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Being a lean startup, Redux

Aaron — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 19:00:11 +0000

Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup, describes a startup as:

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.

What I’ve learned about crowdSpring

TJ — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 03:02:58 +0000

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.

Being a lean startup

TJ — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 18:41:01 +0000

I read Steve Blank’s “The Four Step to the Epiphany” a few years ago and thoroughly enjoyed it. In a nutshell Gary argues that startup founders need to begin a ”customer development” process from the get go. The key insight is that questions regarding the needs of the user can almost never be answered in your own conference room, rather you need to get out and interact with real users and find out which of your many assumptions really hold water (if any).

While I found the book very motivating, I wasn’t in a place where I could act on the advice Steve offered. Well to be honest, I could have, but I found the prospect of interacting with customers very early in product development a bit scary. How would I find prospective users that would be willing to talk with me before I had something really useful to demonstrate? In my mind I had defined “really useful” as being nearly perfect.

With the founding of Firestarter Labs, I want things to be different. I have lived through several less than satisfying product development efforts, and I’ve vowed to learn from my mistakes. Taking the lessons of Steve Blank and Eric Ries to heart we are developing a series of hypotheses and seeking to test them with the least amount of effort. To date we’ve used the concept of the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to:

Test a set of domain names and marketing messages. We first wanted to determine if it would be feasible to reach prospective customers through search engine ads. We had only a simple landing page which described our basic offering and allowed people to sign up for an upcoming Beta test. We tested a few different domain names and ad copy to get a feel for what worked, and tracked our conversion rate (how many people registered for the Beta). For $50 we learned a lot. Did we identify the optimal domain name and marketing copy? Of course not, but it was good enough for us to move on with a little more confidence.
Test the intuitiveness of the solution. Using the Balsamiq paper prototype software we mocked up some variations of the user interface. Working with just a handful of outsiders (not carefully chosen early adopters) we were able to determine that people got the idea and that the most basic of our designs might give an acceptable user experience. From here we began our Web-based implementation – working in no longer than three week iterations. We define the functionality required to test our next hypothesis and estimate how long it will take to implement. We then work to that deadline – compromising functionality if necessary.

The tests so far have been useful, but not yet surprising. We’ve found that our user interfaces are intelligible and we’ve been able to simplify, however we have not yet verified exactly which features will generate the real value to our users. In a month or so we will begin testing for utility. That is to say, determining whether users obtain meaningful benefits from our software as they go about creating their own presentations.

Now if I could only get over my fear that with every new test we’ll discover something awful.

If you want more on the Lean Startup methodology check out Eric Ries’ presentations