Comments (16)

By brantcooper, March 15, 2012 5:06 pm

Those who run in #LeanStartup circles know too well the problems encountered with language.  Eric Ries, Steve Blank and others are criticized for choosing terms and phrases — lean, customer development, MVP, fail fast, etc. — which unintentionally lure would be startup entrepreneurs into thinking about things Wrong and then doing them Wrong.  Lean means don’t take money, “don’t you really mean market development, not customer development,” minimum viable product should be minimum desirable product, one doesn’t really want to fail fast, that causes entrepreneurs to screw their investors or not persevere.

While the critics make cogent arguments, there’s an implicit assumption that different words would not be subject to similar critique from a different angle. It’s generally not helpful to remove phrases from their context and critique them standing on their own.  Doesn’t “viable” contain “desirable?”

I tell you all this, however, because I’m about to do the same thing.

Don’t Think Big

“Thinking Big” is used as panacea to the menace of “feature” startups, who are merely “copycat” companies that often embrace the leanstartup “formula” that forces them to have “small ideas” and seek to “flip,” thereby leaving their investors in the lurch.  Thing is, markets determine the size potential of the business and many startup entrepreneurs mistakenly believe “think big” means go for a big market.  Tragically, a small idea attracts a small market no matter how big the market is you go after.  Thinking big doesn’t change a small idea into a big market.

Do you see what I did right there?

Truthfully, people who exclaim “Think Big” mean go for big ideas.  But do you know why the “startup curve” leads with the TechCrunch bump?  Because the founders were “thinking big” regardless of the size of their idea.  Do you know why a few startups survive the bump? The sage Fred Wilson says:

It turns out, like most success stories, the answer [for success] was simplifying the service. Taking features out. Reducing the value proposition to a clear and simple use case. This was not done in a vacuum. This was done by releasing a less than perfect product to the market, finding a few customers who wanted a less than perfect product, and then listening carefully to those customers to get to the ideal product.

That’s right, they succeed by thinking small. Product-market fit happens first in sub-segments. Understanding the core value proposition for hyper-sub-segmented markets is where you’ll find strong market signals.  You can’t go big without winning small first.  It’s impossible.  The top of the funnel is not filled in as quickly as the bottom no matter how fast you pour the water.

Sean Ellis writes: “[S]tart by focusing the majority of your energy trying to create at least one must have use case.”

To understand a “use case” you must properly and even obsessively segment your market.

Think Disruptive

What critics of me-too startups (criticism that I think is unwarranted, btw) really mean is: Think Disruptive.  Don’t be sustaining innovation.  Change the world.  I’m all for that, though all startups have their place in the ecosystem.  (If we grow the bottom of the startup pyramid, we’ll get more disruption at the top.) When you have thousands of new startups, the fact that most founders focus on problems they experience shouldn’t be surprising. What would be surprising is if it were true that if they simply thought a little harder, they’d be able to come up with ideas that are truly disruptive.

Most truly disruptive innovations come out of scientific or engineering disciplines and though they’re not very visible to the startup community, tens of thousands of people are working on them.  If Universities had better lab to market programs (e.g., where they’re taught doing rather than merely writing business plans, or licensing technology to dinosaurs), we would see more disruptive activity.  Investors focusing on hugely promising technology is a good thing, too.

Disruption is often stumbled upon.  Experimentation is a good way to lead to lucrative stumbles.

Like other startup people who hear a lot of pitches, I do tire of hearing similar pitches and the mobile app equivalent of a bridge to nowhere. But hey, if any of them happen to succeed, it will likely be because they nailed the value prop for a market segment that eventually proved big enough.

Comments (5)

By brantcooper, December 21, 2011 3:40 pm

When you hear concepts over and over, you often wonder is it because it’s swarming or because your ear is newly attuned to it?  Did you know there’s a lot of people who believe that the #11 has super powers and that’s why when they look at the clock, it’s always 11 after?  Seriously.

UX is hip.  And rightly so.  I thought I’d share a theory why this is so and what impact it might have on your startup.  This despite the fact that I’m relatively new to UX concepts.

The 90s

Painting with a super broad brush, the 90s technology revolution which saw the introduction of PCs and networks into businesses was driven primarily by increases in productivity measured at the business level.  Reduction in support staff, increased internal and inter-business communication had a measurable impact on the business.  While the technology was expensive and the immediate net benefit small, it grew enough in the late 90s to, at the very least, portend benefits to come.

It was far from smooth-sailing.  The effective lifecycle of a PCs was only 2-3 years.  If you had a network of 100 nodes, you were easily paying 100K/year to hardware and software to keep things running at a pretty basic level.  Some medium sized businesses were seriously thinking of packing it in until costs would come down or larger benefits could be realized.

