Beyond the garage

It’s been just over a year since the inaugural Startup Lessons Learned conference, and it’s time to do it again. Steve Blank called last year’s conference “Woodstock for entrepreneurs” and my goal is do even better this year.

(If you somehow missed SLLCONF 2010, you can get caught up with a complete video recording here.)

The Lean Startup movement has made tremendous progress in the past year. If you recall, around this time last year we were still fighting various myths, such as “lean means cheap” or that we don’t support having a big, world-changing vision. SLLCONF featured incredible entrepreneurs on stage to put those ideas to rest (watch, for example: Aardvark, Grockit, Dropbox, PBworks). It may be hard to remember that there was a time when people in the agile software development community thought Lean Startup was incompatible with agile practices. Kent Beck himself helped us explain that “quality work” means something different when we’re facing the extreme uncertainty of a startup. And, of course, Steve Blank electrified the crowd with “Accountants don’t run startups.”

All year long, these ideas have trickled further and further out into the world. Last year, we were just starting to explain the concept of “the pivot” (we even had Getting to Plan B author Randy Komisar onstage). This year, the word pivot has become over-hyped (even on TechCrunch). The number of Lean Startup meetup groups has crossed 100, spreading out from traditional startup hubs like San Francisco and New York to a wide variety of places. And, most importantly, the Lean Startup idea is starting to take root in industries and contexts very different from it’s Silicon Valley roots.

That’s why I’ve decided that the theme of this year’s conference will be to explore the impact of Lean Startup “beyond the garage” – from new hypergrowth companies, like Groupon, to Fortune 1000 companies who see entrepreneurship as key to their future, like Intuit. And this year, we’re going to talk not just about business and product development, but we’ll be exploring one of the Lean Starutp movements next big frontiers: the role of design. As usual, we’ll get deep in to the details: how to measure progress, how and when to pivot, and how to accelerate as we grow.

Like last year, we’ll have three huge keynote speakers. First up, Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus (and designer of its famous spreadsheet Lotus 1-2-3), the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the Level Playing Field Institute (and more). He’s one of the most successful entrepreneurs of the past few decades, and has continued to support the startup ecosystem as an investor and mentor. Mitch knows a thing or two about building a hypergrowth startup: Lotus sold $54 million of 1-2-3 in its very first year. Mitch brings a unique perspective to our entrepreneurial renaissance, and I’m honored to be interviewing him on stage.

Second, we’re presenting something unusual for an entrepreneurship conference: the CEO of a Fortune 1000 company. Brad Smith is the CEO of Intuit, one of the most successful software companies in Silicon Valley. Brad doesn’t meet your typical image of a scrappy entrepreneur. But along with Intuit founder Scott Cook, Brad is a leader that recognizes that entrepreneurship is critical to his company’s success. One of the most surprising outcomes of the Lean Startup movement so far has been the recognition that entrepreneurs of all kinds – VC-backed, bootstrappers, and intraprenreurs – have much in common. We all struggle with similar questions and can use similar techniques to enhance our chances of success. Intuit has been a pioneer in recognizing this fact and bringing support to its internal entrepreneurs. I know this sounds foreign to many of you, and that we’ll have a few skeptics in the audience. Bring your tough questions – Brad and I will be having a conversation on stage and you’re invited to join us.

And last but never least, our third keynote is Steve Blank. For readers of this blog, Steve needs no introduction. For those of you who were lucky to see his new talk at SXSW, you know that Steve’s talks have a unique blend of insight, humor, and straight talk. I’ve heard him dozens of times, and he never fails to teach me something new. If you’re still kicking yourself for missing him last year, do yourself a favor and don’t make the same mistake again.

And those are just our keynotes! We also have an awesome lineup of case studies. As always, our rule is by entrepreneurs, for entrepreneurs. No BS, no vanity metrics, no launches, no PR. Only real stories of startups that have tried to make Lean Startup work – and the true story of what happened.

My original intention was to have a completely new lineup this year, but the popular demand for a few of our top speakers was overwhelming. So I’m honored to have back not just Steve Blank, but also two of our case studies: Drew Houston, CEO of Dropbox and Manuel Rosso, CEO of Food on the Table. We’ll get to hear what they’ve learned this past year, as both companies have grown and scaled.

A few other highlights from this year’s lineup:

• How Groupon is using Lean Startup ideas to scale their product development team, by VP of Product Development Suneel Gupta.
• Yes, you really can use continuous deployment – even in an SEC regulated environment. Wealthfront CTO Pascal-Louis Perez will show you how.
• Votizen’s David Binetti will show you a real pivot story, including the actual metrics that helped him realize it was time to change.
• Design + Lean Startup = Lean UX. Former Adaptive Path CEO Janice Fraser will present a series of case studies on how to use Lean Startup to design amazing products.
• Clara Shih is author of The Facebook Era and now CEO of one of Silicon Valley’s hot new companies: Sequoia-backed Hearsay Social.

We’re just getting started. Many of last year’s speakers will be at the conference as mentors, available to help you and your team make sense of the day. Hope to see you there.

