Leancamp Talk by Reshma

Seedcamp Capacity Building for Europe ’ s Next Generation Technology Entrepreneurs
[email_address]
twitter: #seedcamp
#rsohoni

What is Seedcamp?
Catalyst for generating Europe ’ s next generation of entrepreneurs
Focused on providing mentor connections and initial seed capital
Targeted at EMEA ’ s brightest and most ambitious young entrepreneurs
Organization dedicated to helping them take risks to create world-beating businesses

Seedcamp sees a huge number of seed deals in Europe Jan-Jun Mini Seedcamps TEAMS PROPRIETARY CRM DATABASE LUNCHES, DINNERS WITH MENTORS DEMO INVESTOR, BROAD INVESTOR DAYS TRIP TO VALLEY AND CONFERENCES 20 MENTORS 200+ INVESTMENTS 7-10 OPEN APPLICATIONS PROCESS APPLICATIONS 300+ SHORTLISTED MINI SEEDCAMP TEAMS PROPRIETARY APPLICATIONS AND JUDGING SYSTEM ISRAEL, PARIS, LONDON, PRAGUE, BERLIN, DENMARK, CROATIA STARTUPS 160 LOCAL ADVISORS 350 Jul-Aug Open Applications Sept Seedcamp Week Oct-Dec 3 Months

What we ’ve seen
Invested in 21 startups – 2 to 4 person teams – in past 2 years
Mentored 100s of teams/companies
Received over 1500 applications as part of Seedcamp
Personally – Have worked closely with 50+ startups in the past 10 years; Started 2 startups – Seedcamp and Innovation Advisors, Worked in Incubator at Softbank

We have invested in 21 companies to date Kyko

Lean at Seedcamp
Recommended readings: 4 Steps to Epiphany, Startup Lessons Learned, Metrics for Pirates, etc
Masterclasses with Eric Ries, Sean Ellis, Dave McClure
Constant mentoring, lunches, dinners with experts
Blogging/sharing lessons learned between Seedcampers, sharing resources - http://biztools.pbworks.com/ , http://startuptools.pbworks.com/
Focus on product build (Demo Day) and progress milestones (Investor Day)
Get product in hands of users as quickly as possible, Iterate and build based on user feedback
Start to get users converting to customers, protect the bottom of the funnel
Work towards scaleable customer development and building the top of the funnel
Seedcampers end up raising and therefore wasting less capital getting to product, users, customers, Revenue, and Profit

Staying lean, showing results (Tablefinder, Kublax) 2 dead LAUNCHED PRODUCT 20 of 21 REVENUE PRODUCING (2 are cash flow positive 1 year after launch of service ) 16 of 21 HAVE RAISED FUNDING Raised follow-on funding within 3 mos after Seedcamp Week (€250K-€1.5M) 15 of 21

Making the Unknown Known – Customers and Features
Original product around video hosting built on consulting work done for clients
Went through 2 Seedcamps (3 mos) iterating what the business and product proposition could be – mentor feedback on product need, users vs customers
3 rd Seedcamp, really focused on a video monetization solution b/c that ’s where the greatest opportunity and willingness to pay lay
Analyze, Validate, Execute – Product Build, Sales, Product Build
Approach the large media companies first to understand what their needs were Not just try to fit a product into the business
Identified decision makers and actual users
Dynamic feedback loop – where these needs were communicated back to dev team to develop w/in the week after every meeting
Philosophy of continuous deployment - Looped back to potential clients with links to demos of use cases that were directly relevant and implementable right away
Time to complete a sale has dropped. Trials launched with the big media players. And several smaller companies signing on more quickly as the product fits their needs and their buying decisions are quicker

Customer Needs Development – Stop Selling, Start Listening
Founder is a patient – Needed this type of solution - US hospital research provided long list of features that would help patients and clinicians to interact together online
Started small meetings with doctors and hospital execs in UK to understand what their biggest problems were
Mapped problems with the long list of features
Used same language to communicate features to solve problems and assessed which were priorities
Online consultations kept topping the list. This feature had not been prioritized before by PKB as they had expected sharing of test results being more crucial
Consultations became the minimum viable product to both get customer trust and Revenue – Patient and doctor trials have yet to begin so we do await to see how the product works
Another organization had spent 80M pounds to make the same discovery
Beating the skeptics, this is how PKB got into the NHS, hospitals, doctors, and patients hands

Validated learning about customers (Sales build)
Got one hospital to sign a 3-year contract and used that hospital to bring them into the NHS network
Took the NHS contract to Bupa and got a paid trial there for a small group of patients and connecting with NHS hospitals. Spec ’d and built some functionality together
Took that contract to the hospital and got a paid trial for the same group of patients. Spec ’d and built some more functionality together
Took both contracts to another hospital and they want the product plus more features that they ’re willing to pay for
Parallel processing product build
These customer meetings are shared with the dev team on calls 3x per week. Weekly sprints are done
Users are video recorded and shared with the developers
Each stage of development is built to be secure and scaleable for the small number of requested features being built

Everyday action on implementing the Lean Methodology
Scaled up dev team fast as team has grown from 1 person to 6 quickly
Would have wasted a lot of time and Cash without these strong processes. Constantly iterating based on listening to users
Product backlog - a laundry list of all features for development -> sorted into releases, prioritised, time estimates made. Record kept of what ’s ongoing, done (moved off), or planned. It’s a fluid tool, and it needs to be ‘agile’ to reflect current priorities, so recognise things on there will change. Each week they go back to the PB and check priorities and move things currently relevant onto the sprint plan
Sprint plan – plan of action for that ‘sprint’. Weekly sprints, which is on the extreme side of agile. The idea is, you plan the sprint at the beginning, size the tasks, and generally don’t add new items during the week. But we’ve found that about a 70% sprint to 30% ‘other urgent stuff’ ratio is needed, since unknowns (urgent bugs) always happen. At the end of the sprint ideally you put another version of the product into production
Daily ‘scrum’ calls. Basically at 9am every day the whole team gets together for just 10 – 15 mins to say a) what you’ve done the day before b) what items from the sprint you plan to do that day and c) any problems that the team needs to be aware about. Strictly it should be the dev team, but they report back on ‘business’ stuff too since it’s good that everybody is in touch with what everyone’s doing. It’s a small team

Read 4 Steps To The Ephiphany and chucked out the homebrew and implemented Customer Discovery
been running Customer Discovery for about 6 months
results:
too early to tell properly, but
very happy with super-low costs
implementing customer-driven change/feature pull (eg kanban )
works well with the continuous deployement/daily build system developed on the technical side
still have teething problems with customer dev/product spec (eg heijunka – production smoothing)

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Leancamp Talk by Reshma

by Seedcamp on May 10, 2010

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Leancamp Talk by Reshma — Presentation Transcript