Ben Hall is a hacker in residence at Cornershop and founder of previous startups. He discusses his approach to starting new ventures, which focuses on rapidly validating ideas by building minimum viable products and releasing early to test assumptions and learn from customers and metrics. Some of his key advice includes failing fast when ideas don't work, focusing on acquisition metrics over features, and prioritizing speed of delivery over perfect code in the early stages. The presentation emphasizes learning through quick iteration and putting products in front of customers as soon as possible.

1. @Ben_Hall
Ben@BenHall.me.uk
Hacker in Residence at Cornershop / #1seed
Building Startups and Minimum Viable
Products

2. @Ben_Hall
Ben@BenHall.me.uk
Hacker in Residence at Cornershop / #1seed
You talk about it, we ship it.
#craftsmanship

3. @Ben_Hall
Ben@BenHall.me.uk
Hacker in Residence at Cornershop / #1seed
Let’s make some money
#craftsmanshipisdead

4. Who am I?
• Hacker in Residence at Cornershop / #1seed
– Meerkatalyst / MaydayHQ (Co-founder)
– Swapit
– 7digital
– Red Gate Software
• Multiple open source and side projects
• @Ben_Hall or Ben@BenHall.me.uk

5. Agenda
Idea Build Release

6. How I see the world
With a bit of a rant, and various
lessons learned along the way

7. Startup Mindset

8. Validate / Invalidate a concept as
fast as possible

9. Lean Startup?
• Toyota production system
• Toyota Way
• W. Edwards Deming
• Eric Reis made it mainstream

10. Build
MeasureLearn

11. Not about being cheap

12. It’s good to fail, as long as you
fail fast

13. But not so fast that it’s
impossible to succeed

14. The Idea

15. What happens if you don’t have
an idea?
Find a space, theme, problem that
you personally find interesting

17. Redstar Ventures, Science Inc,
Rocket Internet

18. Cornershop
Taps
Pool
Internal / External

19. BELIEVE IN THE VISION
Without a core desire, you’ve already lost the game

20. People don't buy what you do;
they buy why you do it.

21. Ideas to avoid / be aware of?
• Market places / two sided markets
– They do lead to digital transaction businesses ==
most likely to hit $1b
– Winning once is hard. Here you need to win twice.
• Viral
– Generally all about luck
• Photo Sharing etc
– Yawn!!! Be original.

22. Business Assumption Exercise
Business Assumptions Exercise
I believe that my customers have a need to
_____________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________.
This need can be solved with
_____________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________.
My initial customers will be
_____________________________________________________________________
The #1 value a client wants to get out of my service is:
_____________________________________________________________________
The client can also get these additional benefits:
________________________________________________________ and
______________________________________________________
I will acquire the majority of my users/customers through
______________________________________________ and
________________________________________________
Business Assumptions Exercise
I believe that my customers have a need to discover the
best online services to solve their problems.
This need can be solved with recommending them new
services based on their existing tools and expressed
problems.
My initial customers will be early adopters working in the
London tech scene people who use 5-10 apps on a daily
basis and have signed up to over 100.
The #1 value a client wants to get out of my service is:
having a personalised recommendation service for apps.
The client can also get these additional benefits: visualise
all the apps their currently subscribed too and curated
pages by thoughtleaders and social connections.
I will acquire the majority of my users/customers through
external integrations with apps and word of month /
SEO

25. Leave the building
Understand potential customer
acquisition approaches early

26. Speak to everyone!
• Influencers
• Users of competitor products
• Potential new users
• People in different verticals with similar business
models
• Understand industry, customer segments
• Test different value props, identify which
connects best

27. Always discuss previous experiences.
People are rubbish at predicting the
future

28. Easy way to prove it’s a good
idea?
Get them to pay for it.

29. LISTEN TO CUSTOMERS NOT
ADVISORS / VC

30. Naming & Branding
Naming is the hardest problem
Can kill days and suck motivation

31. Create a brand with any name
(Google)

32. Let the name create brand
(AirBnB, YouPorn, PornTube)
Pivots are harder

33. MEERKATALYST IS A RUBBISH
NAME!

34. MissingUnicorns.com
Technical recruitment tool

35. CORNERSHOP
Investing in the name and the brand

36. Tag lines should be short and
sweet

37. DON’T SAY YOU’RE
DISTRIBUTING OR INNOVATING
LAME!!! Only others can say that

38. CustDev can only get you so far
Should have concept / vision clear in
your own head

39. The Build

40. What is a MVP?
• Enhance Learning
• Enable you to ask new questions beyond what
you’ve asked before

41. Don’t turn into a developer!
• This isn’t an exercise in learning new
technologies.
• It’s an exercise in building businesses
• Don’t confuse the two.