SLLCONF 2011 is happening on May 23 in San Francisco. Tickets, our full program, and much more info is available here: http://sllconf.com

Just like last year, we’ll be simulcasting the program into cities around the world. If you’d like to host a simulcast, you can apply here: http://sllconf.com/streaming (In a few days, you’ll be able to get tickets to nearby simulcast on that same page.)

PS. SLLCONF is on a Monday this year (May 23). There’s a number of cool events going on the weekend before, too. Perhaps you’d like to apply to Lean Startup Machine SF or to be a speaker at Ignite: Lean Startup. Both are going to be awesome.

The real entrepreneurs of New York City

The Lean Startup Machine looks a lot like reality television for startups. It's intense, the teams go head-to-head, the protagonists live and learn, and it's all very entertaining. But there is something serious at work, too. I have written previously about how powerful the these events are as a teaching tool for Lean Startup principles. While I was in New York, I had another opportunity to witness this firsthand, and I wanted to share the results with you.

Below you will find the final presentations of each of the Lean Startup Machine NYC teams, including SnappSchool, who was judged to be the winner. To give a little context, I asked two of the other judges - Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits (co-authors of the excellent Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development) - to add a bit of commentary. You'll find their comments below each presentation.

The thing to keep in mind as you peruse these teams is that they all had the exact same amount of time: 48 hours. All of the teams worked incredibly hard. But only a few made significant progress. Only a few really treated their work as experiments - and adjusted immediately, based on what they learned, to something that worked better. Take a look...

The Winner

Snapp school lsm nyc presentation 2011 apr 03 - Lean Startup Machine NYC

Patrick: The winners showed discipline in demolishing their initially very strongly held assumptions about teachers and lesson plans -- tremendous learning and creative way to define a "currency" for MVP.

Brant: Two things elevated Snappschool: 1) MVP was a functioning product -- as long as you searched for the correct subject! 2) They put it all on the line: if teachers don't click submit, the product is dead. That's optimal learning.

Love your layover - Lean Startup Machine NYC  

Patrick: "This was a very strong and analytically-minded team which executed very well -- did a great job with their MVP ---- still up here: http://m.airportadventure.com"

Brant: "Love Your Layover" won the "Best MVP" award. They actually built and tested several MVPs, the last of which was a web-based prototype of their mobile app that used real airport data.

Pop up party_presentation final - Lean Startup Machine NYC

Patrick: "One of those ideas that is relatively easy to CustDev given the analogs present in the market -- this team should have actually consummated a party over the weekend."

Brant: Interesting idea that would only work in a limited number of cities. Email thread in presentation demonstrates potential market. Risk that hosts wouldn't let group of strangers into their apartment was never tested. Great use of airbnb for their source of customer development won them 'Best #CustDev Award."

Unbrokered preso - Lean Startup Machine NYC

Patrick: "Great job with MVP and Demo. Smart team that did very well. See their MVP here: http://app.unbrokered.com/view

Brant: It's not often we get to see a demo in the final presentation. Make that never. Until Unbrokered. That was pretty awesome.

Be bop - Lean Startup Machine NYC

Patrick: "Generally speaking, good execution -- however, move to Android app appeared a bit gratuitous. Could have gone even further with this one with a bit more effort."

Brant: Gotta wonder if the Vision was louder than the Market on this one. They had a great MVP using SMS the 1st night and a little traction, but then moved to Android App without market indication to do so. Seems like they could have crushed it with the SMS app. Co-winner of Best MVP.

Lardspotting - Lean Startup Machine NYC

Patrick: "Reviewing this preso, still chuckling to myself as I recall Nate Berkopec's frenetic and hilarious narration. Their "leap" into LardSpotting app is interesting as similar app appeared a few days later in App Store - http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/meal-snap-calorie-counting/id425203142?mt=8"

Brant: Best Presentation and unannounced winner of the Old Yeller Award. They were forced by the market to take their idea out back and put a cap in it. Leaped to a new idea and accomplished an incredible amount of market validation, as well as overcoming technical risk, in the last few hours of the competition.

Domain matcher - Lean Startup Machine NYC

Patrick: "IMO a genuine problem worth solving - this team went from having very little knowledge of how professional domainers operate to having a strong knowledge understanding of the economics of domaining."

Brant: This team won the "lean learning" award for the amazing amount of learning they did. There product lives in a huge, messy ecosystem facing genuine problems, but also populated with questionable characters. They successfully used lean startup processes to learn their way toward manageable problems. They still have a ways to go, but a clear(er) path forward.

I wanna be! - Lean Startup Machine NYC

 

Patrick: "Did a good job with, very literally, "getting out of the building" ---- however, showed that sometimes it is very difficult to obtain actionable data from CustDev interactions."

Brant: I think this team represents a great demonstration of the "pivot," where one foot is grounded in learning. In this case, the fulcrum is not product, but the pain point that people end up in the wrong jobs. "Best Pivot."

Stylestalkr main final - Lean Startup Machine NYC

Patrick: "Thought the initial idea was big --- didn't quite understand the pivot to subscription e-commerce handbags."

Brant: Stylestalkr won the "Apply to TechStars Award" because several judges this idea actually might be the one with legs. Pun intended.

