Startup boot camp? Design Management summer camp!
I would like to share a story about one of the most exciting weekends of all time. This past April I was accepted to participate in 3 Day Startup in San Antonio, hosted by the Rackspace Startup Program and sponsored by Trinity University.
3DS is based out of Austin, but travels the world to facilitate 3-day startup boot camps. A few dozen aspiring entrepreneurs from a wide range of backgrounds are pulled together, injected with unhealthy levels of caffeine and sugar, and set loose to develop viable, investment-worthy concepts under the guidance of a roaming mob of mentors who had all built successful businesses in the past. Our “mentor mob” included Dirk Elmendorf and Pat Condon (Rackspace), Jason Seats (Slicehost), Bart Bohn (ATI, Ravel), and Nick Longo (CoffeeCup Software), just to name a few. The insights and encouragement these guys provided was incredible. My friend and NeighborFarms co-founder BJ Dierkes also made the cut. The planets had aligned.
The event was timed perfectly with the final design phase of my thesis research, which explored the business model mechanics and social dynamics of small-scale, independent food production. Over the previous months of data analysis and prototyping a vision had emerged for a simple web service that could foster greater market resiliency by enabling new opportunities for collaborative value creation, emergent creativity and self-regulation. I’ll be posting more on this project in the coming weeks.
The 3DS workshop model is straight-forward: participants bring their business ideas and teams will form around the most compelling proposals. These teams will then have 72 hours to define, prototype, validate and pitch their idea to a panel of investors. In anticipation of the workshop, I knew the most important pitch wouldn’t be on the last day, but on the very first round of idea-vetting. I needed everyone around me to be as convinced as I already was, and to believe something great was within reach, but with only a few fleeting minutes to make a year of exploration and insight meaningful.
Opening night pitch: participants show their stuff
Dirk Elmendorf quickly destroyed that notion with a reality check of epic proportions. After several minutes bludgeoning my group with a primer on innovation drivers and market trajectories, he cut me off and said “You know what? I believe you. You’ve done a TON of research and know this stuff and the complexity and intricacy and all that — great — but I don’t need to hear about it. Just tell me what I need to know to support your idea.” YES! I needed to hear that so badly. I realized I was too damn proud of the complexity of the opportunity space to actually let anyone into it in the first place. I was defining my offering as a better solution than that of competitors no one had ever heard of, in a space no one had ever experienced, wrapped in convoluted jargon no one cared to follow.
A huge weight fell off my shoulders. I was ready to build something. I shuffled through my library of slide decks, grabbed eight slides, and penned a quick story. A few minutes later I was pitching to the group. When pitches were complete there was a blind vote for the best concepts that people either supported or would actually like to work on. My proposal won with 12 votes, the next 3 concepts had between 6 and 8 votes. Half a dozen participants joined BJ and I and we began a 48-hour marathon to refine and test the concept, build a convincing prototype and boil everything down into a compelling pitch for a panel of investors.
Visualizing ideas, breaking through complexity
My biggest challenge with regard to the team was to catch everyone up on all of the few relevant research findings that would get us moving forward while extinguishing the bursts of doubt and critique that threatened to derail our momentum. Fortunately, the workshop also aligned with a weekly farmers market here in San Antonio. I took the team out and set them loose with a series of questions for vendors. I also took this time to test a few new concepts that we had developed during the first night’s idea session. One concept included a mobile app, so I sketched a deck of simple interfaces onto a few Post-It notes and stuck them to BJ’s broken iPhone. This quick paper prototype debunked a potential distraction with an investment of less than 20 minutes of prep time.
Test early and often: paper prototyping within hours on inception
Move the team forward: a nice healthy dose of contextual immersion
The goal of the field trip wasn’t to learn anything new (though we did), but to get the team immersed in the context and spur some excitement in the human element behind the project. It worked. We spent the rest of the afternoon littering whiteboards with observations and sketching concepts. That evening we developed a rock-solid revenue model and built an awesome prototype that I could demonstrate from a series of user task narratives.
An endless supply of whiteboards, courtesy of Rackspace in San Antonio
On the final evening we delivered a knockout pitch and had overwhelmingly positive feedback from the mentors and investors alike. BJ and I are now in early-stage development and are preparing for an off-season pilot with the growers I interviewed in Georgia.
Curious to know what the big idea is? Well, you’ll just have to wait and see when we get closer to launch!
This workshop was absolutely amazing, from beginning to end. The time spent with mentors was really the best part of this experience. They held extremely high expectations and were necessarily difficult to convince, which pushed me to a level of focus and refinement that I wouldn’t have found on my own. It was stressful, to be sure, but it was also a hell of a lot of fun.
It was also really exciting to have a chance to apply so much of what I have been learning and developing over the last two years with the Design Management department at SCAD. Contextual research, idea visualization and facilitation, concept mapping, prototyping, and presenting — all compressed into 72 hours of nonstop madness, which was also quite familiar :) In the zombie hours of the early morning, long after so many had gone home to sleep and shower, I felt proud to have been apart of the workshop culture and the high expectations of our department back in Savannah. This is what we had been prepared for. I also felt an unmistakable sadness in knowing that I’m on my own now. I want to create that same energy and creative cohesion. It’s time to build something.
Read more about the weekend:
