2009 08 19 The Lean Startup TechStars Edition

The Lean Startup#leanstartupTechStars Edition
Eric Ries (@ericries)
http://StartupLessonsLearned.blogspot.com

Most Startups Fail

Most Startups Fail
But it doesn’t have to be that way.
We can do better.
This talk is about how.

What is a startup?
A startup is a human institution designed to deliver a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.
Nothing to do with size of company, sector of the economy, or industry

Product / Market Fit
“Do whatever is required to get to product/market fit. Including:
changing out people,
rewriting your product,
moving into a different market,
telling customers no when you don’t want to,
telling customers yes when you don’t want to,
raising that fourth round of highly dilutive venture capital
—whatever is required.”
— Marc Andreessen
http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/the-pmarca-gu-2.html

The Pivot
What do successful startups have in common?
They started out as digital cash for PDAs, but evolved into online payments for eBay.
They started building BASIC interpreters, but evolved into the world's largest operating systems monopoly.
They were shocked to discover their online games company was actually a photo-sharing site.
Pivot: change directions but stay grounded in what we’ve learned.
http://startuplessonslearned.blogspot.com/2009/06/pivot-dont-jump-to-new-vision.html

Speed Wins
if we can reduce the time between major iterations
we can increase our odds of success

A Tale of Two Startups

Startup #1

Stealth Startup Circa 2001

All about the team

A good plan?
Start a company with a compelling long-term vision.
Raise plenty of capital.
Hire the absolute best and the brightest.
Hire an experienced management team with tons of startup experience.
Focus on quality.
Build a world-class technology platform.
Build buzz in the press and blogosphere.

Achieving Failure
Company failed utterly, $40MM and five years of pain.
Crippled by “shadow beliefs” that destroyed the effort of all those smart people.

Shadow Belief #1
We know what customers want.

Shadow Belief #2
We can accurately predict the future.

Shadow Belief #3
Advancing the plan is progress.

A good plan?
Start a company with a compelling long-term vision.
Raise plenty of capital.
Hire the absolute best and the brightest.
Hire an experienced management team with tons of startup experience.
Focus on quality.
Build a world-class technology platform.
Build buzz in the press and blogosphere.

Startup #2

New plan
Shipped in six months – a horribly buggy beta product
Charged from day one
Shipped multiple times a day (by 2008, on average 50 times a day)
No PR, no launch
Results: 2007 revenues of $10MM

Lean Startups Go Faster
Commodity technology stack, highly leveraged (free/open source, user-generated content, SEM).
Customer development – find out what customers want before you build it.
Agile (lean) product development – but tuned to the startup condition.

Commodity technology stack
Leverage = for each ounce of effort you invest in your product, you take advantage of the efforts of thousands or millions of others.
It’s easy to see how high-leverage technology is driving costs down.
More important is its impact on speed.
Time to bring a new product to market is falling rapidly.

Customer Development
Continuous cycle of customer interaction
Rapid hypothesis testing about market, pricing, customers, …
Extreme low cost, low burn, tight focus
Measurable gates for investors
http://bit.ly/FourSteps

Agile Product Development(A tale of two startups, revisited)
Principles drawn from Lean Manufacturing and Toyota Production System
These examples are drawn from software startups, but increasingly:
All products require software
All companies are operating in a startup-like environment of extreme uncertainty

Traditional Product Development
Unit of Progress: Advance to Next Stage
Waterfall
Requirements
Specification
Design
Problem: known
Solution: known
Implementation
Verification
Maintenance

Agile Product Development
Unit of Progress: A line of Working Code
“Product Owner” or in-house customer
Problem: known
Solution: unknown

Product Development at Lean Startup
Unit of Progress: Validated Learning About Customers ($$$)
Hypotheses,
Experiments,
Insights
Problem: unknown
Data,
Feedback,
Insights
Solution: unknown

Minimize TOTAL time through the loop
IDEAS
LEARN
BUILD
DATA
CODE
MEASURE

How to build a Lean Startup
Let’s talk about some specifics.
Small Batches
Continuous deployment
Split-test (A/B) experimentation
Minimum Viable Product
Five why’s

Small Batches
IDEAS
LEARN
BUILD
Learn Faster
Five Whys
Build Faster
Continuous Deployment
Small Batches
Continuous Integration
Refactoring
DATA
CODE
MEASURE
Measure Faster
Split Testing
Actionable Metrics
Net Promoter Score
SEM

Benefits of Small Batches
Faster feedback
Problems are instantly localized
Reduce risk
Reduce overhead

IDEAS
LEARN
BUILD
Learn Faster
Five Whys
Build Faster
Small Batches
Refactoring
DATA
CODE
MEASURE
Measure Faster
Split Testing
Actionable Metrics
Net Promoter Score
SEM

