Lessons in Lean
Martin Croteau, The Director of Academic Entrepreneurship at The Ontario Centres of Excellence, spoke to Venture For Canada fellows on Lean Start Up Principles
“A Start Up company is not a small version of a big company, which is the way we have been running it for the past 60 years”
“Start-ups fail because no one cares… they fail from a lack of paying customers and they run out of time”
“Lean methodology is a process of creating order from the chaos of what a Start-Up usually is”
“The lean methodology has entered the lexicon of business”
“Wherever customer adoption is important, lean is important”
“Here’s where your office is and here is where all your customers are, you’ll notice none of your customers are in your office”
“At the end of the day your business plan is the best guess at the moment you’re writing it”
“Figure out which guesses are most important, then get out of the building and one at a time test those guesses”
“What is the least you can deliver to the customer with the biggest pain that you can sell right now”
“A customer willing to empty their wallet on the spot are out there”
“If they’re not asking for it then you shouldn’t be developing it”
“In god we trust, all others bring data (William Edwards Deming)”
“If you take-away anything from this presentation you should understand where you are on this curve of idea to real company” (Customer Development Stages)
“Make sure you’re in love with the problem and you’re in love with the person who has the problem because you are going to be spending a lot of time with them”
“Competitors don’t have those features because customers don’t have those problems”
“Anything that is not mission critical to getting your customer to pay and your product out the door should be delayed as long as possible”
“Constantly look for opportunities to strip features out, simplicity is key”
“The value proposition is where the problem and solution meet”
“You know how… [problem], well we… [solution], so that… [value proposition statement]”
“If it’s your idea and your company then you’re the one that has to get out of the building”
“What emerges is an embodied profile of what your customer looks like”
“What do we want to be when we grow up as a company”
“The toughest part of this is you need to re-look at your team”
“The founding team at this stage usually becomes the casualty”
“The constant process of ‘test, verify, test, verify’ never stops”
“The moment you stop spending time with customers is the moment you have lost the path”
“Decide what you want from a [pitch] competition, but you’re not really building your business — it’s a tool”
Martin’s workshop on Lean Start Up Principles can be summarized by the statement: “The customer is king.” Always be connecting with customers, iterating with customer and everything you do as a business should produce value by addressing pain for your customers.
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