The 5 Lessons I Learned From Lean Startup Machine

A few months ago I wrote about The Power of the Right Question and briefly mentioned that one of the biggest lessons I learned @LSMWashDC was not coming up with the right idea, it was coming up with the right question(s).

When I showed up that weekend, I didn’t know anyone but there was a shared passion that brought close to 60 people together for a full weekend. That shared passion was finding ideas that would make a difference. And so we self-organized around ideas that we were passionate about.

There were 5 lessons beside asking the right question(s) that I took away. I believe these lessons are relevant to anyone who wants to validate ideas and especially relevant to entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs.

1. Know your target audience

Whether you are designing a product or a service, it is critical to understand your target audience and their needs. Not just in terms of who they are but why they would use what you are offering. In the words of Clayton Christensen, what job will they be hiring your product for?

This is where my team spent sometime thinking through the questions we want to ask in person and through a survey we put together to identify that job. This was an iterative process but it provided us with valuable insights on the questions we need to ask to surface our assumptions.

2. Invalidate your assumptions

While the question of “what problem are we trying to solve?” is an important question to ask, we need to be willing to ask the questions that test our idea or as we learned, “invalidate our assumptions”. There are many biases when it comes to ideas (confirmation bias might be relevant in this case). We tend to want to find data that confirm our bias and assure us that we have the right idea but this is not particularly useful if we really want to test our ideas and adjust early before we invest money, time and energy. We built the landing page below to see how many people would sign up which was one of the criterion we used to invalidate our assumptions.

3. Use a scientific approach

When we started as a team, we were trying to figure out so many things like what questions we need to ask, how will we market our idea and who will be doing what?. When that happens, teams tend to lose focus and get distracted. There need to be a scientific approach to follow in order to track what we have done and what we learned from it. We used a canvas (Experiment Board) to validate our learning and adjust as needed. It was hard to follow at first as it required discipline and a different way of thinking but once we adopted it, it provided us with valuable insights with each experiment we ran.

4. Get out of the building

One the first things we learned was to get out of the building and talk to people about the “perceived” problem we are trying to solve. At this point, we think it is a problem for us but that doesn’t mean it is a problem for our target audience. This is where interacting with our target audience is critical. It helps us validate another variable which is do we have the right target audience?

This concept is not new, in lean manufacturing the concept of go and see for yourself or gemba has one of Toyota’s principles (Toyota Principle #12).

5. Be ready to pivot

Now the hard part is when we realized that our perceived problem is not really a problem (as I heard once, “the problem we are trying to solve doesn’t exist” or as I would say, “it exists only in our imagination”). Once the data shows otherwise, it is only wise to adjust course or as in lean startup lingo, “Pivot”. Steve Blank explains this with a brilliant question, “what do you do when hypotheses do not meet reality?”.

As a team we had to figure out what to do next, we had to tweak some of the variables in our canvas, do we have the right target audience? Are we solving the right problem?

Here’s what our experiment board looked like by the end of the third and final day.

While our final pitch was well received, we were missing the winning ticket which was the letter of intent. The final question to seal the deal, how many customers either promised to buy or actually given you money to buy what you are offering when it becomes available?