Vorzu - Lean Startup Machine NYC

Patrick: "Liked this team a lot but unfortunately demonstrated a severe misunderstanding of what an "early adopter" is in the context of Lean Startups. "

Brant: Best MVP would have been to (manually) find pools of users for all the startups inside the same building and charge them for it. You don't need a landing page or an app or a platform to prove some markets.

Dealgol - Lean Startup Machine NYC

Patrick: "They built an MVP but didn't show it to their customers -- had to ding them for that."

Brant: There actually might be something there, there. But I'm note sure how close they got to finding out.

Memories.me - Lean Startup Machine NYC

Patrick: "I loved that this team had strong ideas and strong validation -- but then quickly uncovered the paramount challenges in terms of marketing their solution."

Brant: Interesting example of a particular #CustDev dilemma: pain with which customers quickly identify, yet for which, customers are generally unwilling to put up with, let alone pay for a solution. Why? Because no one watches the old videos anyway, and soon the footage will be their children's problem. ; )

---

Thanks to all of the teams - you're showing the world what entrepreneurship really looks like. And a special thanks to all of the Lean Startup Machine organizers, mentors, and judges.

The next Lean Startup Machine will be an extra special SLLCONF edition. It will take place the weekend before the Startup Lessons Learned conference on May 23 in San Francisco. Stay tuned for details.

New York Lean Startup Week

SXSW was amazing and exhausting. We'll have slides and video from our Lean Startup track posted soon. Don't forget to vote to help choose a Lean Startup SXSW Challenge winner. (You can follow the slide presentation on Slideshare here.) Next week, I travel to New York, where I'm especially excited to see the entrepreneurial renaissance that is in progress, first hand.

I am declaring next week to be officially Lean Startup Week in New York City. Here's why:

NYU, Tues. 3/29 6-9pm - Demo Competition & Interview with Eric Ries

NYU's Himelberg Speaker Series brought to you by the NYU Stern Berkley Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation with help from Tech@NYU

Columbia, Weds. 3/30 6-9pm - Discussion with Eric Ries, brought to you by the Columbia Venture Community

The Columbia Venture Community and the Columbia Journalism School are pleased to bring Eric Ries to campus on Wednesday, March 30th at 6pm for an evening of frank conversation.

 These events all have limited availability:

• NYC Lean Startup Circle, Thurs. 3/31 6:30-9pm - sold out!
• Google Tech Talk, Friday. 4/1 noon-3pm - private
• Lean Startup Machine, Friday. 4/1 7-9pm - apply while you still can

If you can't make it to one of those events, here are some upcoming opportunities on my speaking tour:

• Portland - PDX Lean Startup Circle - April 5, 6pm
• Seattle - Seattle Google Technology Users Group (GTUG) - Monday, April 11
• Michigan - The Michigan Lean Startup Conference - Thursday, May 19
• Baltimore - RailsConf keynote - 9:15am Tuesday, 05/17/2011

And you certainly will not want to miss the Startup Lessons Learned Conference 2011, which will take place on May 23 in San Francisco. That will be my last major public appearance for a while, as I'll need to take some time to recover before the book comes out. It will feature an amazing lineup, which we'll announce shortly.

Hope you can make it to one or more of these events. If so, be sure to come say hello.

(Special thanks to Trevor Owens for helping to organize my New York trip.)

SXSW updates

First of all, I want to start on a somber note. As everyone here at SXSW is waking up, an eight foot tsunami wave is about to hit my hometown of San Francisco. All signs point to a minor event, but our friends and colleagues in Japan have not been so fortunate. The earthquake and tsunami have caused untold devastation, destabilized nuclear power plants, and who knows what else. My prayers are with everyone who's been affected. I ask all of you who are reading to do what you can to help. Take it from George Takei:

The show must go on, so we're still working hard on an epic event on Saturday at the AT&T Center for SXSWi. I do need to clear one thing up, though. Apparently, my blog post yesterday caused some confusion. Unfortunately, buying the Appsumo Lean Startup SXSW Bundle will not get you into the SXSW event. Only SXSW badge holders will be able to get in. Believe me, we would love to have you there - but SXSW rules are very strict. We've had to negotiate to get our own event staff into the room. If you want to come, you will need a SXSWi badge.

If you are at SXSW, there is absolutely no excuse for missing out. Just ask Tim O'Reilly:

However, you do not need to be at SXSW to enter the Lean Startup SXSW tournament and win our crazy smorgasbord of equity investments and prizes. For example, wouldn't you like to attend this year's Startup Lessons Learned conference (sllconf 2011) as my personal guest and join our VIP speakers dinner the night before? So if you can't join us, don't feel bad. While all the talkers and drinkers are inside the building, you can get outside and make something incredible happen. We can't wait to see what you come up with.

At SXSW, I'll be on stage bright and early at 9:30AM. I hope to see you there. To help you fight off the  effects of your SXSW hangover, we'll have some bonuses waiting for you. The first 100 people to show up will get a 50% discount on the Appsumo Lean Startup SXSW bundle (and you thought we couldn't make the deal any better). Noah Kagan will also apparently be handing out tshirts, stickers, and other stuff while supplies last - he promises you'll like them, but he hasn't made me any such promise.

