It was fifteen long days ago that I decided to take the plunge and head out to Austin, Texas at the invitation of the StartupWeekend crew to attend their global StartupWeekend Organizer’s summit, hosted the day before South By Southwest (SXSW), arguably the world’s largest gathering of tech, startup, and other talented creatives (music and film) from around the world.
SXSW: The Startup-Central Conference of the World
Investors looks for traction, product, and team. Social proof also helps when you’re trying to get a first meeting. So you need to kick ass in at least one of these areas.
Before you pitch investors, build a minimum viable product, put it in front of customers, and learn something…
(Source: angellist)
I organise a group of around 120 entrepreneurs and startuppers that meet once a month for some interactive discussion, networking, and free food and drinks (thanks to the generosity of sponsors like Microsoft Bizspark).
Tonight we’re hearing from Glen Harris, founder and inventor of Harmony Universal Remotes, a venture he later sold to Logitech back in the day. He’s sharing his words of wisdom gleaned from running startups.
The interactive discussion tonight will focus on starting up lean, taking some good lessons from Eric Ries’ new Lean Startup book. Here’s some of the topics we’ll be covering:
Lots to cover, and lots to discuss. The night is aimed to be as interactive as possible, with discussion led by me, but really produced by the group. Want to learn from others and share your own wisdom? Come along tonight - we’ve only got limited space, so please RSVP through our meetup group.
Here’s an article I recently wrote for Unlimited Magazine evangelising Lean Startup as a great fit for building rapid, validated business models - great for startup-building hackathon events like the upcoming Auckland Startup Weekend
There’s a reason I’ve been a little quiet recently - I’ve been re-inspired to work on a startup idea that I kickstarted almost a year ago now and have been steadily working away following my own lessons and thinking about a longer term plan.
Few people plan ahead for their next big exit; although many people dream about cashing out of something with lots of money, for most, the execution of this dream is more like buying a lotto ticket rather than executing an idea into a profitable business.
I run into quite a few technology entrepreneurs who have spent much of their career selling services (web or otherwise), and who have finally put together the workings of a product, which they now want to call a ‘startup’. Almost always these entrepreneurs have gathered their customers through direct sales and don’t quite get what an online startup is usually about. So here’s my advice in two lines:
Lean Startup and Customer Development Guru, Steve Blank, delivered an awesome keynote at this year’s Startup Lessons Learned conference imploring entrepreneurs and investors alike to adopt an ongoing digital boardroom rather than stuffy once a month/quarter physical board meetings.
The digital boardroom is a great idea; some of the problems I’ve faced as entrepreneur is how to get more value from the networks and expertise of investors and other board members. Usually you’ve selected these as smart money, but how easy is it to leverage this smart money when they are often so detached from the day-to-day mechanics and challenges of your business?
I received an intro from a close friend the other day referring someone who had an idea for a startup. The closing commentary reminds me of a phrase I constantly run into here in NZ and highlights a misperception by many first-time entrepreneurs:
“I’m going to use New Zealand [insert your country here] as my test market before I start scaling up my startup operation”
Lean guru, Ash Maurya hits the nail on the head again regarding building startups - too many technology-focussed startups focus on the solution, and leave the other, more risky parts of the business model, like problem, alone.
Ash reminds us that his Lean Canvas tool for modelling a business model in an early stage startup, has a space for the solution and it’s only 1/9th the size of the whole canvas - for good reason!
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I see lots of startups forming around me, whether through mentoring, the networks I have, or my own startup ideas. There’s one factor I see a regularly by those who are struggling, compared to those that manage to keep up momentum: domain experience and the implication of this, what I call ‘domain hunch’.
