This document introduces the Lean Startup methodology for launching companies. It discusses replacing traditional business plans and linear execution with customer development, hypothesis testing, and iterative product development and validation. The Lean Startup process involves creating a business model canvas, conducting customer interviews to test assumptions, designing experiments to validate hypotheses, and using the results to pivot, iterate, or persevere. Examples are provided of how companies have leveraged these Lean principles to develop products through rapid experimentation and learning.

2. Leveraging Lean For Your Startup
October 6, 2016

3. Kyra Davis
Director of Academic
& Government
Relations
@Kyra Davis
Jake Disraeli
Senior Sales Associate

4. Intro Story

5. 5-Year Financial Forecasts
Historical Method of Launching Companies
30-Page Business Plans
If you build it, will they come?

6. STEVE BLANK
“No business plan survives the first
contact with customers.”

7. SEARCH
to
From EXECUTION

8. Business Plans —> Business Model Canvas
Customer Development during Product
Development
Linear Execution —> Pivot, Iterate, and Validate
Changing the Rules of Innovation
Lean Startup

9. Don’t marry your idea!

10. The answers are outside the building.

11. Business
Model Canvas
A business model
describes how an
organization creates,
delivers and
captures value.
*Licensed from Strategyzer.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0

12. Business
Model Canvas
*Licensed from Strategyzer.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0

13. Customer Development
A process for testing and validating your
market and business model hypotheses
through interactions with potential
customers.

14. Designing Customer Development Experiments
Which hypotheses will you be testing?
How will you test them?
What will you measure?
How will you determine success or failure?
Rinse and repeat.

15. Customer Interviews
1. Identify your goals and important assumptions to test in
advance
2. Ask open ended questions and five whys
3. Get psyched to hear things you don’t want to hear
4. Search for behaviors and patterns, not feelings
5. Never pitch; be aware of confirmation bias.
5 Best Practices for Conducting Customer Interviews

16. Confirmation Bias

17. Flow of a Customer Interview
1. Context for conversation.
2. Demographic information.
3. Learn about their behaviors and processes surrounding your
solution.
1. How are they currently solving the problem?
2. Would they be willing to pay to do it differently?
3. Have they tried ways of the solving the problem?
4. Which aspects about this problem are most important to them?
4. Now, get feedback on your solution (if you have a prototype).
5. Ask for introductions.

18. Hypothesis Testing
1. Prototypes & Wire Frames
2. Google AdWords
3. Landing Pages
4. Interact with online communities (Quora, Reddit, blogs, etc.)
5. Surveys (but be careful!)
Additional Methods for Testing Hypotheses

19. Customer Interviews InAction

20. Customer Interviews In Action
1. What are your company killing assumptions?
Is it a feature that you’re depending on being successfully adopted? Is it a pain point
that your entire model is built around? Maybe it’s a channel partner that you need for
distribution.

21. Customer Interviews In Action
2. Who do you need to talk to to test these
assumptions?
Be as specific as possible (age, income, profession, location, media habits, etc.)

22. Customer Interviews In Action
3. How will you gather information? How do you quantify
success?
Where will you go? How will you schedule conversations?

23. Customer Interviews In Action
4. What are three interview questions you will use?
Describe the process of doing X from start to finish?
What are the biggest pains associated with doing X?

24. Vitruvian Therapeutics

25. Phrase the
assumption that you
will test as a clear
statement that can be
proven right or wrong.
HYPOTHESIS
Design an experiment
to test your hypothesis
and build any artifacts
that you will need to
run it.
DESIGN
Run your qualitative or
quantitative test with
customers or
stakeholders.
TEST
Analyze the results
and decide whether to
pivot, iterate or
persevere.
LEARN
Rapid Experimentation
The iterative learning
process that is used to
quickly test hypotheses
about the product or
business.

26. Emotional Rollercoaster
My idea
rocks!
Whoa. Maybe not.
Hmm. That’s interesting.
This might work!
I’m close, but not there
yet.
Ok, how about this one!
Ugh. Still no.
Found it!!! Let’s go.
Darn it.
Good feeling about this
one.

27. Lean Never Stops

28. WIZER
Initial Concept:
Wearable and data-based hand sanitizer
to reduce risk of healthcare-associated
infections for doctors and provide
compliance data to hospitals.

29. WIZER

30. WIZER

31. WIZER

32. Blue River Technology

33. Kyra Davis
Director of Academic
& Government
Relations
Jake Disraeli
Senior Sales Associate
@kyradavis