But what I'm most excited - and nervous - about is that my publisher is bringing an exclusive printed sneak peak of my new book, The Lean Startup. They'll be giving them away at the Lean Startup SXSW event as long as supplies last. Apart from a handful of test readers, this is the first time the manuscript will be available to the public. Did I mention my love/hate relationship with customer feedback? Come get your copy and send me your thoughts. I can't wait to hear what you think.

And if you happen to be at SXSW for any part of the event, do come say hello. It's always a thrill to meet people who read this blog. Thank you for your continuing and overwhelming support.

The Lean Startup SXSW + bundle + tournament

Today's theme is "with a little help from my friends." You all know I am busy writing The Lean Startup Book. So none of what I am about to announce would have been possible without a tremendous amount of help.

A few months ago, I began planning an event at SXSW with my friends at 500 Startups (their glamorous frontman is Dave McClure but everyone knows Christen O'Brien does the real work). The original plan was to do our own standalone event. But when the organizers of SXSW got wind of it, they asked us to join forces with them and become an official part of the SXSW Interactive program. So we have put together a program that you do not want to miss. It will take place at the AT&T Center on March 12, 2011. If you have a SXSW badge, you'll get in for free, but please do RSVP on our plancast page (and help us become the most popular event in their awesome SXSW events guide).

We have an amazing agenda full of case studies lined up with amazing speakers:

David Binetti
Steve Blank
Bill Boebel
David Cancel
Jason Cohen
Sean Ellis
Janice Fraser
Andres Glusman
Stacey Higginbotham
Laura Klein
Pascal Louis-Perez
Dan Martell

Ash Maurya
Dave McClure
Ian McFarland
Farb Nivi
Eric Ries
Manuel Rosso
Robert Scoble
Hiten Shah
Jeff Smith
Wendy Tan White
Parker Thompson
check the complete list...

---

But that's not all, not by a long shot. You see, my friends at Appsumo were not content to let 500 Startups have all the glory. So I asked them to put together the mother of all bundles, to make sure that everyone who comes to our event at SXSW - and everyone who wishes they could come, too - has the tools they need to take these ideas and put them into action. So they created The Lean Startup Bundle for SXSW, and it's unbelievable. I asked a few more of my friends to help out, and they came through in a big way: twillio ($50 of credit), Pivotal Tracker (a full year of service), KISSmetrics ($100), Ask Your Target Market (3 months of 30 surveys per month), Sauce Labs (1000 minutes of testing), and over two dozen other companies. And things just snowballed from there. Jason Cohen's awesome hardcore WordPress hosting at WPEngine, $200 credit with Chargify, $1000 off at uTest. You'll get books, too: a preorder of my book, my Startup Lessons Learned ebooks, Ash Maurya's excellent Running Lean, and the Venture Hacks bible. But that is not remotely all. You will get a ticket to any Startup Weekend event anywhere in the world. You will get more than $5000 worth of stuff for only $99. You will get so much stuff that I challenge you - nay, I dare you - to try and use it all.



Actually, I really do dare you. You see, when my friends at Pivotal Labs got involved, they wanted to do more. Sure, you can come to our amazing SXSW event and get inspired. You can buy the Lean Startup Bundle and get everything you could possibly need to get started. But then what? The Lean Startup movement is all about doing, and so we wanted to give a reason to get started now. Maybe you already have a new startup, but maybe you've been thinking about that side project. Maybe you need a little nudge to get out of the building and start talking to customers?

Forget the nudge. We have put together a sledgehammer-sized tournament to see who can create something amazing while everyone else is just getting drunk at SXSW. I told you we'd make it worth your while, though. Perhaps you'd like a $50,000 investment from 500 Startups and a spot in the amazing 500 Startups Incubator? Or maybe you'd rather get the full Pivotal Labs treatment, along with a $50,000 investment from Band of Angels? There are seven prize packages you can win. Naturally, one includes a Microsoft Xbox and a Kinect.

We'll choose ten finalists, who will get mentoring from our all-star cast: including me, Hiten Shah, Dave McClure, Brad Feld, Ramit Sethi, Dharmesh Shah, Andrew Chen, and more. I'm just getting started: go ahead and look at the complete list of prizes. You have until the very end of SXSW (March 20th) to impress the judges and your peers. The SXSW Lean Startup Bundle is your entry ticket; you don't have to be at SXSW to be eligible.



I think we've managed to pack a lot of value into that $99 ticket, but I don't want anyone to feel excluded. Every time I offer something for sale here, I get emails from bootstrappers, students, and others who can't afford it. So - as they say on TV - wait, there's more. The first 100 people who come to our SXSW program will get a heavily discounted bundle from Appsumo (they'll be passing out cards). And if you can't be there, and you really can't afford the $99, there's still a way. Maybe you have a few friends who are planning on buying The Lean Startup Book when it comes out. Maybe you can give them a little nudge to preorder. If you can get 10 to do so, I will buy your bundle for you. Just go create your own http://lean.st URL using Facebook or Twitter. Get your friends to use that URL to preorder. You'll see a count of how many books you've sold. When that count hits 10 or more, email me your lean.st URL and your bundle's on me.

Special thanks to Dave McClure, Christen O'Brien, Noah Kagan, Parker Thompson, Ian McFarland and all of our many, many sponsors. You are all amazing.

