Lean LaunchPad

Lean LaunchPad is an excellent course on “how to do startups”, offered for free on Udacity

Lean LaunchPad has been so useful and influential that…

  • it’s become the basis for the successful NSF I-Corps program, with universities sponsoring I-Corps hubs all across the US
  • it’s a class at Stanford (ENGR 245), Berkeley (MBA 295)

Some Key Take-aways

#1 Get out of the building

Get out of the building and talk to (who you think) your customers (are). This is the main thrust of Customer Discovery

Business Model Canvas

The Business Model Canvas outlines 9 business facets where startups need to articulate hypotheses for each, and test those hypotheses for each by asking potential customers and/or actually presenting a product/service to customers.

The hypotheses are expected to be wrong at first, and that’s OK! Post-It note answers for each category is highly encouraged – answers are temporary until vetted through customer research.

Fail safe, fail fast, fail often

The canvas is separated into 2 halves, with the Value Proposition(s) in the middle:

Left – Internal business structure

Right – External business structure

  • Key Partners
  • Key Activities
  • Key Resources
  • Cost Structure
  • Value Propositions
  • Customer Relationships
  • Customer Segments
  • Channels
  • Revenue Streams

Minimum Viable Product (MVP) & Product-Market Fit (PMF)

Deploying Minimum Viable Products (MVP) to try to demonstrate you’ve found Product-Market Fit (PMF) is a core tenet the Lean Startup methodology

Startups are not just small companies

Startups are organizations in search of a business model, and they need to experiment & iterate on all relevant business facets until it’s clicks (the money starts flowing in!), or the funding runs out.

Long-Form Read

Why the Lean Start-Up Changes Everything: a faster, smarter methodology for launching companies may make business plans obsolete

Lean LaunchPad x Cynefin

Markets and Product-Market Fit are Complex problems: if you introduce a new product, how will the market respond? Cause and effect cannot be truly predicted here, thus this is a Complex problem.

Cynefin toolset for Complex problems: Probe –> Sense –> Respond

  • Probe: Minimum Viable Products (MVP) are the Probe to the market – the product should be a cheap and fast, safe-to-fail experiment, while being sufficiently fleshed out such that…
  • Sense: MVP needs to provide good feedback as an experiment. MVP needs to be a full enough solution to try to avoid a false negative conclusion on the overall idea
  • Respond: the startup amplifies the product features that excite the customer, and dampen the features that don’t