If there’s one thing that seems to be true in technology, it’s that future benefits are easy to imagine and don’t come quickly enough. In other words, the industry pretty consistently over-promises and under delivers.  Technology in the 90s was mired with buggy (Microsoft) software that bogged down trailing hardware and arguably was maliciously incompatible with (buggy) legacy network software (Netware).

An emphasis on UX was nowhere to be seen.  Of course, that’s not exactly true, Apple had it in spades.  But the extra dollars required for an improved user experience had little impact for the average business user on business productivity. A reasonable argument could be made that this was a short-sighted view, but the view was rational. If you triple the price tag, you must triple the productivity. The Macintosh made headway in businesses at the departmental level, where the impact on productivity was significant; in other words, where specialized graphic-intensive applications were put to use.

The UX experience on the PC was crap and no one wanted to pay to improve it, since you could still reduce the administrative support to principal ratio even with crappy systems.  That it took a IT guy several weeks to implement buggy MS Mail to SMTP gateways and the end-user process to send such an email sucked didn’t matter relative to the time and money savings of sending proposals at the last minute vs sending hard copies via Fed Ex.

The 2000s

As the Internet emerged as a business productivity tool, the primary beneficiary was the department.  The browser as a standardized UI for internal applications reduced IT supports costs and offered some freedom for departments and business units from their dependency on IT.  As SaaS emerged, this independence accelerated.

The early user experience on the browser was horrible and often worse than that of desktop or client/server applications.  But the benefits from a lightweight interface and reduced dependency on IT outweighed the superior UX experience.  Further, technical limitations on the browser thwarted efforts to improve the experience.

Today

While I’m sure there will be a whole new revolution in business and departmental productivity, likely brought on by human-computer interaction technology (think Kinnect), today’s story is about personal productivity.  Applications built for the desktop stand-alone, mobile, browser-based SaaS are all about improving user productivity.  The two primary ways to achieve this are 1) work within existing flows; 2) mimic the offline world.

I chuckle when I see marketing slogans “We’re going to change the way you work!”  Really?  See ya!  Why do dating sites fail? They don’t replicate how human beings meet.

The tricky thing is that you need to improve productivity enough to justify the costs without changing behavior so much as to make the product undesirable.  How do we do this?  With superior UX, of course.  How do you nail such a thing?  It should come as not surprise that my recommendation is deploying Lean UX design principles.  You must understand the it is a delicate, learning process.

“But people are so different!” you rightfully lament. Yep, the one size fits all is dead. While investors and industry pundits hand-wringing about copycats, features-not-products, thinking-too-small, etc., the entrepreneurship world is producing 1000s of startups to figure out how to solve common problems across a wide-diversity of people.

I don’t know what the landscape ends up looking like.  If big businesses swoop up  lean startups who have successfully unlocked one or more beachhead market segments, they can’t kill the innovation or roll it up into bloatware without creating a new startup opportunity.  Similarly, is it possible for one SaaS or mobile product to solve similar productivity problems for a mass of varied segments?

I welcome your thoughts in comments!

Comments (3)

By brantcooper, September 12, 2011 9:12 pm

As an early believer in Lean Startup movement, I can perhaps be excused for my unbridled enthusiasm for the release of Eric Ries’ new book, The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses. Not however, for the reasons you might expect.

In fact, some early adopters of Lean Startups — those who have already bought into the framework to the extent that they’ve applied its practices into their high tech startup — might be a tad disappointed.  They might have to look a little deeper; there’s no vanity steps to success herein.

Why? In the end, this book is not written for them. But rather, like any good entrepreneur, Eric is aiming at the Mainstream market.  According to Geoffrey Moore in Crossing the Chasm, you can’t address the Mainstream market the same way you learned to do in the early adopter market.  (Hence the chasm.)

In my opinion, for example, early smartphone adopters diss’ the iphone, because Apple targeted the Mainstream, not them.

Eric’s intentions are easily discerned from his definition of Startup:

“A human institution designed to create new products and services under conditions of extreme uncertainty.”

This is clearly not intended to speak (only) to high technology startups, but rather to anywhere uncertainty exists. In my opinion, this is the strength of Ries’ book: it is a call to action to anyone inclined to take action to make things better despite facing severe uncertainty.  There is no boundaries to where you can exercise your entrepreneurship.  And though Eric doesn’t state so explicitly, true entrepreneurs are those willing to admit to the uncertainly within the institutions they inhabit AND to develop solutions that solve problems in the face of that uncertainty.

This definition applies to social entrepreneurship, non-profits, education, government, large successful businesses, and any business with technology risk or market risk, including yes, high tech startups.