A month is fifteen weekends

Lean Startup Machine is the brainchild of Trevor Owens, Josh Horn, and Ben Fisher, a hackathon-style competition where teams come together on a Friday evening and build a brand new startup – by Sunday. It’s an impossibly short amount of time. To make it more difficult, unlike your standard issue hackathon, the judging on Sunday is not just about who can make a cool-looking prototype. Teams launch real products to real customers. The judging criteria is all about validated learning. Teams are expected to talk to customers, build minimum viable products, and even pivot as necessary. Luckily, the teams are assisted by some of the best startup mentors in the industry.

Lean Startup Machine came to San Francisco a few weeks ago, after successful debut runs in New York and Chicago. I’ve had the privilege of being a judge in previous weekends, but this is the first time I was able to attend in person.

When I first heard about Lean Startup Machine, I’ll admit I was skeptical. In my consulting practice, I struggle to get teams to do validated learning when they have months or years of runway. How much learning could a team do in only 48 hours, with no budget whatsoever?

But the results were amazing. Out of eleven teams, the three finalists we picked all had discovered honest-to-goodness viable businesses. Each had pivoted several times and had built one or more MVPs. One even had $100 in revenue (in escrow) from real live customers. Beyond the three finalists another few teams had made solid discoveries and would probably have been contenders if they’d just had a little more time. I bet more than half the teams wish they had just one more day – and could have achieved something great in that time.

Think about that for a second. If only they had one more day. Think how valuable a single day is, when  used to its maximum potential. And now think how casually we throw a day of work away, when it’s just one tiny part of a huge batch, as in a monthly release cycle.

And that brings me to the fuzzy math that forms the title of this post: a month is fifteen weekends. Normally, we consider a month-long development cycle to be a short time. We can barely get anything done. We feel rushed. We are too busy to learn anything. We think we’re acting fast. The Lean Startup Machine puts the lie to that idea. I forced me to think about how much validated learning these teams could accomplish if they had a whole month - fifteen times longer - to work.

It wasn’t just that the winning teams were so productive. It was the wide disparity between the most and least productive teams. Remember, everyone had the same amount of time. Most teams were about the same size. And every team started with a promising idea (which were chosen by voting on the first day). But some teams managed to get only a single landing page-style MVP done over the course of the whole weekend. Some managed little more than a survey of customers, or a few conversations. Their learning was decidedly un-validated: stories, anecdotes, maybe some strong thinking at the whiteboard.

Talking to attendees afterwards, I got the sense that these laggards learned the most from the weekend. I bet when those teams disperse and go back to their day jobs (many of whom work at startups), they will have the biggest impact on their teams and colleagues. Because they saw, first hand, just how hard it is to make progress, even with a great team and great idea, if you’re not flying through the Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop.

For example, one team managed to put together a very decent looking minimum viable product, in the form of a landing page with a “click to signup button” that basically did nothing but collect data about who was clicking. And their MVP even had a reasonably high click rate. But is a 25% click rate validation of the idea? That depends on who’s clicking and why. Do they understand the product? Are they eager to try it, or were they just enticed by the shiny button? Unfortunately, the team had no way of answering these questions. They weren’t even collecting contact information from these first customers. They were just counting clicks.

I don’t mean to pick on this team. After all, I can easily imagine how they got in this situation. They were trying to find the minimum viable product, after all. I can almost hear the argument in my imagination: “guys, let’s just ship this thing and see what happens – we can always add contact fields later.” This is a classic startup fallacy: “ship it and see what happens.” Whenever you use this plan, you are guaranteed to succeed – at seeing what happens. Unfortunately, if you cannot fail, you cannot learn. And so this team had succeeded in building and shipping something; they even had some measuring. But they could not learn, and – most importantly – they could not get another turn through the feedback loop. Remember, an MVP is not an event in itself; it is the beginning of a process. (Dare I say it, "you still have to iterate?")

I don’t know how many real companies will come out of a weekend. After all, the scientific method makes it easier to disprove a bad idea than “prove” a good idea. In one notable case, a team was able to conclusively invalidate a business that I have been pitched by venture-backed entrepreneurs many times – with a full day to spare. Compared to entrepreneurs who’ve blown millions of dollars pursuing the same vision, this is a way better outcome. Since they had extra time, they tried a pivot into a much more promising idea. By the time of the judging, they had an MVP in the market with real customers signed up. Will this new idea ultimately prove profitable? Only time will tell.

Regardless, I’m a believer in Lean Startup Machine because of its educational impact. Reading is good. Going to conferences is good. Watching videos is good. But taking action is better. Lean Startup Machine offers everyone the opportunity to learn some of our key tenets, by immersion, rather than by rote: getting out of the building, pivoting, minimum viable product, and validated learning. In real life, the most comfortable thing is to stay in the building, leave assumptions untested, and hope for the best. LSM forces participants to go outside the comfort zone, or fail.

I was surprised by the number of people who attend Lean Startup Machine who already work in a startup full-time. They are not there to learn if their current startup idea is good or bad. They are there to learn a new, faster process that they can bring back to their company.

As one participant wrote,

"The Lean Startup Machine was a synthesis of a lot of my frustrations with how the companies I've worked for over the past few years have created products, and showed me that a much better way was possible. A hugely eye opening experience for me, and I had a blast working with really smart, energetic people."

