This is a presentation I did at Failcon 2012 in San Francisco, It tells the story of ccLoop, a startup I founded in 2010.
ccLoop was my fourth startup. The first three found large markets and did well, but this one did not.
I discussed a few topics including:
- Getting the right founding team.
- Solving a problem that customers care dearly about.
- Building a product the customer can't live without.
- Knowing when to pivot and when to persevere.
- Not getting wrapped up into PR and worrying about which startups have "social proof" and which don't.
At each stop on our tour, we’ll be giving a lecture presentation about how each of us as designers can work for the greater good. We know, however, that intention only goes so far; we must collectively establish best practices. When we’re designing for homelessness, health, poverty, education, and well-being, the stakes are higher than ever, with little room for half-hearted efforts.
With that in mind, we have compiled a Toolkit for both design students and educators (or really for anyone who wants to apply creative problem solving to social issues) that outlines 13 values and corresponding strategies for not just how to design for the greater good, but how to produce GREAT design for the greater good. (Note: The 13 values are derived from the Designer’s Handshake document included in our book, Design Revolution: 100 Products that Empower People).
Professionalism for the Wildlife Control OperatorLaura Schmidt
How do you present a professional appearance to your customer--and make the customer want to hire you trust you, and pay you good money to solve the wildlife problem? We'll show you!
At each stop on our tour, we’ll be giving a lecture presentation about how each of us as designers can work for the greater good. We know, however, that intention only goes so far; we must collectively establish best practices. When we’re designing for homelessness, health, poverty, education, and well-being, the stakes are higher than ever, with little room for half-hearted efforts.
With that in mind, we have compiled a Toolkit for both design students and educators (or really for anyone who wants to apply creative problem solving to social issues) that outlines 13 values and corresponding strategies for not just how to design for the greater good, but how to produce GREAT design for the greater good. (Note: The 13 values are derived from the Designer’s Handshake document included in our book, Design Revolution: 100 Products that Empower People).
Professionalism for the Wildlife Control OperatorLaura Schmidt
How do you present a professional appearance to your customer--and make the customer want to hire you trust you, and pay you good money to solve the wildlife problem? We'll show you!
Designing APIs for Humans: Leveraging UX Methods For Develop Human Centered APIsPronovix
Application programming interfaces (APIs) are a way modern websites and applications share data with users. From sharing user profile data between services to displaying relevant information from one service to another, APIs enable us to develop a single platform of shared data. In other words… it’s about people.
This talk will walk through how to leverage the practice of human centered design to create robust and meaningful APIs that help meet users needs. We’ll touch on topics such as:
* How and why to involve a cross disciplinary on an API team into the HCD process (Engineering, UX, Product)
* What HCD methods and techniques to use in order to create a healthy API ecosystem
Understanding users without getting boredStefan Ivanov
The slides were used in a workshop at UXify Bulgaria 2018 in order to share and let the participants explore different techniques for conducting user research.
An introduction to our Nearshoring services. We build your high performance IT team with experts from Eastern Europe. Fast, scalable and combined with the security of a German partner.
The slide explains the basics of the Scrum Framework one of the most popular Agile implementations for beginners. You can learn fundamental knowledge about it.
Training material for coaching using GTD with Outlook. This material is not affiliated with, or endorsed, approved or authorized by, Microsoft Corporation or The David Allen Company but everyone who attends the course discovers that can be more productive with a minimum effort
Diversification, Discovery, and Data: 13 Insights from 13 Years of Safari, pr...bisg
Diversification, Discovery, and Data: 13 Insights from 13 Years of Safari, presented by Andrew Savikas, CEO of Safari Books Online, at Making Information Pay 2014, a track of IDPF's Digital Book 2014, at Book Expo America, on May 29, 2014
Late last year I postulated the idea of a 12 hour start up, the idea being that you take an idea into fruition within 12 hours. Uploaded to SlideShare to spread the word.
Stop writing stories, start validating working softwareMatthew Philip
Slides as presented at the 2020 Ágiles Latam Conference.
Abstract:
Barry O’Reilly exhorts today’s leaders to “break the cycle of behaviors that were effective in the past but are no longer relevant in the current business climate, and now limit or may even stand in the way of your success.” After more than two decades of writing, refining, grooming, estimating and documenting user stories, it’s time to unlearn them.
In a vast and sad irony, user stories have become the heavyweight documentation and process that they were meant to replace. This session proposes that we strip away the accrued behaviors and get back to the heart of agile and focus on delivering — and measuring progress by — working software.
Designing APIs for Humans: Leveraging UX Methods For Develop Human Centered APIsPronovix
Application programming interfaces (APIs) are a way modern websites and applications share data with users. From sharing user profile data between services to displaying relevant information from one service to another, APIs enable us to develop a single platform of shared data. In other words… it’s about people.