Deploy new software quickly
At IMVU time from check-in to production = 20 minutes
Tell a good change from a bad change (quickly)
Revert a bad change quickly
And “shut down the line”
Work in small batches
At IMVU, a large batch = 3 days worth of work
Break large projects down into small batches

Cluster Immune System
What it looks like to ship one piece of code to production:
Run tests locally (SimpleTest, Selenium)
Everyone has a complete sandbox
Continuous Integration Server (BuildBot)
All tests must pass or “shut down the line”
Automatic feedback if the team is going too fast
Incremental deploy
Monitor cluster and business metrics in real-time
Reject changes that move metrics out-of-bounds
Alerting & Predictive monitoring (Nagios)
Monitor all metrics that stakeholders care about
If any metric goes out-of-bounds, wake somebody up
Use historical trends to predict acceptable bounds
When customers see a failure:
Fix the problem for customers
Improve your defenses at each level

Rapid Split Tests
IDEAS
Code Faster
Learn Faster
BUILD
LEARN
Continuous
Deployment
Five Whys Root
Cause Analysis
CODE
DATA
Measure Faster
MEASURE
Rapid Split Tests

Split-testing all the time
A/B testing is key to validating your hypotheses
Has to be simple enough for everyone to use and understand it
Make creating a split-test no more than one line of code:
if( setup_experiment(...) == "control" ) {
// do it the old way
} else {
// do it the new way
}

The AAA’s of Metrics
Actionable
Accessible
Auditable

Measure the Macro
Always look at cohort-based metrics over time
Split-test the small, measure the large

IDEAS
Code Faster
Learn Faster
BUILD
LEARN
Continuous
Deployment
Minimum Viable
Product
CODE
DATA
Measure Faster
MEASURE
Rapid Split Tests

Why do we build products?
Delight customers
Attract lots of them
Make a lot of money
Big vision: change the world

Possible Approaches
“Maximize chances of success”
Build a great product with many features that increase the odds that customers will want it
Problem: no feedback until the end, might be too late to adjust
“Release early, release often”
Get as much feedback as possible, as soon as possible
Problem: run around in circles, chasing what customers think they want

The minimum set of features needed to learn from earlyvangelists – visionary early adopters
Avoid building products that nobody wants
Maximize the learning per dollar spent
Get the facts before it’s too late
Probably much more minimum than you think!

Visionary customers can “fill in the gaps” on missing features, if the product solves a real problem
Allows us to achieve a big vision in small increments without going in circles
Requires a commitment to iteration

Examples
Building IMVU in six months
2004 “Kerry vs. Bush avatar debate”

Techniques
Smoke testing with landing pages, AdWords
SEM on five dollars a day
In-product split testing
Paper prototypes
Customer discovery/validation
Removing features (“cut and paste”)

Fears
False negative: “customers would have liked the full product, but the MVP sucks, so we abandoned the vision”
Visionary complex: “but customers don’t know what they want!”
Too busy to learn: “it would be faster to just build it right, all this measuring distracts from delighting customers”

Five Whys
IDEAS
Code Faster
Learn Faster
BUILD
LEARN
Continuous
Deployment
Five Whys Root
Cause Analysis
CODE
DATA
Measure Faster
MEASURE
Rapid Split Tests

Five Whys Root Cause Analysis
A technique for continuous improvement of company process.
Ask “why” five times when something unexpected happens.
Make proportional investments in prevention at all five levels of the hierarchy.
Behind every supposed technical problem is usually a human problem. Fix the cause, not just the symptom.

There’s much more…
IDEAS
Code Faster
Learn Faster
BUILD
LEARN
Unit Tests
Usability Tests
Incremental Deployment
Free & Open-Source Components
Cloud Computing
Cluster Immune System
Just-in-time Scalability
Refactoring
Developer Sandbox
Split Tests
Customer Interviews
Five Whys Root Cause Analysis
Customer Advisory Board
Falsifiable Hypotheses
Product Owner Accountability
Customer Archetypes
Cross-functional Teams
Semi-autonomous Teams
Smoke Tests
CODE
DATA
Measure Faster
MEASURE
Split Tests
Clear Product Owner
Usability Tests
Real-time Monitoring
Customer Liaison
Funnel Analysis
Cohort Analysis
Net Promoter Score
Search Engine Marketing
Real-Time Alerting
Predictive Monitoring

Get Started Today
You are ready to do this, no matter
who you are
what job you have
what stage of company you’re in
Get started now, today.

Thanks!
Startup Lessons Learned Blog
http://StartupLessonsLearned.blogspot.com/
Getting in touch (#leanstartup)
http://twitter.com/ericries
eric@theleanstartup.com
Workshop Tomorrow, Aug 20
http://bit.ly/boulder-workshop
9am-1pm at TechStars

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2009 08 19 The Lean Startup TechStars Edition

by Eric Ries

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