DevDay (http://devday.pl), 20th of September 2013, Kraków Video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4eTOvq2WmM&feature=c4-overview-vl&list=PLBMFXMTB7U74NdDghygvBaDcp67owVUUF

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

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

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

4. Who am I?
• Hacker in Residence at Cornershop / #1seed
– Meerkatalyst / MaydayHQ (Co-founder)
– Swapit (Lead Dev / CTO)
– 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”
Build
Learn
Measure

10. Not about being cheap
Lessons learned

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

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

13. What is a startup?
A company that is confused about
1) what its product is
2) who its customers are
3) how to make money

14. Validating The Idea

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

17. Betaworks, Science Inc, Rocket
Internet

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

19. People don't buy what you do;
they buy why you do it.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/atomicpuppy/2132073976/

20. Easier to go from shit to great
than nothing to great.

21. Going to Church (a punt) vs. Science (running a process)
CORNERSHOP PROCESS

24. Leave the building
Understand potential customer
acquisition approaches early

25. Identify a Minimum Viable Customer
Segment
•
•
•
•
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

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

27. LISTEN TO USERS/CUSTOMERS NOT
ADVISORS / VC. CUSTOMERS PAY.

28. Iterate, update, log insights
Go back to BMC and update.
Keep previous copies for history.

29. People seem interested? You’ll
need a name & brand
Naming is the hardest problem
Can kill days and suck motivation

30. Google
Airbnb
Spotify
YouPorn
Apple
Ryanair

31. KEEP TAGLINES SIMPLE
BUT SAY WHAT YOU DO!
DON’T SAY YOU’RE DISRUPTION
OR INNOVATING
LAME!!! Only others can say that
http://insideintercom.io/what-everyoneneeds-to-know-about-disruption/

32. CustDev can only get you so far
At this point you should have a
concept / vision clear in your own
head

33. The Build

34. What is a MVP?
• “An MVP is an experiment that tests a critical,
falsifiable hypothesis of your business” Devin
Hunt
https://speakerdeck.com/devinhunt/mvps-in-practice

35. Fake it until you make it

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

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

38. Speed of delivery is key
•
•
•
•
Beg, steal, borrow – just get it done!
Ability to learn
Should be based around your vision
Lesson from “Project X”: Took too long to
release because the aim wasn’t to learn about
customers but make money. Missed a
number of (commercial) opportunities.
Failing? Likely.

39. Don’t reinvent the wheel
TOO MANY FUN THINGS IN LIFE TO
WRITE BORING CODE

40. Do you need a full application?
WebFlow.com / strikingly.com

41. Fake it?
• Proto.io

42. Really need to build…
• Foundation over bootstrap etc
• KISS!! Do you really need EmberJS, Backbone
etc etc etc?

43. Build on the shoulders of giants
Community
NodeJS  *AMAZING*
ElasticSearch  *AMAZING*
4SQ API, Screen scraping, hidden APIs –
whatever is required to get the job done.
KEEP IT SIMPLE. KEEP IT DIRTY.

44. Low traffic, dyno is paused. First user needs to spin it up. Keep alive script
A WORD OF WARNING ABOUT
HEROKU

45. Paul Stack rocked my world – Vagrant
+ Rackspace Cloud / AWS EC2

46. 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?

47. BULLSH*T

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

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

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

51. DON’T BE AFFAIRD TO THROW
CODE AWAY

52. Building a startup?
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.

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

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

55. Do things that move the needle
What are you trying to learn? What
value are you adding?

56. The
Release

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

58. Customers
Metrics
Application
TIME TO LISTEN

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

60. Librato
Librato - Pretty

61. Track User Events / Actions
Your own database is most valuable source. Use it!

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

63. Pirate Metrics - AARRR

64. Drive Traffic
•
•
•
•
PR (Hacker News, Techcrunch, The Next Web)
Buy traffic (PPC)
Social Media
Email still king
• Piggyback off others
– Paypal > Ebay
– Airbnb > Craigslist

65. 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

66. Quickly qualify a lead & call

67. 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

68. Finally…

69. Start with something, iterate.
Have a vision, a goal, a desire and
execute on it.

70. Value Driven Development
Do things that people care about!

71. Get feedback. Not working?
Change it. Kill it. Move on.
Building startups people care about is
amazing!
Working on ones no-one cares about is
sole destroying.

72. @Ben_Hall
Ben@BenHall.me.uk
Blog.BenHall.me.uk
Cornershop.io