If you’re reading this right now, and wondering if maybe your company could go a little faster, pay attention to Lean Startup Machine. It may be coming soon to a city near you. The next LSM is scheduled for Boston on Feb 25, 2011. Early bird registration just started, and it’s sure to sell out.

Lean Startup junkies

Offered without comment. Enjoy.

Warning: NSFW



(I did not create this video and I have no idea who did. Whoever you are, get in touch and I will heap copious praise upon you.)

Case Study: UX, Design, and Food on the Table

(One of the common questions I hear is how to reconcile design and user experience (UX) methods with the Lean Startup. To answer, I asked one of my favorite designers to write a case study illustrating the way they work, taking us step-by-step through a real life redesign.

This is something of an IMVU reunion. The attendees at sllconf 2010 were wowed by Food on the Table's presentation. If you weren't there, be sure to watch the video. Manuel Rosso was IMVU's first VP of Marketing, and is now CEO of Food on the Table, one of the leading lean startups in Austin. I first met Laura Klein when we had the good fortune of hiring her at IMVU to join our interaction design team. Since then, she's gone on to become one of the leading experts implementing UX and design in lean startups. 

In this case study, Laura takes us inside the design process in a real live startup. I hope you'll find it illuminating. -Eric)

A lot of people ask me whether design fits into the lean startup process. They're concerned that if they do any research or design up front that they will end up in a waterfall environment.

This is simply not true. Even the leanest of startups can benefit from design and user research. The following is a great example of how they can work together.

A couple of months ago, Manuel Rosso, the CEO of Food on the Table came to me with a problem. He had a product with a great value proposition and thousands of passionate customers. That wasn't the problem. The problem was activation.

As a bit of background, Food on the Table helps people plan meals for their families around what is on sale in their local grocery stores. The team defined an activated user as someone who made it through all the steps of the first time user experience: selecting a grocery store, indicating food preferences, picking recipes, and printing a grocery list.

Users who made it through activation loved the product, but too many first time users were getting lost and never getting all the way to the end.

Identifying The Problem

More than any startup I've worked with, Food on the Table embraces the lean startup methodology. They release early and often. They get tons of feedback from their users. And, most importantly, they measure and a/b test absolutely everything.

Because of their dedication to metrics, they knew all the details of their registration funnel and subsequent user journey. This meant that they knew exactly how many people weren't finishing activation, and they knew that number was higher than they wanted.

Unfortunately, they fell into a trap that far too many startups fall into at some point: they tried to measure their way out of the problem. They would look at a metric, spot a problem, come up with an idea for how to fix it, release a change, and test it. But the needle wasn't moving.

After a couple of months, Manuel had a realization. The team had always been dedicated to listening to users. But as they added new features, their conversations with users had changed - they became more narrowly focused on new features and whether each individual change was usable and useful. Somewhere along the way, they'd stopped observing the entire user experience, from end to end. This didn't last very long - maybe a month or two, but it was long enough to cause problems.

As soon as he realized what had happened, Manuel went back to talking directly to users about their overall experiences rather than just doing targeted usability tests, and within a few hours he knew what had gone wrong. Even though the new features were great in isolation, they were making the overall interface too complicated. New users were simply getting lost on their way to activation.

Now that they knew generally why they were having the problem, Manuel decided he needed a designer to identify the exact pain points and come up with a way to simplify the interface without losing any of the features.

Key Takeaways:

• Don't try to measure your way out of a problem. Metrics do a great job of telling you what your problem is, but only listening to and observing your users can tell you why they're having trouble.
• When you're moving fast enough, a product can become confusing in a surprisingly short amount of time. Make sure you're regularly observing the user experience.
• Adding a new feature can be useful, but it can also clutter up an interface. Good design helps you offer more functionality with less complexity.

Getting an Overview of the Product

When I first came on board, the team had several different experiments going, including a couple of different competing flows. I needed to get a quick overview of the entire user experience in order to understand what was working and what wasn't.

Of course, the best way to do that is to watch new and current customers use the product. In the old days, I would have recruited test participants, brought them into an office, and run usability sessions. It would have taken a couple of weeks.

Not anymore! I scheduled UserTesting.com sessions, making sure that I got participants in all the main branches of the experiments. Within a few hours, I had a dozen 15 minute videos of people using the product. The entire process, including analysis, took about one full day.

Meanwhile, we set up several remote sessions with current users and used GoToMeeting to run fast observational sessions in order to understand the experience of active users. That took another day.

Key Takeaway: Get feedback fast. Online tools like GoToMeeting and UserTesting.com (and about a hundred others) can help you understand the real user experience quickly and cheaply.

Low Hanging Fruit

Once we had a good idea of the major pain points, we decided to split the design changes into two parts: fixing low hanging fruit and making larger, structural changes to the flow. Obviously, we weren't going to let engineering sit around on their hands while we made major design changes.

The most important reason to do this was that some of the biggest problems for users were easy to fix technically and could be accomplished with almost no design input whatsoever.
For example, in one unsuccessful branch of a test, users saw a button that would allow them to add a recipe to a meal plan. When user test participants within the office pressed the button, it would very quickly add the recipe to the meal plan, and users had no problem understanding it. When we observed users pressing the button on their own computers with normal home broadband connections, the button took a few seconds to register the click.

