a human institution designed to create a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.

Our company, while not the stereotypical garage startup, fits all three aspects of this definition.  Every project our team undertakes is essentially a startup effort designed to (hopefully) bring a new product or service to market, in addition to serving the project’s client.  Our batting average over the last 23 years, unfortunately, is not much better than the typical startup success rate.  In terms of long-term commercial success, a few succeed — most fail.

Frustrated with this pattern of dead-end, shelf-ware projects, our team started looking for new approaches to building commercial success.  We discovered the Lean Startup methodology–oh my, was that really two years ago?–and Firestarter Labs was born.  Of course, that’s only the beginning of the story.

Fast-forward to today. We’ve fielded PresentationNext in private beta tests and are in the early stages of a new effort.  Looking back over the last couple years, we realize that we have made definite progress — but we also have lots of room for improvement. The first thing we hope to do is, for better or worse, write more blog posts.  From here on out we’ll write about the lessons we’ve already learned, be more transparent about our ongoing progress, and share what we discover along the way.

Keep us honest by sending a note or harassing us on twitter.

]]> http://firestarterlabs.com/2011/12/being-a-lean-startup-redux/feed/ 1 http://firestarterlabs.com/2009/11/what-ive-learned-about-crowdspring/ http://firestarterlabs.com/2009/11/what-ive-learned-about-crowdspring/#comments Thu, 05 Nov 2009 03:02:58 +0000 TJ http://firestarterlabs.com/?p=94 For those of you that don’t know, crowdSpring is a crowdsourcing site for logo, business card, illustration, and web site design.  Basically crowdSpring manages design contests.  If you need a logo, you just describe what you are looking for and put up the prize money.  The creatives then compete for that prize – submitting their designs for your review and feedback. 

The primary aspect of their business model that convinced us to give it a try was their money back guarantee – if you don’t receive at least 25 entries to your contest, you face no obligation.  We also gained some confidence from the fact that we could observe ongoing contests.  It was pretty clear that (for whatever reason) some real rockstar designers like to play in these contests.

What we had in mind was the design of a logo and business cards.  We had checked around locally and it seemed that logo design would likely cost us $500 and that wouldn’t include business card layout.   For that money we’d get a handful of design ideas as well as refinements on the chosen design.  The primary benefit of choosing a local designer was that we would get to interact face-to-face.

On crowdSpring however, that $500 would be a larger than average prize and would include business card layout.  Given the size of the prize we thought it was reasonable (based on a review of similar contests) to expect that we might get 100 different options to choose from.  While all interaction would happen online, we were satisfied that the risk/reward ratio was in our favor so we set up a contest.

What did we learn:

• The creatives are starved for feedback.  In many contests, the buyers provide little or no feedback and this discourages input from the creatives.  We found that all constructive criticism was highly appreciated and that the designers were smart about learning from the feedback given to them or to their competitors.
• Being involved is time-consuming.  This was the biggest surprise.  We set out to provide at least a little feedback on every unique design.  Given that the creatives take all the risk in these contests, it seemed only fair to prevent unnecessary work.  You need to expect to spend an hour or so a day to keep up (although I really got sucked into the process and probably spent 3).  In addition to being courteous, staying involved helps you as the buyer learn about your own likes and dislikes (these were not obvious to us at the start).
• Choice is good.  In the end our contest had an amazing 267 entries.  While the vast majority of these were well off the mark, it was incredibly invigorating to have a handful of high quality and completely different designs to choose from.  We were extremely pleased in the end.  JediTiffin had the winning entry.  The business cards he designed, in particular, have been extremely effective.  It is very satisfying to see them pique people’s curiosity about what we’re doing here at Firestarter Labs.

We’re now preparing for a new contest focused on giving our web application a needed face-lift.