Leveraging Lean For Your Startup

Leveraging Lean For Your Startup

October 6, 2016

Kyra DavisDirector of Academic & Government Relations@Kyra Davis

Jake DisraeliSenior Sales Associate

Intro Story

5-Year Financial Forecasts

Historical Method of Launching Companies 30-Page Business PlansIf you build it, will they come?

Steve BlankNo business plan survives the first contact with customers.

SEARCHtoFrom EXECUTION

Business Plans > Business Model Canvas Customer Development during Product DevelopmentLinear Execution > Pivot, Iterate, and ValidateChanging the Rules of InnovationLean Startup

Dont marry your idea!

The answers are outside the building.

Business Model CanvasA business model describes how an organization creates, delivers and captures value.

*Licensed from Strategyzer.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License

Business Model Canvas

*Licensed from Strategyzer.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License

Customer Development A process for testing and validating your market and business model hypotheses through interactions with potential customers.

Designing Customer Development Experiments Which hypotheses will you be testing?How will you test them? What will you measure?How will you determine success or failure?Rinse and repeat.

Customer Interviews Identify your goals and important assumptions to test in advanceAsk open ended questions and five whysGet psyched to hear things you dont want to hearSearch for behaviors and patterns, not feelingsNever pitch; be aware of confirmation bias.5 Best Practices for Conducting Customer Interviews

Confirmation Bias

Flow of a Customer Interview Context for conversation.Demographic information.Learn about their behaviors and processes surrounding your solution.How are they currently solving the problem?Would they be willing to pay to do it differently?Have they tried ways of the solving the problem?Which aspects about this problem are most important to them?Now, get feedback on your solution (if you have a prototype).Ask for introductions.

Hypothesis Testing Prototypes & Wire FramesGoogle AdWordsLanding PagesInteract with online communities (Quora, Reddit, blogs, etc.)Surveys (but be careful!)

Additional Methods for Testing Hypotheses

Customer Interviews In Action

Customer Interviews In Action 1. What are your company killing assumptions? Is it a feature that youre depending on being successfully adopted? Is it a pain point that your entire model is built around? Maybe its a channel partner that you need for distribution.

Customer Interviews In Action 2. Who do you need to talk to to test these assumptions?Be as specific as possible (age, income, profession, location, media habits, etc.)

Customer Interviews In Action 3. How will you gather information? How do you quantify success?Where will you go? How will you schedule conversations?

Customer Interviews In Action 4. What are three interview questions you will use?Describe the process of doing X from start to finish?What are the biggest pains associated with doing X?

Vitruvian Therapeutics

Phrase the assumption that you will test as a clear statement that can be proven right or wrong.HypothesisDesign an experiment to test your hypothesis and build any artifacts that you will need to run it.designRun your qualitative or quantitative test with customers or stakeholders.TESTAnalyze the results and decide whether to pivot, iterate or persevere.Learn

Rapid Experimentation The iterative learning process that is used to quickly test hypotheses about the product or business.

Emotional Rollercoaster

My idea rocks!Whoa. Maybe not.Hmm. Thats interesting.This might work!Im close, but not there yet.Ok, how about this one!Ugh. Still no.Found it!!! Lets go.

Darn it.

Good feeling about this one.

Lean Never Stops

WIZERInitial Concept:Wearable and data-based hand sanitizer to reduce risk of healthcare-associated infections for doctors and provide compliance data to hospitals.

WIZER

WIZER

WIZER

Blue River Technology

Kyra DavisDirector of Academic & Government Relations

Jake DisraeliSenior Sales Associate

@kyradavis