Comments (14)

By brantcooper, November 11, 2010 11:47 am

If you follow high tech startups at all, it was virtually impossible to have missed all the discussions this summer regarding disruptions occurring in the startup environment, including the role of investors, the wisdom of “Lean startups,” and bemoaning the fall of the “big win” mentality.  As I sad in a Venture Beat article, when in the midst of change, it’s difficult to know where you are in the curve.  It’s also difficult to discern whether something is an instigator of change or the result of change.

I think it’s important to understand that there is a new startup reality, that this reality is not based on fads, but represents a fundamental shift — i.e., there is no going back.

First, startups are a global phenomenon. If you don’t believe me, hitch a ride on one of Dave McClure’s Geeks on a Plane trip or note the different languages used to tweet about Lean Startups.  Not only are entrepreneurs creating new startups around the world, but the ability to hire quality resources and manage remote teams improves every year.

Second, startups are cheaper to start. By now this is stating the obvious, but with open source platforms and tools, the relative ease of building product (including hardware) compared to a decade ago, the emergence of social media and marketing analytics, and again, inexpensive global resources, mean that founders can get up and running toward proving elements of their business model for thousands of dollars.

Third, startups are social. Back in the day, the sole purpose of networking events was to exchange business cards and exercise ego.  It was about “what can you do for me.”  Today, it’s about “what can I do for you.”  In my experience, entrepreneurs today embrace the ethos of “providing value,” with the belief that value will someday, somewhere be provided back.  There is a desire for real entrepreneurial community that creates an incredibly fertile environment.

Fourth, startups are data-intelligent. While there’s always the risk of drowning in data, the fact is that entrepreneurs have an incredible amount of intelligence about their customers.  From resources that today seem incredibly mundane like dead-simple survey tools, to narrow, but powerful apps to test and measure user experience and interface design, to sophisticated analytics around marketing funnels and product feature usage, startups are able to “build, test, measure” like never before.

Fifth, startups are savvy.  By this I mean, that they are a smarter about building startups.  Not because they are more intelligent, but because they have 1-4 above.  They are more worldly-wise, they are open, they share, they are eager to learn and they have access to incredible mentoring.

Barring some global catastrophe like, I don’t know, the ice caps melting or something, none of the above is reverting back to the way it was in the past anytime soon.  Unable to predict the future, I’ll leave open whether bigger trends emerge.  But so given the above, what can we discern?

The macro changes described above have created a perfect storm for disruption to the startup environment.  It has given rise of the “super angel.”  Is has resulted in an explosion of incubators, accelerators, co-working spaces and mentorship programs.  It has enabled the successful emergence of the Lean Startup methodology. While in the micro- sense, as individuals, Eric Ries and Steve Blank are changing how startups are build and Dave McClure is helping change the investor landscape, from a macro- point of view, they are the result of disruption, not the cause.

I point this out not to diminish their accomplishments, but on the contrary, to argue 1) criticisms of their activity largely miss the real point; and 2) we don’t know yet how the environment will look, only that it won’t be the way it was before.

So with that, I will go ahead and predict where I think we’re headed.

Already, college students worldwide graduate believing they will launch a startup.  Go to any Startup Weekend or Lean Startup Machine event and listen to interesting pitches being made by weekend warriors.  It’s incredible.  Hundreds of thousands of would be startup entrepreneurs emerging globally every year.  We are witnessing a fundamental shift in power from investors to entrepreneurs.  Local communities are forming everywhere with entrepreneurship as their focus.  These ecosystems are emerging to support “grassroots entrepreneurship.”

All these startups cannot be funded by institutional investors.  Friends and family investors is already an accepted first effort, though VCs were preaching otherwise as recent as a couple of years ago.  Perhaps some still do.  The rise of early stage (even 5-10K) investments through wealthy individuals, angels and incubators is already occurring.

No matter how much some bemoan “dipshit” companies, sorry brother, they are here to stay.

The fall of the “big win” is permanent.  Investors, find a new model.  You can’t just bet on the needle in the ever-growing haystack.

The role of M&A will increase.  Big companies will struggle to keep up with both sustaining and disruptive innovation.  Acquisition is their only hope.  Secondary equity markets to merge synergistic startups will rise in prominence.

On the entrepreneurs’ side, Founders will continue to need to prove business models to get funding, so the use of Lean Startup or Lean Startup-like methodologies will accelerate, as well bootstrapping and crowdsourcing.

While some of this may seem obvious and some wild speculation, the fundamental factors driving the disruption are pretty indisputable.  And it’s important to distinguish between what we can do and changes we can drive versus what is changing us.  Such a perspective can help us at the very least, to picture the forest if not actually see it.

What is being created, in my estimation, is an innovation machine.   High-powered Lean Startups — fast pivoting toward product-market fit and capital efficient — are like “Moore’s Law for Startups”: increasing output on decreasing input, over time.  Imagine an environment where we embrace dozens of startups attacking similar problems, but with different solutions and targeting different segments.  Large businesses are perhaps constructed from small wins.  Big businesses innovate through acquisition.  Such an environment can only lead to more and faster disruptive innovation.

The real question then becomes, perhaps, how does society handle an increasing rate of disruptive innovation?