42. Lesson learned from
Meerkatalyst
Built an over complex system when a shell
script would have done

43. Lesson learned from Mayday
Stopped the MVP, started scaling (technical
backend), didn’t have product/market fit.
Massive Fail

44. Avoid writing code if you can
• Email first startups are cool!!
• Sunrise (Just raised $2.2m, started as morning
email of your day’s schedule each day)
• Mattermark

45. Speed of delivery is key
• Beg, steal, borrow – just get it done!
• Ability to lean
• Should be based around your vision
• BOA took too long… aim wasn’t to learn,
missed a number of opportunities

46. LIFE IS TOO SHORT TO WRITE
BORING STUFF
Don’t reinvent the wheel

47. UI / Design
• Bootstrap
• Flat UI
• ThemeForest + Wordpress
• KISS!! Do you really need EmberJS, Backbone
etc etc etc?

48. Middleware
• NodeJS
• GitHub
• Community
• NPM / Bower

49. Backend
• NoSQL
– Mainly because of migrations
• ElasticSearch
– *AMAZING*

50. Hosting
• Heroku
• Rackspace Cloud
– Preference of choice. Great startup team.
– Gave me lots of free beer at SXSW
• Amazon Web Services

51. Paul Stack rocked my world – Vagrant

52. APIs
• Easily accessible data
– FourSquare
• Screen Scrape Data
– Dirty, but *powerful*
– Node + Redis === *fast*

53. Personal collection of reusable
code
Copy and paste FTW!!!

54. Cult of the Software Craftsman
• Code Quality is not a feature!
• Do you really need 80% test coverage? What
value is that actually adding?
• Do you really need that abstraction? That IoC?
That level of separation? That ability to scale?
• Is that really going to change your world?

55. BULLSH*T

56. WHO CARES ABOUT CLEAN CODE IF
THERE ARE NO SALES!

57. IF DEVELOPERS WERE IMPACTED BY
REVENUE THEN THEY WOULDN’T
SPEND 10 DAYS WRITING CLEAN CODE

58. STOPPED DOING TDD A LONG TIME
AGO
Write tests / code / shell scripts to speed up feedback loop – not about
long-term.

59. BUT I ATTEMPT TO KEEP IT CLEAN

60. DON’T BE AFFAIRD TO THROW
CODE AWAY

61. Facebook Rewrite Example
Move fast and break things

62. Ideal Team SizeTeam Size
Ideally Three People

64. Identifying what’s required?
• MVP needs to be a product you can learn from
but generally everything can be dropped.
– If it doesn’t answer a question, does it need to be
there? If there is no question, then no.
– Need X feature to be Y is generally incorrect.
Other ways to solve the problem
• Releasing and iterating at least every day

65. Fake it until you make it

66. Lesson learned from
Rate it Slate it
Prototyped Functionality
Took 2-3 hours to go from a concept to
learning valuable insights

67. Release something that moves
the needle every day
Zynga’s approach

68. But that won’t work in XYZ
environment
Really?!

69. The
Release

70. Job done! If you build it they will come
Must be true, Hollywood said so

71. Find the people who believe what you
believe
• Early Adaptors
• Early Evangelists
• Will market the product for you.

72. Key factors
• Metrics
• Drive Traffic
• Listen to your customers

73. Metrics
• Collect everything
• Visualise key data
• Have key metrics that you want to track

74. Backend system
• Librato metrics
• Rackspace / AWS

75. Librato

76. User Metrics
• Google Analytics
• MixPanel
• KissMetrics
• Your own database is most valuable source.
Use it!

78. AARRR
• Pirate Metrics. The only ones that matter.
• Application Level
• Feature Level (less for investors, more for
product managers)

80. Taskfirm.com

81. Metrics became the tests
• Ensure the system is
working as expected
• Alerts when the system
stopped working outside
of normal bounds

82. Drive Traffic
• PR (Hacker News, Techcrunch, The Next Web)
• Newsletters (Own and others)
• SEO – Inbound links
• Blog (Own and others)
• Tweet (MailChirp)
• Email (MailChimp)
• Influencers in the sector
– Friends of Red Gate
– Microsoft MVP programme

83. Paid Advertisement
• 4 Hour Body tricks (Google Ad Words for title,
in store hack for cover)

84. Speak to people using the product
• Red Gate UX team
• Watch, Listen, Learn
• Introduce explicit touch points in the
application for reaching out
– Rate it Slate it inbox beta list
• Do people want the feature?
• Can we build a email list of people who are actively
engaging with the product

85. Quickly qualify a lead & call
• Rapportive
• Intercom
• Drop off time is around 90% a day after they
used your product
• Call them ASAP

88. A/B Tests?
• Waste of time at the early stage.
• Complex to configure, not enough traffic to
make them statistically significant.
– Mayday A/B tests
• Took ages to get data, could have just asked people

89. Be prepared to kill it!
• Referly
• Meerkatalyst
• Mayday
• Pivot.

90. Be public about failing

91. Finally…

92. Summary
• Stop playing with cool tech & start learning
• Have a vision & execute it
• Listen to customer over everyone else
• Watch your metrics
• Just get started!

93. To all the hackers, hustlers and
hipsters – Good Luck!
Ship stuff, change the world and have
fun!
Apparently it’s worth all the pain, stress
and sleep nights

94. Thank you, please come again.
@Ben_Hall
Ben@BenHall.me.uk