Blog Take 3: Learning Lean
I find writing posts downright painful. Result? I've restarted this blog 2-3 times now, each time faltering shortly thereafter. So this time I'm taking a new approach. Inspired by Eric Ries's Startup Lessons Learned, I'm using it as my diary as I learn to apply Customer Development to company building.
For the past year and a half, I've been learning about Customer Development, and more generally lean startups. This learning started off with a subscription to the Lean Startup Circle list, and culminated in the extreme privileged of auditing part of Steve Blank's MBA course at Berkley.
As part of that MBA course, a group of students ran a case study on my company. The number 1 take-away from that study is that we did everything backwards :) Ouch. That's ok, we've now made our way through to market/product fit (yup that's product/market fit done backwards), and things are looking up. But I certainly want to learn from my mistakes and avoid struggling through the same ones in the future.
So Let's Pour On the Learnin'!
I've banded together with a group of 14 other entrepreneurs (first-timers and repeat offenders alike). We're each going to each be fleshing out a new startup idea by following the syllabus for Steve Blank's ENGR 245: The Lean Launch Pad (thanks for sharing Steve!)
Here's the deal:
- We're doing this as a group of Italian, or Italian-kinda-sorta, entreprenuers.
- We'll be following Steve's course plan as closely as possible, but there's no professor, just us following along, digging in and getting it done.
- We're using a Google Group as our glue, plus weekly conference calls.
- Each entrepreneur will recruit her own founding team members and lean mentors (step up if you'd like to be one or the other!)
- We'll each be keeping a diary as we go. This blog is now mine.
10 Weeks, Starting Jan 10, 2011
In the meantime, I'll need to decide which of my two ideas to move forward with. In my next post, I'll give a brief description of each and then we'll take it from there.
If you are into the daily deals and coupons space, have an exceptional ability to sell ice to Eskimos OR are a psycho-awesome developer, AND are interested in maybe-maybe being part of the team, contact me. I'm in Mountain View, CA.
(no I don't want to build a Groupon clone)