentation" and "validated learning" as abstract concepts. It's quite another to see them in action, in a real-world setting. Proving his understanding of minimum viable product, JB suggested that we start small, by posting a "case study MVP." That's how this post came to be.

Below, you'll find two videos: one about the lab, and one containing a case study of the team at work. Watch them both. If you have questions, JB has generously agreed to make himself available to answer them in a future post. Just leave your question as a comment to this post. If there's sufficient interest, we'll expand this MVP.

"A Lean Startup Inside a Fortune 500 Company"

"We Really Don't Know What the Features Are Yet..."

Here are some highlights that I found especially interesting:

One-week iterations. One of the hardest things about corporate innovation is breaking through the slowness that is the default speed for most initiatives. The Nordstrom Innovation Lab solves this problem by working in one-week increments. In the second video above, you'll see them build an entire new product in one week end-to-end.
Genchi gembutsu. This is one of my favorite concepts from the Toyota Production System. It translates roughly as "go and see for yourself" - it's the Toyota version of "get out of the building." By talking face-to-face with customers, salespeople, and managers in a physical store, the innovation team is able to identify an opportunity that they can execute against extremely quickly. But they go beyond simply "getting out of the building" - they actually set up shop physically in a retail store for the entire week. They build products, test new features, and get feedback all out in the open. You really have to see it to believe it.
Simple, rapid, experiments. I hear all the time that developing for iOS, with its myriad approval delays and deployment obstacles means that you can't use rapid development techniques on that platform. Yet in the video you'll see this team overcome that bias with a little ingenuity. They simply brought two iPads with them. While the app is in development, the sales team is using one iPad, and the developers are working on another. At every break, the sales team swaps iPads with the developers - always using the latest version of the app. (The same technique works with paper prototypes, too.)

Have questions for JB and the rest of the Nordstrom Innovation Lab team? Post them as comments.