Launching the Startup Studio Playbook
The book about everything you wanted to know about startup studios, a.k.a. venture builders, startup factories foundries… And how you can build one.
Just minutes after putting the Startup Studio Playbook on Product Hunt, I was mesmerized by the results. Thanks to Product Hunters, and friendly help from Ryan J. Negri — serial entrepreneur and MD at Iron Yard Ventures, the book made it to the front page, and became a front runner:
You can check it here:
And we kicked off a thread on Hacker News, chewing on the question why startup studios are such a hit everywhere except maybe Silicon Valley.
This was only possible with the tremendous help of many great entrepreneurs, who made it possible for me to put this book together. But how did we get here?
“Let’s build startups by the dozen… But how?”
It’s been almost 3 years since I attended a Startup Pirates Workshop in Budapest, and consequently quit my corporate job. That was the best reckless decision of my life, that lead me to my exciting and painful first-startup-experience, involving the Finnish Startup Sauna accelerator and an inspiring trip to Silicon Valley.
After the failure of my first company, I wanted to find another way of building innovative companies. We met with the founder of Drukka, originally a development agency. With Tamás Bohner, the founder, we said that we want to build startups by the dozen. We just had to figure out, how? We decided to look at the inspiring examples of companies like Betaworks, eFounders, Science-Inc, Rocket Internet, and do what they do here in Budapest.
This is how I started to research the startup studio model. A year ago I interviewed eight studios, and put that knowledge into a short ebooklet, the Anatomy of Startup Studios.
I also did a dig into publicly available data and created a startup studio trend report.
The readers of these publications encouraged me with positive feedback. And I knew that we need to publish more material, to make the startup studio model truly transparent and accessible to entrepreneurs.
Validating the book via Indiegogo
To make sure the market really needs and wants a book on startup studios, we set up an Indiegogo campaign in November 2015. And people were super supporting.
With the campaign successful, now we just had to write the book. Which was much harder than I anticipated. But I had many help. Founders of successful studios, inspiring entrepreneurs dedicated their time and expertise to make this a reality. Thanks to their effort, we now have a book that shows you the inner workings of startup studios — organizations that build startups with in-house resources, in a sustainable way.
Learn how to build startups easier
Studios are on the rise, popping up everywhere, and creating more and more exciting startups. And startup studio exits are on the rise also — just to mention the $1 billion exit of Dollar Shave Club, a portfolio company of legendary startup studio Science-Inc.
But be warned: This book is not for everyone, not for people who want to stick to traditional startup building. It’s for people who are looking for a less-risky (maybe less-sexy?) way of creating companies. For these people, the book offers:
- A foreword by Mike Jones, CEO of Science-Inc;
- A summary about the model, pros, cons and challenges;
- The story of how Betaworks and Daniel Ilkovich built Dexter — a company that wants to empower regular people to rule the web;
- A look into the Game Plan of eFounders, the startup studio that builds SaaS companies, told by Thibaud Elziere and Pauline Tordeur;
- Budapest-based Lab.Coop built a 100% co-owned venture builder and they tell you how;
- Ryan J. Negri, serial entrepreneur and Managing Director of Iron Yard Ventures shares his story about Laicos — a Tampa-based startup studio;
- Helsinki-based startup studio Midealab tells you about how they are building startups from megatrends;
- Jons Janssens and Barbara Putman Cramer show you how they engineered the right company culture at Backspace, and Amsterdam based studio;
- Antoine Duboscq, founder and CEO of adVentures shares his insight into startup studio strategy;
… and more case studies, examples, best practices.
If you want, you can get a big discount through the Product Hunt launch page until 30th November 2016.
Big Thanks to people who made this possible
I want to give a special thanks to all of you who backed my campaign and purchased one or more of the startup studio related publications ever since. I’m also grateful for Drukka, for donating to the campaign and thus making it possible for me to release the Hungarian version of this book in the future.
There are a few people who provided great help in getting the Indiegogo campaign up and running. Natalie Edwards from s-FBI startup studio was kind enough to read early drafts of the campaign, and provided me with the guidance to improve it. Tamás Turcsán is the founder of Connect East Incubator, lector of the Hungarian version of Lean Startup, journalist, fellow entrepreneur, organizer of the Hackathon-in-a-box events. And a friend who helped me throughout my entrepreneurial journey. Csaba Rittling is a close friend, ever since we volunteered for the same student organization during college. Nowadays Csaba is a commercial photographer. He helps me to capture some of the pivotal moments of the editorial process. Tom Juskó is a fellow entrepreneur. We know each other since we met on a Hackathon-in-a-box event. Tom and his team were fantastic partners in creating our campaign video.
And there are those people who made great contributions to the Startup Studio Playbook. These people dedicated their time and expertise to make the startup studio model more transparent and reachable for all. I’d like to express my utmost gratitude to Mike Jones, Denis Kovalevich and Petr Schedrovitsky; Daniel Ilkovich and Josh Auerbach; Ryan Negri; Peter Langmár, Daniel Nagy, Ádám Bankó; Henry Nilert, Niko Porkka and Juho Oranen; Jons Janssens and Barbara Putman Cramer; Thibaud Elziere and Pauline Tordeur; Antoine Duboscq; Danny Feeman, Tom Riddle, Linsey Jaco, Margaret Avery, Chris Hess, and Chirag Patel.
With your help, we now have a tool to make the startup studio model more accessible. Thank you!
What’s next
There are many ways the startup studio model can benefit entrepreneurs, investors, corporations and ecosystems. I hope, that while reading the book you discover some of these ways for yourself.
To achieve our goal and make the model more transparent and wide-spread, we need more stories, more discussions and more research. So I encourage you to join the different startup studio related Facebook and LinkedIn and Slack groups out there. Share your story, ask your questions, get your opinion out. You can find links to these communities on the page below:
One key area that needs more focus is the startup studio vs accelerator topic. Another is the analysis of startup studio fundraising and financials. I’ll make my best effort to focus on these areas in the coming year.
Let’s make this happen!
Attila