This talk will walk through how to leverage the practice of human centered design to create robust and meaningful APIs that help meet users needs. We’ll touch on topics such as:
* How and why to involve a cross disciplinary on an API team into the HCD process (Engineering, UX, Product)
* What HCD methods and techniques to use in order to create a healthy API ecosystem
Understanding users without getting boredStefan Ivanov
The slides were used in a workshop at UXify Bulgaria 2018 in order to share and let the participants explore different techniques for conducting user research.
An introduction to our Nearshoring services. We build your high performance IT team with experts from Eastern Europe. Fast, scalable and combined with the security of a German partner.
The slide explains the basics of the Scrum Framework one of the most popular Agile implementations for beginners. You can learn fundamental knowledge about it.
Training material for coaching using GTD with Outlook. This material is not affiliated with, or endorsed, approved or authorized by, Microsoft Corporation or The David Allen Company but everyone who attends the course discovers that can be more productive with a minimum effort
Diversification, Discovery, and Data: 13 Insights from 13 Years of Safari, pr...bisg
Diversification, Discovery, and Data: 13 Insights from 13 Years of Safari, presented by Andrew Savikas, CEO of Safari Books Online, at Making Information Pay 2014, a track of IDPF's Digital Book 2014, at Book Expo America, on May 29, 2014
Late last year I postulated the idea of a 12 hour start up, the idea being that you take an idea into fruition within 12 hours. Uploaded to SlideShare to spread the word.
Stop writing stories, start validating working softwareMatthew Philip
Slides as presented at the 2020 Ágiles Latam Conference.
Abstract:
Barry O’Reilly exhorts today’s leaders to “break the cycle of behaviors that were effective in the past but are no longer relevant in the current business climate, and now limit or may even stand in the way of your success.” After more than two decades of writing, refining, grooming, estimating and documenting user stories, it’s time to unlearn them.
In a vast and sad irony, user stories have become the heavyweight documentation and process that they were meant to replace. This session proposes that we strip away the accrued behaviors and get back to the heart of agile and focus on delivering — and measuring progress by — working software.
The briefing document to our two week Create Meaning program in cooperation with the Miami Ad School.
All results will be published on createmeaning.com
Feel free to follow-up Q&A on twitter @createmeaning.com or our blog.
Presentation to the New Frontiers Entrepreneurs - Nov 2015Raomal Perera
New Frontiers Networking event - Nov 2015. Presentation on Lean Startup.
Tweets:
Great talk yesterday by @raomal on the Lean Startup #NewFrontiersNetEvent
@raomal Thank u for yesterday @EI_NewFrontiers #NewFrontiersNetEvent .
Great talk by @raomal on #leanstartup Always good to step back and sense check your approach #NewFrontiersNetEvent
Great talk by @raomal "vision, passion & integrity" are key in a #startup! #NewFrontiersNetEvent #WeSavvy
@EI_NewFrontiers #NewFrontiersNetEvent @raomal great advice from raomal perrera never underestimate the power of networking
@raomal 'entrepreneurs aren't RISK TAKERS. They r people who figure out a way to MITIGATE THE RISK, then go for it'! #NewFrontiersNetEvent
"Understand what the problem is before you attempt to solve it" - @raomal #NewFrontiersNetEvent #startup #networking
@owletbabycare 'Are we really creating value for our customers?' @raomal ...#newfrontiersnetevent We sure are! #hiprotein #beefsnack
@raomal ...'your user is not always your customer'...#newfrontiersnetevent
The #NewFrontiers cohort engaged with @raomal's presentation #NewFrontiersNetEvent #leanstartup #networking @Entirl
@raomal To get the answers you are looking for! You need to know your problem. @Newfrontiersnw @EI_NewFrontiers
@raomal talks lean startup @EI_NewFrontiers #NewFrontiersNetEvent
Entrepreneur and Educator Raomal Perera now speaking at the #NewFrontiersNetEvent @EI_NewFrontiers @raomal
@EI_NewFrontiers #NewFrontiersNetEvent @raomal great to hear raomal perrera at the podium. He owes much of his success to Ent Irl
@raomal takes to the floor to discuss his successes with #LeanStartups #NewFrontiersNetEvent #Networking @Entirl
Very excited to have @raomal with us today at the #NewFrontiersNetEvent! #startup #networking @Entirl
Elizabeth Quintanilla, Marketing Gunslinger, gave this presentation: "Social Media Marketing what business owners should know .." to business owners considering social media as part of their Marketing Mix.
Presentation includes a discusion of social media monitoring tools, 101 ways to measure Social Media Return on Investment (ROI), the ABC's of Social Media, and more!
