Wake Up and Smell the Coffee
A Tale of Strange Loops at a Startup Weekend
I’ve just returned home from my second Startup Weekend here in Perth, Western Australia. I’m a typically introverted hacker, and so my tendency is to enter these events with a favourite idea which I damn well sit down and build. That is, after all, the fun part. This time was different. I want to learn how to build a business, not a product, and so I arrived at the venue deliberately devoid of a pet project to pitch.
Well, that’s not quite true. I pitched my idea to teach programming to kids, but that was just to have a chance to yell at a captive audience from my soapbox. Instead, a friend and I brainstormed an idea during the Friday night pre-event drinks, and he pitched that. We formed a team with two others and set to work.
I should provide some context here by describing the eventual result. Javalarm is a free alarm clock app for your iPhone or Android Phone which displays an ad for a nearby indie coffee shop when you wake up in the morning, giving you a chance to win a free coffee there each day.
We fumbled our way to this strong concept by applying validation strategies suggested by our mentors, and we learned a lot about the value of doing this; we would have wasted half the weekend had we built our first concept, which was an alarm clock with lots of funny negative consequences if you fail to get up in time, or if we’d pursued what it morphed in to, which was a social to-do list that allows you to make promises to your friends, giving them the power to hold you accountable for what you told them you’d do.
What really worked was that we weren’t emotionally tied to the initial idea, as we’d arrived at it very quickly. We were therefore happy to abandon it as soon as we received evidence that it wasn’t as strong as we thought. And we knew we’d have no trouble figuring out a way of transforming the idea into something new, as we were really getting into the groove of riffing on similar concepts.
The Lean Startup encourages teams to move rapidly through the build, measure, learn feedback loop. Startup Weekend distills this further, changing the feedback loop into one of brainstorm, validate, learn. We would think of something we thought might work, we’d perform an experiment to test that theory, and we’d modify the idea based on the results, often completing an entire cycle in less than an hour.
By applying this technique we learned quite a few things that allowed us to hone our original concept, strengthening our pitch to the judges. For instance, we learned that requiring coffee shops to give away a free coffee each day is not the barrier to entry we thought it would be, because they already give away so many. We learned that users really dislike the idea of penalties as a way of motivating them to do something they don’t like doing, even if they’re funny, and even if they’re able to inflict them on others. We learned that converting an independent coffee shop into a customer was relatively easy, because the owner is often the person making coffee when you walk in, and is usually happy to chat and to make an on-the-spot decision when presented with a low-risk proposal that will benefit their business.
We also learned that there’s another, insidious feedback loop that’s even more rapid than Startup Weekend’s brainstorm, validate, learn feedback loop, and that’s the train of thought within each of our heads. During the brainstorming phase I’d often think of an idea, imagine what the results of the validation step would be, and abandon the idea, all within the space of a few seconds, and often without speaking to anyone else. It was very easy to get trapped at this stage, with a serious dose of analysis paralysis.
I think the challenge of entrepreneurship is one of knowing when to break out of this internal feedback loop into the longer one of Startup Weekend, and then from that into the longer one of Lean Startup, and so on. I’m sure many potential entrepreneurs stay within the first loop far too long, honing their favourite idea to perfection before reluctantly revealing it to a trusted advisor. After asking them to sign an NDA.
So that’s my advice.
- Begin with a fresh idea that you’re not emotionally attached to.
- Start iterating on that idea within the speediest feedback loop.
- Know when to jump off to the next level.
We delivered a great pitch at the end of the weekend, including a good business plan and a killer demo (we’d built both the iPhone app and the website dashboard for coffee shop owners during the course of the weekend). We had a couple of customers in the pipeline and even interest from a coffee shop owner in San Francisco.
In credit to the awesome startup community here in Perth, our pitch was judged fairly to be no better or worse than anyone else’s, and we didn’t place. Having little emotional attachment to the concept means that we can treat that result as just another data point in the ongoing experiment. The only question now is whether we jump off or keep riding the loop we’re on.