Right or wrongly, Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834) is held out as a representative of inevitable doom and gloom scenarios involving human existence.  Critics often point to technological advances as examples of how humans continually postpone, if not vanquish, Malthus’ scenarios.  There will always be those ready to declare, The End is Near! But there’s no denying the world faces extraordinary problems.  And I can’t help but feel that when you have a powerful groundswell of entrepreneurship occurring on the one hand, and an absurd peak of celebrating ignorance in our society on the other, that we are perhaps reaching toward the next epoch of innovation and enlightenment.

Comments (5)

By brantcooper, July 28, 2010 7:36 pm

Now a couple of days away from the Lean Startup Machine startup weekend, I wanted to get down some initial thoughts on the event.  When approached about participating in the event, I was immediately intrigued by the idea, as long as it took the lean startup principles seriously.  Much to their credit, organizers Trevor Owens, Ben Fisher and Kyle Kelly were open to any and all ideas to make the event conform to Lean Startup and customer development principles.  And much to Eric Ries‘ credit, he threw his support behind the idea once such conformity was demonstrated.  Still, this was an experiment.

The more one adopts these principles, the more one can find ways to adopt them in all areas of life — they become “meta,” as Patrick Vlaskovits would say — and this event was no exception.  It was Lean Startup Machine’s Minimum Viable Product.

By all accounts (that I’ve heard), the event was a rousing success.  Here are some more or less random thoughts about the weekend, some of which I hope to cover in more depth soon:

1) I’m blown away by the people who attended: smart, opinionated, creative, dedicated team-players with some really interesting ideas.  And they all want to be startup founders.  Many will scoff at whether this is a good thing or not, but I think it’s great.

2) Customer Development is a great conflict resolution tool.  When you reach a loggerhead, formulate opposing opinions as hypotheses and go test them.

3) While there was reluctance among some and a few Engineers stayed inside completely, whole teams hit the streets of NYC to engage customers.  It was awesome to see!  I can’t wait for the video.

4) Clearly enterprise B2B ideas are at a disadvantage when it comes to weekend customer development.  But B2C rocked it and B2SMB took advantage of New York’s vast number of local businesses.

5) Good team balance was essential.  Those teams with naturally social members kicked customer development butt.  People were making phone calls to business owners across the country, setting up Craigslist ads, conducting surveys, interviewing by telephone and pounding the pavement for person-to-person discussions.  There was more combined customer development in one weekend than most startups do in a year!

6) Customer Development is hard.  Several assumptions were crushed over the weekend and for the more brutal failings, there were no easy follow on steps.  It’s one thing for a market segment to fail, it’s another when a core idea is roundly  rejected.  But it happened.   It’s easy to become demoralized by negative validation, but the teams pressed on.

7) We saw some amazing pivots, product mockups that reflected the changes, and then customer validation of the pivots!  That’s pretty amazing for a weekend’s work.

8 ) Some people had a tough time understanding the difference between seeking evidence for their idea and testing their assumptions.

9) This event has great potential.  There were some rough spots, but no major problems and the learning that went on was tremendous.

10) It will be interesting to hear more feedback, but my general impression is that this was the first real encounter with customer development for most of the participants and that the experience they gained was invaluable.  My belief is that to truly grok customer development, you must “get a win;” meaning you need to experience first hand the empowerment that comes from customer validated ideas.  I think we had a lot of that!

If there’s something in particular you’d like to hear more about the weekend, please let me know in comments.

Comments (9)

By brantcooper, February 9, 2010 1:36 pm

Lean is not about the funding you take,

The size of your sales force, the money you make.

Lean is not how much money you spend,

That you like your product and so does your friend.

To test your guess and iterate,

To kill your favorite feature your customers hate,

To exercise ideas, removing the sheen,

That is what makes a startup lean.

Comments (4)

By brantcooper, February 3, 2010 12:10 pm

Because of the overwhelming response and great feedback for the the Customer Development image I recently shared, I decided to share another from our upcoming book. Please let me know what you think.

Figure 2. My interpretation of Ries' Lean Startup: Customer and product development interrelatedness

*CPS = Customer-Problem-Solution

As shown in Figure 2, customer development and product development are two distinct, but interrelated and iterative processes. As Eric Ries describes, the Customer Development team works on testing the problem-customer-solution assumptions, while the Product Development team tackles the solution.  The product development process receives input from customers indirectly through customer development, and (in the web world) directly through measurement of product usage.  The product development process actively iterates on the product, releasing new or different functionality directly to the customer as quickly as possible.

The customer development process receives input from customers indirectly through product development reports on feature usage, but also directly from customer development processes and analytics.  The customer development process iterates on core business assumptions, product functionality, and acquisition and conversion assumptions, resulting in updated hypotheses, honed messaging, positioning, marketing tactics, and feature requirements.

In the Customer Discovery context, a lean startup is not one that necessarily uses lean manufacturing precepts per se, but rather one that uses fast, iterative development practices in conjunction with customer development methodologies in order to:

1)       Validate core hypotheses (customer-problem-solution),

2)       Produce an MVP,

3)       Achieve Product-Market fit,

4)       Produce a development and marketing roadmap for scaling.

Creating a proper iteration loop requires you to predefine success and failure for each stage, and a means to measure your progress.  For example, in the web-based world, Dave McClure’s AARRR metrics (Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, Revenue) might be applied to measure the stages from concept to product-market fit.

(BTW, if you are interested in being notified when the book is published, sign up here.)