Think about this for a second.  If true, the problem with the failure to innovate facing many hugely successful businesses is not that they don’t “act like a startup,” but rather that they don’t understand their own uncertainty.  Most people recognize that many governmental institutions face extreme inefficiencies and could benefit from new products and services designed and implemented in new ways.  The roadblock is, perhaps, that in a society overly dependent upon the advice of “experts,” we are unable to admit to the uncertainties we confront and therefore fail to unleash the creativity necessary to build new systems to solve big problems.

Conversely, those who claim to know everything, in other words face no uncertainty, are either not part of a “startup” or simply not truly entrepreneurial.  The arrogance of certainty leads to doing things the way they’ve always been done.

Make no mistake:  there is much here for high tech startups. Entrepreneurs who are still figuring out how to apply the principles to their businesses have much to learn here, but Eric describes less how to do it and more how to think about doing it. (Teach a man to fish and all that.) Personally, I have found that there are multiple layers of understanding to be had in the Lean Startup world and most of us are just scratching the surface. While some will look for more specific action items, Ries’ approach is honest, since there is no such thing as a startup blueprint.  While “Build, Measure, Learn” is easy to grok, the actual practices one has to put into place to create a learning environment that induces change, that produces products that people care about is hard.  No, It’s really hard.  And it’s one thing to do it in a high-tech startup of a couple of people and it’s another thing entirely do to it in a startup environment of 10 people and it’s another universe to do it in static, change-averse cultures that are in the most dire need of disruption.

Eric’s “stuffing the envelope” analogy, for example, is illuminating and one I hadn’t encountered before.  It turns out that stuffing envelopes one at a time is faster than differentiating the tasks and doing them in batch mode.

“What if it turns out that the customer doesn’t want the product we’re building? Working in small batches ensures that a startup can minimize the expenditure of time, money, and effort that ultimately turns out to be wasted.”

When in execution mode — i.e., when uncertainty has been eliminated — you can optimize processes for speed or cost.  When in learning mode, however, crippling inefficiencies can occur if you’ve optimized execution on the wrong parameters and then learn your assumptions were wrong.

Eric offers stories that run against the grain, which lead you to think differently about how to solve problems, such as increasing efficiency through less specialization and the fastidious elimination of metrics that enforce false certainty (vanity metrics).

There’s more to come. Eric briefly tackles the quest to bring disruptive innovation to the enterprise. At this point, I’m not sold on the methods prescribed.  Ries says he aims to “protect the parent organization from the startup” thereby turning the conventional model “on its head.” The premise seems to be that senior management “springs innovation” onto existing managers.

I’m not sure this is the case.  I think it more likely that senior managers are more distrustful of low margin, small market experiments run by kooky internal entrepreneurs then they are of managers who continue to execute on current products.  Futhermore, there is no real head flipping here since these are really two sides of the same coin. Maybe big company departments need protection from fast moving startup people, but startups need “protection” from the problem of being measured by the same criteria (e.g. profit margin) as existing product.  Big company R&D centers are rife with products that never see the light of day.

My take is that big companies are going to look more to startups to solve the problem of disruptive and even sustaining innovation.  An economy bustling with 1000s of Lean Startups is conducive to enterprises waiting for small entrepreneurs to prove the market before the big guys move in.  It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

The Dark Side The book is perhaps a bit heavy on the development side of the house, but for anyone envisioning innovation, this is the right place to start.  Eric’s discussion of applying the “5 Why’s” is instrumental to understanding the implementation of fail-safe processes.  It would be interesting to see  these principles applied to the dark art of sales and marketing.  Instead of traditional loss reports, what would a no-blame-game 5 Why’s look like to dissect a failed sale?  Poor Customer Support?

But this only means that new ideas of how to apply Lean Startup principles need to be tested, validated and shared.  When discussing my book, the Enterpreneur’s Guide to Customer Development, with Steve Blank, he remarked how the school of thought he pioneered “is what it preaches.” Eric’s book demonstrates that.  Not only because Customer Development is an important aspect of Lean Startups, but because Eric’s own vision and elucidation of Lean Startups has evolved tremendously from when I first heard him present his ideas in June of 2009 in China.

The Lean Startup movement is a framework entrepreneurs of all stripes can use to innovate in their industries. All those who adapt and practice it – who make it their own – will continue to advance the Lean Startup framework.

Comments (1)

By brantcooper, September 3, 2011 12:21 pm

Even since I began tweeting — as a non-early adopter in early 2009, btw — I’ve wanted to create a 10 steps blog post for something, because, well, because that’s what you’re supposed to when you blog, right?  So when my Twitter dashboard became a (brief) topic of conversation at the San Diego Tech Coffee meetup last week , an opportunity arose: a 10 steps post on Twitter? Damn, that’s social media gold right there.  And I’m after nothing, if not social media gold!

