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DevDay 2013 - Building Startups and Minimum Viable Products
The document outlines key insights and lessons learned about building startups and minimum viable products (MVPs) by Ben Hall, a hacker and partner at Cornershop. It emphasizes the importance of rapid validation of ideas, understanding customer needs, and iterative development while warning against overcomplicating software systems. Hall advocates for a focus on delivering value and learning quickly, rather than perfecting code or scaling prematurely.
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DevDay 2013 - Building Startups and Minimum Viable Products
- 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 aboutit, we ship it. #craftsmanship @Ben_Hall Ben@BenHall.me.uk Cornershop.io Hacker in Residence and Partner at Cornershop / #1seed
- 3. Let’s make somemoney #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.
- 6. How I seethe world With a bit of a rant and various lessons learned along the way
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- 8. Validate / Invalidatea concept as fast as possible
- 9.
- 10. Not about beingcheap Lessons learned
- 11. It’s good tofail, as long as you fail fast
- 12. But not sofast that it’s impossible to succeed
- 13. What is astartup? A company that is confused about 1) what its product is 2) who its customers are 3) how to make money
- 14.
- 15. What happens ifyou don’t have an idea? Find a space, theme, problem that you personally find interesting
- 17. Betaworks, Science Inc,Rocket Internet
- 18. Without a coredesire, you’ve already lost the game BELIEVE IN THE VISION
- 19. People don't buywhat you do; they buy why you do it. http://www.flickr.com/photos/atomicpuppy/2132073976/
- 20. Easier to gofrom shit to great than nothing to great.
- 21. Going to Church(a punt) vs. Science (running a process) CORNERSHOP PROCESS
- 24. Leave the building Understandpotential customer acquisition approaches early
- 25. Identify a MinimumViable 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 previousexperiences. People are rubbish at predicting the future
- 27. LISTEN TO USERS/CUSTOMERSNOT ADVISORS / VC. CUSTOMERS PAY.
- 28. Iterate, update, loginsights 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.
- 31. KEEP TAGLINES SIMPLE BUTSAY 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 onlyget you so far At this point you should have a concept / vision clear in your own head
- 33.
- 34. What is aMVP? • “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 untilyou make it
- 36. Lesson learned from Rateit Slate it Prototyped Functionality Took 2-3 hours to go from a concept to learning valuable insights
- 37. Avoid writing codeif 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 deliveryis 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 thewheel TOO MANY FUN THINGS IN LIFE TO WRITE BORING CODE
- 40. Do you needa full application? WebFlow.com / strikingly.com
- 41.
- 42. Really need tobuild… • Foundation over bootstrap etc • KISS!! Do you really need EmberJS, Backbone etc etc etc?
- 43. Build on theshoulders 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, dynois paused. First user needs to spin it up. Keep alive script A WORD OF WARNING ABOUT HEROKU
- 45. Paul Stack rockedmy world – Vagrant + Rackspace Cloud / AWS EC2
- 46. Cult of theSoftware 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.
- 48. WHO CARES ABOUTCLEAN CODE IF THERE ARE NO SALES!
- 49. IF DEVELOPERS WEREIMPACTED 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 AFFAIRDTO THROW CODE AWAY
- 52. Building a startup? Don’tturn 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 Builtan over complex system when a shell script would have done
- 54. Lesson learned fromMayday Stopped the MVP, started scaling (technical backend), didn’t have product/market fit. Massive Fail
- 55. Do things thatmove the needle What are you trying to learn? What value are you adding?
- 56.
- 57. Job done! Ifyou build it they will come Must be true, Hollywood said so
- 58.
- 59. Metrics • Collect everything •Visualise key data • Have key metrics that you want to track
- 60.
- 61. Track User Events/ Actions Your own database is most valuable source. Use it!
- 62. Metrics became thetests • 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 (HackerNews, Techcrunch, The Next Web) Buy traffic (PPC) Social Media Email still king • Piggyback off others – Paypal > Ebay – Airbnb > Craigslist
- 65. Speak to peopleusing 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 alead & call
- 67. A/B Tests? • Wasteof 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.
- 69. Start with something,iterate. Have a vision, a goal, a desire and execute on it.
- 70. Value Driven Development Dothings that people care about!
- 71. Get feedback. Notworking? Change it. Kill it. Move on. Building startups people care about is amazing! Working on ones no-one cares about is sole destroying.
- 72.
Editor's Notes
- #5 I have fun with startups
- #6 http://www.flickr.com/photos/newyorkbaltimore/8010607852/sizes/k/in/photolist-dcSsCu/Taking everything you’ve heard this week and applying it to real businesses with the aim of making *money*
- #8 Stages of a startupBuild, measure, leanDon’t be scared to failDon’t be scared to kill it if it’s not workingBe public, be visible, talk to everyoneDon’t fail too early!
- #17 Meerkatalyst example Thought I understood customer problem. Problem I had personally while at 7digital, knew others had it, ran with it as a side project before joining Springboard startup accelerator
- #19 Ideas by themselves are worthless100% on executing the visionPrevious company tried to split attention across 4 company streams. It doesn’t work.Without a core desire, you’ve already lost the game
- #22 Ideas by themselves are worthless100% on executing the visionPrevious company tried to split attention across 4 company streams. It doesn’t work.Without a core desire, you’ve already lost the game