#giff constable

(Ft Giff Constable)

This is the first of an experimental series where we ask a mentor from the LSM network to share some lessons based on a lean startup case study. Giff Constable is the CEO of Neo, a product innovation company. He's mentored more Lean Startup Machine events than almost anyone, including the very first one. Giff will be critiquing the case study on Seen.co.

Watch Tarikh's Case Study Here:

Lesson 1: Intellectual Honesty is a Pre-Requisite for Lean

I love Tarikh's sincerity. From a psychological point of view, it is insanely hard to challenge yourself once you've sunk time and energy into a solution. They approached the process honestly and got better at it as they went along. When they invalidated their core assumption, even though a lot of startup mythology tells you to persevere, they were honest enough with themselves to realize that creating new consumer behaviors could be tremendously difficult and dangerously slow. At that point, each team has to make their own judgement call.

Lesson 2: Interviews Must Focus on Behavior, Not Feeling

My take listening to their first round of interviews is that they focused on feelings, not behavior, which is a classic mistake. It is one thing for someone to say, "Yeah, it would have been cool to check out that Ani DiFranco concert I missed." It is a very different thing to discover that they spent 30 minutes scouring the internet for videos and audio clips. The great thing is that Tarikh's team realized this fact. Their next experiment was much more rigorous, and this is exactly in the spirit of lean. Continuous improvement!

Lesson 3: Validation is Not a Customer of One

Validation is a tricky word. You don't have true validation until you've hit both product-market fit (the customer pulling the product out of your hand and refusing to give it back) and business model-market fit (a scalable way to make money). But in particular, validation is never, ever, ever a customer of one! However, Trevor running up with a $20 bill makes for a great story!

Lesson 4: Choosing the Right Riskiest Assumption is Key to Success

It is interesting to see that once the team no longer had a solution to sell to people, their brains were naturally open to studying customer behavior. This is how they discovered the burdens of event organizers, and what gave the insight for their pivot. I also given them credit for choosing a reasonable "riskiest assumption". Their original idea had many risks, but they were smart enough to zoom in on a big one, and fearless enough to tackle it in spite of how it might threaten their vision.

Lesson 5: Once You've Found a Beachhead, the Broader Risks Come Into Play

You may think you're a girl/boy genius with a finger on the pulse of the markets flipping me off with your free hand, BUT take note. Failure can and probably will happen to you. 

"When it was launched in December 2001 the annual sales target was 40,000 units, and the company expected to sell 50,000 to 100,000 units in the first 13 months...Dean Kamen predicted that the Segway "will be to the car what the car was to the horse and buggy and John Doerr, a venture capitalist who invested in the company,predicted that Segway Inc would be the fastest company to reach US$1 billion in sales.However, only about 30,000 Segways were sold from 2001 to 2007."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segway_Inc.

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Lean Startup methodology is not a revolutionary idea. It's the best answer to the inevitable fact that startups fail and fail often.

So the question is, "How do I fail as cheaply as possible and get the most learning as quickly as possible from each failure?"

This is the core of Lean Startup method. If you agree with the value of that question then we're on the same team.

The answer to that question is considerably messier. This is the part where you have to use your brain. If our advice sucks, ignore it! If our rules suck, ignore them! If you figured out something better, tell us!

If you think lean startup method doesn't work, you're too focused on the trees and not the forest. If you're following Patrick Vlaskovits's advice to the T and your startup is bombing, tell him to fuck off, seriously. It's not a cult. Think for yourselves!

When you go through iterations of your product, you should also be iterating through your lean startup methods. The goal is to reach a state of Zen-like understanding. Then you can punch a hole through a VC from an inch away. Or by the time you're ready, you won't have to. (Good movies)

If you want more details or tips on getting started, please read the blogs of Eric Ries, Patrick Vlaskovits, Brant Cooper, Steve Blank, Sean Ellis, Hiten Shah, and other geniuses in the Lean Startup Circle who go out even less than I do.