Lean Start-ups

I attended a Boston Lean Start-up Circle meeting last week. This group and many others are part of the larger lean start-up movement, spurred by the writings of Steve Blank, presented nicely by him here.

The framework and advice provided by this movement apply to start-ups and to expansion stage software companies, and in fact I was turned on to this movement by several product managers from the OpenView Venture Partners portfolio.

This meeting had two presenters: David Cancel, who went through this deck, and John Prendergast (David was founder of Compete, Lookery, Ghostery, and is currently CEO of Performable, focused on website AB testing and conversion optimization. John is currently CEO of Blueleaf, focused on personal finance management). 

Many interesting topics were discussed — all of them relevant to senior management teams at any start up and expansion stage software company — especially those practicing Agile development methodology.

Some key messages that stuck out for me are these:

* The earlier you are in the evolution of your business, the more important it is for you to act and do something to learn. Planning is important, but less meaningful because you don’t know much, and all you have is assumptions. It’s much more important for you to act and test those assumptions, as quickly as humanly possible. The key is to find the shortest cheapest way for you to test an assumption and test!

* Data is critical, but don’t bury yourself in tons of metrics! Focus on the key metrics that show the health of your business and what you want to impact–that’s your operational dashboard. Understand your lead-to-sales funnel. And finally, understand how different groups of users behave over time via cohort analysis, described in detail by my colleague Vlad Djuric in his series here.

* There’s no silver bullet! There’s no recipe for the perfect start-up. All you can find in literature and at talks are tools to help you navigate the difficult terrain of starting and building a company. The rest if up to you.