Social Business Manifest that describes how Social Media and Social Networking is changing business rapidly. Change & Transition Management. Reset and rethink business. How to embrace the social revolution.
Watch the webinar here:https://youtu.be/GEzILwI6VdU
Key Takeaways:
1. Understand the type of content your customers want and need.
2. How to develop creative topics.
3. Managing your content once it has been published.
4. How to build a social media foundation with your content
Digital Strategy and Online Marketing - How To Become The Ultimate Brand Auth...Doyle Buehler
How To Become The Ultimate Brand Authority Online - The Digital Leadership Training Series with Doyle Buehler
Want to build and create a compelling competitive online brand presence using your existing digital assets with a remarkable digital strategy? This webinar series is designed to help you understand what your audience is looking for, and how to improve and create the ultimate online brand experience to drive sales and leads.
Every business online is different, yet there are some key fundamentals and tools that will assist you in creating a digital ecosystem that keeps your audience educated and entertained and more importantly, interested in what you do and how you do it. If you can’t deliver a valuable brand experience, you’re only 1 click away from them leaving you, forever.
Based upon Doyle Buehler's award winning digital leadership and online strategy framework, this Online Brand Authority Webinar series will show you how to construct a comprehensive, integrated digital ecosystem that has all your online assets working together - strategy, social media, branding, websites, sales funnel, landing pages, content, advertising, SEO etc. It will show you exactly how to overcome the clutter of online, get clarity on what is really important, and become the digital leader and brand authority in your industry.
Specifically designed to complement what you are already doing online to build your brand authority, you will get a step-by-step understanding over 2 webinars that kicks your complete online platform into high gear, with the tools and knowledge to really make things happen for your brand.
Here is the 2 part break down of the Building Brand Authority Webinars:
Webinar 1 - Rocking Your Digital Ecosystem
Learn the 7 Disciplines of digital leadership for a successful online presence
Create a digital strategy framework that connects your value with the needs of your online audience
How to master your content and develop your voice online to deliver your core value
Webinar 2 - Integrating and Escalating Your Kick-ass Online Platform
How to connect and re-align your website across your entire online platform
What you actually need for a working, qualifying, sales and leads funnel
Creating influence beyond your immediate reach through focussed advertising and analytics
The ultimate goal is that you will gain incredible clarity of what you need to be doing online to maximise your Brand Authority, and how to put all of your digital ecosystem pieces together, to work FOR you.
To understand LeanUX, we'll introduce Lean, Lean Systems, and Lean Startup to situate LeanUX in context. This introduction and discussion will use Kanban to explore various aspects and ideas of LeanUX such as hypothesis formulation, assumptions gathering, multi-hypothesis testing and designing / running experiments to create tight feedback loops of customer insight.
We'll cover aspects of LeanUX research, which is conducted to gain a validated understanding of the user's problem hypothesis to understand if the problem we think customers have, is something they actually have before spending months and tens of thousands of dollars doing wasteful UX research & design time on a concept that delivers no customer value.
We'll also discuss lightweight techniques for sharing the research process with the entire team, covering the basics of customer research, interviewing, cognitive biases in user research, and how to create light-weight, rapid personas for solution hypothesis validation. We'll then cover collaborative ideation, designer pairing, and how lean teams work together to reduce batch size and increase the flow of customer business value increments - concepts mostly unheard of in product development teams following agile or waterfall ideologies.
Will Evans explores the convergence of practice and theory using Lean Systems, Design Thinking, and LeanUX with global corporations from NYC to Berlin to Singapore. As Chief Design Officer at PraxisFlow, he works with a select group of corporate clients undergoing Lean and Agile transformations across the entire organization. Will is also the Design Thinker-in-Residence at NYU Stern's Berkley Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship.
Will was previously the Managing Director of TLCLabs, the world's leading Lean Design Innovation consultancy where he has brought Lean Startup, LeanUX, and Design Thinking to large media, finance, and healthcare companies.
Before TLC, he led experience design and research for TheLadders in New York City. He has over 15 years industry experience in design innovation, user experience strategy and research. His roles include directing UX for social network analytics & terrorism modeling at AIR Worldwide, UX Architect for social media site Gather.com, and UX Architect for travel search engine Kayak.com. He worked at Lotus/IBM where he was the senior information architect, and for Curl - a DARPA-funded MIT project when he was at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science.
He lives in New York, NY, and drinks far too much coffee. He Co-Founded and Co-Chaired the LeanUX NYC conference, and is the User Experience track chair for the Agile 2013 and Agile 2014 conferences.
