1. Common Mistakes at #LSMsf

    Congrats to our three winners at Lean Startup Machine San Francisco! These three teams rocked it and came up with awesome products. One even made money!

    As a postmortem I thought I would go over some of the mistakes teams made as it’s our goal in future events to have every team perform at the level of our three winners. These are simple mistakes that could easily be avoided.

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    1. Not understanding the process, specifically what it means to pivot.

    We give every attendee a copy of The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development weeks before the event for a reason. It’s a brief read that will catch you up on everything you need to know for our event.

    Many attendees didn’t understand the data-driven approach to the methodology. Every customer interview should be tracked as a data point and compared against every other interview. Your data set must be a homogenous segment of potential customers as you define them by your customer hypothesis.

    Pivoting is based off of comparing one of your hypotheses expected outcome to what actually happens through testing. Only if this comparison is wrong do you pivot. Pivoting is not based off of coming up with a new idea.

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    2. Building something no one wants

    In Chicago, Eric Ries defined the Lean Mindset as, “If my life depended upon it, what’s the least amount of work I have to do [to test this]?”

    I was unhappy to see several teams show us demo’s during the presentation without any letters of intent (LOIs) or cash in hand from actual customers. No startup needs a functioning product to get this level of customer validation. It was a significant time and resource drain for participants to write code when they weren’t ready to, it’s likely they will have to completely redo the work they’ve done after talking to more customers.

    For more on building your startup without any web product, check out this case study on Food on the Table (aka the Concierge MVP).

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    3. Leadership issues

    Several teams suffered from indecision. When everyone’s meeting for the first time, there needs to be someone assigned to drive consensus, whether formally or informally.

    Several teams missed out on getting the proper mentorship and testing efficiently because they weren’t coordinating properly. I recommend teams schedule planning phases into the weekend. These are generally best done Friday night, Saturday at lunch, & Saturday evening. During this planning phase everyone is assigned actions to take and understands the vision for Customer Development. LSM is a team sport. You also want to keep communication open the entire weekend through a Google Group mailing list & Fast Society text message group.

    One thing I really liked at the SF event is how several teams efficiently used whiteboards. In Chicago, one team did some awesome brainstorming using post-it notes.

    2. 1 year ago 

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