#CollectiveAcademy: Lean Startup Development

The first course of the Collective Temperance chapter was Lean Development — a set of startup principles based on the business theory by Eric Reis. Collective member Andreas led the three workshops every Tuesday morning.

The basic principles of Lean Startup Development are based on validating the problem your business seeks to solve whilst using as little resource as possible. Andreas tells us that at this early stage, it’s easy to get bogged down in details that don’t matter until later — to begin with, you need to be able to confidently say that your idea is going to work.

Workshop 1

The first session focused on finding a problem, and creating a customer assumption.

Using a ‘Validation board’, you can test the assumptions you have already made about your business. You can track the ‘pivots’ your business has already made, and define the core assumptions of your business. If any of these fail to pass, your whole business idea could be invalidated.

One business in the group found through interviews that her assumed customer group wasn’t interested in one of the fundamental principles of her business idea. She was able to realise either her business or customer base needed rethinking, without wasting resources.

Workshop 2

By now, participants were ready to apply their learning to the Lean Canvas — an entrepreneur-focused business plan.

The plan gives you a snapshot of your business which can develop and morph as your startup grows. This new way of thinking teaches you to devise experiments which will allow you to test who your customers are, what they want and how much they will pay.

Lesson of the day? You don’t need the resources you thought you would!

Workshop 3

Preparing to pitch your startup’s mission and brand.

This session looked at the basic economics of starting out. Taking a moment to consider if your finances will allow you to take the next step, or if you need to rethink how you can take things forward.

Then, it’s time to consider how you acquire and keep customers. Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referrals & Revenue (AARRR — or the infinitely better name of Piratemetrics) is a framework focused on finding and most importantly keeping customers.

We considered how customers interact with a company, and how to optimise that interaction so it turns in to recommendations.

That’s a wrap for the first course of #CollectiveTemperance. If you have an idea for a useful topic, or would be interested in running one yourself, get in touch with nadine@camdentownunlimited.com.