So I came up with 8 steps, which is 2 whole steps easier than 10!

But seriously, people.  I love Twitter, use it daily, and there is simply no doubt that I have benefited from using it.  Depending on your business, not only might you  benefit, too, but it might be required practice for you to be successful.

So if you have not taken the dive into Twitter, forget all the negativity you’ve heard and read on.

1. Determine why you want to use Twitter

I use Twitter for the following reasons (in no particular order):

• Build my brand
• Learn what to read from people I respect (I no longer visit my “blogroll”)
• “Socialize” (in a very broad definition of the term) with “real” people
• Participate & nourish specific communities, e.g, the San Diego tech scene
• Indirectly (mostly) sell products and services

I’m guessing some of your ambitions might fall within that list, but regardless, know what you want to get out of using Twitter.

2. Choose a client

I strongly recommend you don’t use Twitter’s web client.  In my view, you’ll be more successful if you segregate your Twitter feeds based loosely on the objectives you determined in Step 1.  I use TweetDeck and have used HootSuite in the past.

3. Follow

Follow people who will help you meet your objectives. Follow writers, journalists and bloggers you read, thought-leaders in subject matters you care about, and other influencers whom you think might tweet interesting stuff.  Don’t be concerned if they don’t follow you back.  Follow colleagues, peers, casual acquaintances and friends, but only those that are interested in or are somehow related to subject matters that concern you.

You can follow people outside those parameters, too, but be prepared for tweets that fit the Twitter cliche, e.g., “I’m flossing, but just can’t loosen that piece of beef stuck between the cuspid and first premolar.”

4. Create lists

Lists allow you to group tweeters by subject matter and “Tweetability”.  (Twitter allows you to NOT follow people, yet include them in your lists, which is patently absurd and leads to gaming of follows.  But that’s a different topic altogether.)  Create one list for your “Top Tweeters.”  I call mine “Watch” and I keep it private, in other words, others cannot see its members.  I put people in the list whom I am confident I want to read their tweets.  They are people I respect, thought leaders, influencers or simply good tweeters.  New tweeters have to earn their way onto the list.  Crappy tweeters who also happen to be “people I respect, thought leaders or influencers” are removed from the list.

I also have a list for people who tweet politics, tweeters based in Southern California, and news feeds.

Dave Churchville: In awe (with a tinge of fear) of the sheer number of columns in @brantcooper ‘s TweetDeck

5. Columnize your feed

Columns turn your massive, undifferentiated stream into digestible, information sources.  In TweetDeck, I have a column each for my lists:  ”watch”, politics, socal tweeps, and the newsfeed.  I also have a column for the standard Twitter feeds Mentions (of me), Direct Messages and “All Friends.”  Finally, I created 2 columns based on custom search queries:  tweets that mention hashtags #custdev or #leanstartup; and tweets about “San Diego startups.”  The number of tweets in each column is actually pretty easy to follow.

6. Commit

A change in behavior can’t happen by casually “checking it out.”  So maybe you don’t want to change your behavior.  But you don’t even know if that’s true until you truly give something new a shot.  Commit time to check your feed everyday for 2 weeks.  I don’t care if it’s only for 15 minutes.  Read tweets, read recommended posts, learn something new.

7. Engage at your own pace

Don’t tweet for the sake of tweeting.  Seriously, just don’t.  RT something you like.  Reply to a tweet if you have something to say.  You might not find your voice in the first 2 weeks, but who cares?  If you find what you receive valuable, you’ll come back.  Eventually you’ll figure how to give value.

8. Manage your feed

Graduate Tweeps from your All Friends and search columns to your Watch (Top Tweeters) list as needed.  Demote others.  You don’t have to unfollow, but if there is absolutely zero value to the Tweets AND no other value to keeping these people on your follow list, unfollow them.  You might want to follow people who are influential to you in some way, but they might suck at Twitter.  So keep them in the All Friends list.  You don’t have to worry about insulting them by unfollowing, but they won’t clutter your feed if you’re managing your lists well.

To be honest, I look at the “All Friends” feed the least. The most noise comes from the custom query columns.  But I find these easy to ignore, since my other lists contain the Tweeps I want to hear from.

For most people, the most difficult part is just getting started.  I’ve purposefully not addressed the etiquette of social media, providing value and all that, because that’s been written about several times before and is something you can worry about after you get going.  I hope to simply help you get going.  Start small, differentiate your feeds, commit to a small amount of time everyday for 2 weeks.

Let me know how it’s going!