Of course, this meant that users would click the button over and over, since they were getting no feedback. When the script returned, the user would often have added the recipe to their meal plan several times, which wasn't what they meant to do.

This was, by all accounts, a bad user experience. Why wasn't it caught earlier?

Well, as is the case with all software companies, the computers and bandwidth in the office were much better than the typical user's setup, so nobody saw the problem until we watched actual users in their natural environments.

What was the fix? We put in a "wait" spinner and disabled the button while the script was processing. It took literally minutes to implement and delivered a statistically significant improvement in the performance of that branch of the experiment.

Giving immediate feedback drastically reduced user error

Manuel told me that, immediately after that experience, the team added a very old, slow computer to the office and recently caught a nasty problem that could add 40 seconds to page load times. Needless to say, all usability testing within the office is now done on the slowest machine.

Key Takeaways:

• Sometimes big user problems don't require big solutions.
• To truly understand what your user is experiencing, you have to understand the user's environment.
• Sometimes an entire branch of an experiment can be killed by one tiny bug. If your metrics are surprising, do some qualitative research to figure out why!

A Redesign

While the engineering team worked on the low-hanging fruit, we started the redesign. But we didn't just chuck everything out. We started from the current design and iterated. We identified a few critical areas that were making the experience confusing and fixed those.

For example, we started with the observation that people were doing ok for the first couple of screens, but then they were getting confused about what they were supposed to do next. A simple "Step" counter at the top of each page and very clear, obvious "Next" and "Back" buttons told users where they were and what they should do next.

Users also claimed to want more freedom to select their recipes, but they were quickly overwhelmed by the enormous number of options, so we put in a simple and engaging way to select from recommended recipes while still allowing users to access the full collection with the click of one button.

Users were confused by how to change their meal plan

Recommended recipe carousels made choosing a meal plan fun and easy to understand

One common problem was that users asked for a couple of features that were actually already in the product. The features themselves were very useful and well-designed; they just weren't discoverable enough. By changing the location of these features, we made them more obvious to people.

Most importantly, we didn't just jump to Photoshop mockups of the design. Instead, we created several early sketches before moving to interactive wireframes, which we tested and iterated on with current users. In this case, I created the interactive wireframes in HTML and JavaScript. While they were all grayscale with no visual design, they worked. Users could perform the most important actions in them, like stepping through the application, adding meals to their meal plan, and editing recipes. This made participants feel like they were using an actual product so that they could comment not just on the look and feel but on the actual interactions.

By the end of the iterations and tests, every single one of the users liked the new version better than the old, and we had a very good idea why.

Did we make it perfect? No. Perfection takes an awful lot of time and too often fails to be perfect for the intended users.

Instead, we identified several areas we'd like to optimize and iterate on going forward. But we also decided that it was better to release a very good version and continue improving it, rather than aim for absolute perfection and never get it out the door.

The redesign removed all of the major pain points that we'd identified in the testing and created a much simpler, more engaging interface that would allow the team to add features going forward. It improved the user experience and set the stage for lots more iteration and experimentation in the future. In fact, the team currently has several more exciting experiments running!

Key Takeaways:

• Interactive prototypes and iterative testing let you improve the design quickly before you ever get to the coding stage.
• Targeting only the confusing parts of the interface for redesign reduces the number of things you need to rebuild and helps make both design and development faster.
• Lean design is about improving the user experience iteratively! Fixing the biggest user problems first means getting an improved experience to users quickly and optimizing later based on feedback and metrics.

The Metrics

Like any good lean startup, we released the new design in an a/b test with new users. We had a feeling it would be better, but we needed to know whether we were right. We also wanted to make sure there weren't any small problems we'd overlooked that might have big consequences.

After running for about 6 weeks and a few thousand people, we had our statistically significant answer: a 77% increase in the number of new users who were making it all the way through activation.

My entire involvement with the project to do the research, design, and usability testing was just under 90 hours spread over about 6 weeks.

Key Takeaway: Design - even major redesigns - can be part of an agile, lean startup environment, if done in an efficient way with a lot of iteration and customer involvement.



Laura Klein has been working in Silicon Valley as both an engineer and a UX professional for the last 15 years. She currently consults with lean startups to help them make their products easier to use. She frequently blogs about design, usability, metrics, and product management at Users Know. You can follow her on Twitter at @lauraklein.

Why we need to teach MBA’s about modern entrepreneurship (and what Harvard Business School is doing about it)

This week, the startup tribe from Harvard Business School is making their annual trek to Silicon Valley. They’ll hear from a variety of experts and get to see many startups firsthand. While they’re here, I’m sure they’ll be received warmly. But I don’t think they’d be too happy to hear what gets said about them when they leave the room.

It’s a common refrain around Silicon Valley to disparage the role of MBA’s in entrepreneurship. We still have some collective scar tissue: the idea conjures up the hordes of dot-com hopefuls that descended on VC’s and angel investors with little more than a business plan. Even today, I routinely hear MBA’s advised to remove the degree from their resume when applying to startup jobs. We also cavalierly lampoon the “suits” that get brought in to run startups after the founders are fired by callous VC’s. I used to call them “executioners” because their attempts to “execute” the standard general management playbook in the startup context of extreme uncertainty usually led to disaster.