The Minimum Loveable Product: Go Beyond the Minimum Viable ProductDialexa
Minimum Viable Products (MVP) rarely make "good" products. We discuss an alternative: the Minimum Loveable Product. In the world of platform engineering, coordinating your software (and perhaps hardware teams) to deliver a valuable product that your target audience will use is critical to success.
http://by.dialexa.com/beyond-the-minimum-viable-product-why-you-should-build-a-minimum-loveable-product
Agile Product Management - Co-Training with Angel Medinilla (c)Andrea Darabos
Agile Product Management course as part of the Agile Kaizen (c) training portfolio.
See more at
http://www.proyectalis.com/AgileKaizen/
www.leanadvantage.co.uk
Agile Product Management - Co-Training with Angel Medinilla (c)
Failcon 2012
1. “Social Proof is Not Proof”
Michael Wolfe
www.about.me/michaelrwolfe
@michaelrwolfe
2. Now *this* is a tough crowd
I didn’t know you were such
an EPIC FAIL
Do you win the conference
by being the biggest FAIL?
I hope your presentation
isn’t a FAIL!
10. Got press and awards
“The CEO Michael Wolfe is a proven
winner along with his backers at
Benchmark. This is a natural idea and
opportunity with very long legs.”
- NextUp Research
13. Let’s go back to summer 2010
• Entrepreneur in Residence at Benchmark
• Was working on new company ideas
• Intrigued by the collaboration market
• Co-founder/CEO at Vontu with Mike
• Now is a Partner at Greylock
• Was working on a photo-sharing company
14. Looked at the usual suspects
They gave up and built a homegrown system based
on mailboxes and wiki pages
15. “Enterprise 2.0 from your inbox”
GOAL: build a collaboration solution that people will
actually use
• Embrace email, don’t compete with it
• Zero friction to become a user
• Great UI, search, social features
• Viral and freemium
16. The Plan
• Raise some money
TEAM fail
• Build small team
VALIDATION fail
• Customer validation
VALUE fail
• MVP, iterate, iterate
PRODUCT fail
• Product/market fit
SOCIAL PROOF fail
• Profit!
17. TEAM
Awesome engineering team
Mike took on customer validation, sales, marketing,
finance, product management, financing, etc.
19. TEAM lesson
If you fail, it will be because you don’t reach
product/market fit and don’t get customers
So, someone on your team should be great at and
work on only that
It is not a part time job
An engineering team is not a company
20. VALIDATION
Is email overload a
problem?
Yup
Do you live out of your
inbox?
Yup
You aren’t happy with the
tools you’ve tried?
Yup
Would you try this?
Yup
21. VALIDATION fail
We validated the problem but not the solution
Overbuilt the MVP - we thought we needed clear
differentiation. Should have got it out sooner
“We talked to some customers” is not validation
22. VALIDATION lessons
You aren’t doing it enough
No, you aren’t
Stop it, you really aren’t
No, shut up
23. VALUE fail
“Enterprise 2.0 value
proposition:
– Get more done
– Find information
– Discover experts
– Build reputation and
relationships
– Be happy
The “soft” value prop
NO BUDGET.
NO URGENCY.
NO ONE
24. The VALUE degrees of difficulty
“HARD “
VALUE PROP
Get Winners
customers, grow
revenue
Compliance, secu
rity, cost savings
Productivity, colla
boration, employe
e satisfaction
Loserville
“SOFT “
VALUE PROP
Email Web Saas Cloud Social Mobile
OLD TECH NEW TECH
25. VALUE lessons
We focused on adoptability, not value
Wasn’t new and different enough – not “10x”
better than the alternatives
This is why the collaboration market is so hard
And why so many email startups fail
26. SMART MAILING LISTS
• Easy to create and grow
• Capture documents and discussions
• Find content, discover experts
• Social and viral
27. PRODUCT fail
People “liked” our product, but we didn’t get “love”
OK to have haters as long as you have lovers
Needed critical mass of usage to provide value, but
without value couldn’t attract critical mass
Early adopter market overlapped with Google’s install
base
29. SOCIAL PROOF fail
(Smart people involved. I
“I have an idea I want to run guess they know what they
by you” are doing)
“Sounds great”
(People love my idea!)
“Let me tell you about my (Wow, Mike sounds really
great idea!” excited about this)
“Sure, we’ll try it”
(Everyone loves it!).
“This thing is happening!” “Can I invest?”
30. Things we did well
Pivoted decisively
Great support from board and investors
Team cohesion
Selected a new project (Pipewise) with a lower
“degree of difficulty”
31. Knowledge has been dropped:
Don’t get distracted by who has SOCIAL PROOF and
who doesn’t
Diverse TEAM, VALIDATE the idea, leverage larger
waves to add VALUE
Follow your gut – you know the right thing to do
Go and do it.
Questions?
32. “Social Proof is Not Proof”
Michael Wolfe
www.about.me/michaelrwolfe
@michaelrwolfe