Lean Startup [jan2013-may2013]

• Going after a couple of ideas of what make a startup tick, and how can you avoid falling in the most common pitfalls of the startup movement.
• Talking about validated learning where all the steps you take are directed by input coming from the customers and not from the business owners. A couple of examples presented like the IMVU service, the laundry in India, or Kodak photo share which all started with a basic product, and improving that by getting input from customers instead of having a plan before going to market.
• MVP description and what’s it about. Always strive to keep the feature creep to a minimum and deliver to the early adopters, whom are people to prefer somewhat incomplete products just to gain the incentive of being first users - which might be an advantage to them or their company by being first batch of users.
• The leap-of-faith assumption refers to one thing that the startup assumes to be correct without prior validation, but in which the MVP helps to make a sale.
• The Dropbox example where a “how does it work” video became the MVP that went through the features - sync made easy - but at the same time the leap-of-faith was the assumption that similar products where too difficult to use.
• Food on the table story - “concierge” approach - one customer initially interacted directly with the founder in order to get an insight in building the product.
• Use the so called “Innovation accounting” for the startup as an accounting method
• Going over the Toyota manufacturing setup of small batches, introduced after ww2 when Japanese companies couldn’t get hold of a lot of capital in order to compete with the us manufacturers. They were using small batches and same machines to produce different types of components also the production line can be easier interrupted if something went wrong or components had issues. Toyota became largest car manufacturer of the world, in the year 2008.
• Large batch death spiral which incurs further penalties as the batches advance through the build process, and when even the slightest delays build up.
• Training new hires through a gradual developing cycle pays off in the end especially of looking at longer term costs/bugs/delays
• Use the 5 why’s technique to get to the root cause of the problems.