the minimum and the viable
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Talk at Founders Hive, December 2012TRANSCRIPT
The Minimum and
The ViableDr Tendayi VikiUniversity of Kent
Website: www.tendayiviki.com Follow Me: @tendayiviki
The Founder’s Hive
About Me:Academic: @unikent
4 failed startups, e.g. Tasksauce
Currently: Valideation
Organizer: Lean Startup Circle Kent
It’s a New Day
The costs and difficulty of setting up a new startup have plummeted…
The question is no longer can it be built, but rather should it be built….
Eric Ries (2011) The Lean Startup
http://lean.st
The Challenge
Most New Business Ideas
Are Terrible
People are terrible at predicting what other
people will pay money for.
There is very little value in the initial idea itself. It is just a seed that forms the basis for learning.
Great entrepreneurs are comfortable with “killing their babies”…
And pivoting to new ideas….
The Curse of the “O’s”
CEO, CFO, CMO, CTO, COO
Startups are not smaller versions of big companies!
Steve Blank & Bob Dorf (2012) The Startup Owner’s Manual
http://ow.ly/fcJEU
Startups are more like frogs than fish.
Rob Fitzpatrick and Salim Virani (2012)
http://www.foundercentric.com
The Curse of Early Success
You can’t argue with success…
Yes you can. Seth Godin
http://ow.ly/fcIUG
No two startup situations are the same…(Even in the same market as another company)
Rob Fitzpatrick and Salim Virani (2012)
http://www.foundercentric.com/
Each startup situation has its own topography….
And it’s a great challenge to business plan for that…
A Startup is A Thesis
Not Executing a Plan but;
A Path for Searching:
For a sustainable and profitable business model…
Eric Ries (2011) The Lean Startup
http://lean.st
Get out of the building and start talking to
customers
As early as possible…
Ash Maurya (2012)Running Lean
http://www.runningleanhq.com/
In a Lean Startup, we don’t build products with the goal of selling: ◦It is always with the goal of learning.
That is why we build minimum viable products (MVP). ◦The minimal product we need to build to
maximise learning.
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The Minimum Viable Product
The hypothesis/objective you are trying to learn.
from the target market segment you are trying to learn about.
and the form it takes to achieve that learning.
Patrick Vlaskovitz (2012)http://vlaskovits.com/2012/09/apple-maps-debacle-and-minimum-viable-products/
A Great MVP
Specify who you are going to be talking to from the beginning.◦Be specific about your target sample.
If you talk to anyone who will talk to you: ◦It becomes hard to distinguish signal from
noise.
Running Successful Experiments
Specify exactly what you would expect to find if your assumptions are correct.
◦Hypotheses MUST be falsifiable.◦Set minimum success criteria.
Otherwise, there is no way to know if you have learned anything.
Running Successful Experiments
In science, the process is called operationalization:
◦Taking an abstract notion and concretising it!
The products you build as an MVP must be a concretised test of your hypotheses about customers.
A Great MVP
Get out of the building and start talking to customers.
No one is going to steal your idea…
Remember, there is very little value in the initial idea itself. It is just a seed that forms the basis for learning.
Eric Ries (2011) The Lean Startup
http://lean.st
THANK YOU