Lean Startup Summit —a 72h hackathon

I believe in a small group of professional people who are under time-pressure.

It really is two things: the desire to reach an ambitious objective on time AND the profound anxiety to “not come up with anything interesting”. Those feelings by itself make it worth participating.

For our hackathon during the Lean Startup Summit (LSS) we composed a versatile team of 6 people from oneUp: 2 full stack developers, validation expert, designer, growth hacker and a team lead. The team also planned to check-in several times during LSS with our contact at Triodos. By using our experience in building startups for our clients, we followed a business model canvas based process as strict as possible. First understanding the problem, validating the problem, coming up with solutions, validating the solution, pick one solution and work our way from there.

As the Lean Startup Summit (LSS) kicked off on Tuesday, our group had already been working ~30 hours on a Problem Statement we got from Triodos. Our objective during the summit: build a startup within 72 hours with 5 paying customers.

The problem statement. T-minus 42 hours

How might we help people avoid information overload and long lead times by becoming the go to energy advisor so that they’ll effortlessly transition to an energy efficient household?

From the perspective of Triodos, this could mean an entry point into the market of sustainable energy and housing. By the time the first speaker of the LSS kicked off we already went through our first valley of despair:

“this is awesome”
“wait a minute…”
“this sucks”
“I suck”
“this might work”
“this is awesome”

Tuesday evening, ~50hours into the hackathon, our concept reached a tangible form. We selected our target customer (early adopter), identified the problem, created the value proposition, set up the landing page, installed tracking tools and had a plan of attack to get paying customers

Value proposition. T-minus 22 hours

Our concept was named after it’s core value: Zero. The service aims to bring your energy bill, your hassle in becoming a energy neutral household and your household-footprint to zero.

Triodos Zero is an energy subscription model that takes you to Zero, on autopilot.

The concept is based on the customer problems that we identified around making a house energy-neutral. The real pains that are being met by the value proposition:

• The hassle in understanding what is possible in the quest to a sustainable household;
• The issues in finding the right labour to make the home-improvements;
• and the investments itself.

Our customer pays a (fixed) monthly subscription for a period of 8 to 12 years in order to make their house energy-neutral. Triodos Zero pays the energy bills, gives you smart appliances, brings in the sustainability expert and facilitates the home improvements. By reducing the energy bill as fast as possible Triodos Zero saves money to pay for the services provided to the customer (see graph below).

Getting to results: the customers. T-minus 10 hours

At the conference — armed with our signs saying “experience sustainability on autopilot” — we lured people into the next step of the funnel: a Tesla. In the Tesla (on autopilot) we had all the time in the world to pitch the Zero proposition. If they liked the product, they paid €10 via Tikkie (QR code) to reserve a spot as one of the first 100 Tridos Zero beta households. We ended up with 15 paying customers! We even had Alexander Osterwalder in the car (proof in the footer). Great. Success.

After the conference we pitched the concept and the results of the hackathon to Triodos. The first feedback from Triodos and the (potential) customers are promising. There are multiple assumptions that need to be validated. In the creation of the Triodos Zero startup, the validation phase — with a minimum of 6 weeks — is the next thing we would like to do. We are excited to see where the autopilot brings us next!

Follow the progress of the concept via:
https://www.getzero.nl/
More information about oneUp and the approach
https://www.oneup.company/