But this anti-MBA bias harms the entrepreneurship ecosystem and limits opportunities even for startups that don’t employ a single MBA.

I spend a lot of time thinking and writing about what a theory of entrepreneurship needs to do. One of my beliefs is that such a theory should be addressed to entrepreneurs and the people who hold them accountable. It’s this latter criteria that I think tends to get overlooked in most writing about entrepreneurs.

Who holds entrepreneurs accountable? One obvious answer is startup investors: angels and venture capitalists - many of whom have MBA’s. They have the ultimate responsibility in a venture-backed company of deciding whether to fire the founders and bring in “professional management.” I believe one of the reasons that this often goes badly is that the investors have nothing more than standard general management tools for evaluating the startup’s success. For example, when a startup is making more money month after month, I often hear VC’s say something to the effect of, “well, you can’t argue with success.” I hear similar things for pre-revenue startups that are on schedule, on time, and on budget - even though they are busy building something that nobody wants. (In fact, this crisis was at the heart of Steve Blank’s original impetus to develop customer development as an alternative set of milestones to use for startups.)

I also frequently see the reverse. General management is supposed to be orderly, “strategic” and mostly calm. I have seen founders replaced because their style seemed too chaotic, even though what’s really happening is that they are operating at startup speed. Pivots are disorienting, but necessary. Except when a startup is busy “pivoting” all the time, running around in circles. That's a waste of time. How do you tell the difference? General management doesn't have a good answer. As a result, founders get removed prematurely or even entirely exiled.

And there’s a worse fate, too. Far too many venture-backed companies correctly conclude that the founders are being counter-productive during their high-growth phase. But neither they nor the founders can think of anything for them to do: the MBA’s think they should be purged and the founders think they should be in charge. It rarely occurs to either party that the founders could be busy inventing the next disruptive product, but doing so in a non-disruptive way. As a result, many of these companies get caught by surprise when their optimization activities hit a plateau and competitors who have a true portfolio approach race past them. Facebook vs. Myspace, anyone?

These dynamics harm startups at all stages, because they pressure founders to engage in “success theatre” – trying to make themselves look successful by general management standards by focusing on vanity metrics, product milestones, and whiz-bang demos. In entrepreneur circles, this is goes by the innocuous-sounding term “board management” – but it is actually a terrible waste of energy and focus.

And it’s not just investors who are having trouble. The tech press loves to celebrate when startups get acquired, and founders make lots of money. But who do you think makes those acquisition decisions? In many cases, it’s MBA’s inside large companies. Far too many of these acquisitions go nowhere. Companies are acquired for hundreds of millions only to be worth tens of millions a few years later. I know plenty of people that have nothing but disdain for the “suits” who make these decisions. These entrepreneurs are only too happy to engage in success theatre, cash out, and move on to the next venture. What happens after they leave is of little concern. If it goes badly, we all know it’s the behemoth who will get the blame.

But that’s damaging, too. The core moral tenet of capitalism is that voluntary exchange is the ultimate test of whether an economic transaction is value creating or value destroying. Fraud, deception, and dishonesty undermine this moral calculus. Vanity metrics and success theater are in a moral grey area; they are masking the fact that some of our industry’s most “successful” ventures are actually value destroying. Even worse, this breeds tremendous mistrust.

Back in my IMVU days, I met with an investment banker who wanted to help us understand the M&A landscape. When we walked him through our business model and results, he explained that our options would be limited, because the main M&A community was feeling burned by companies like ours. He explained, “the big companies have bought a bunch companies with a client download or engagement business model, like Xfire and Neopets, and haven’t seen the returns they had hoped. Therefore, if you want to sell IMVU one day, you’ll need to abandon your business model, even though it’s generating a lot of revenue per customer. You’d be better off just selling ads.” There’s a lot wrong with statement, not the least of which is that “client download” is not a business model and that he was advocating that we abandon a real business model for an unprofitable one. But I believe he was representing his clients’ honest beliefs; they were confused about how to classify startups. When they get burned by a wave of acquisitions that turn out to be value destroying, the rest of us suffer the resulting lack of liquidity that is so important to the startup ecosystem.

It’s tempting to blame the MBA’s for all these mistakes. But I think the root cause of these mistakes is the fact that most MBA’s are not adequately educated about entrepreneurship. The problem afflicts general managers who try to innovate within big companies, too. In fact, I hope longtime readers will recognize these as the exact same mistakes that afflict us as entrepreneurs when we try to hold ourselves and our teams accountable. Are we making progress? Is what I’m working on creating value? What should I work on next? These are the enduring startup questions.

That’s why I am so excited about a new course that is debuting this year at Harvard Business School.

I’ll be honest. I get a lot of raised eyebrows here in Silicon Valley when people hear that I am an Entrepreneur in Residence at Harvard Business School – and not just because I continue to be physically resident here in San Francisco. Some people here are skeptical of spending time with MBA’s. One tweet read, “well, if HBS is investing in the lean startup we know it has jumped the shark.”

I’m glad to be able to do something about the divide between entrepreneurs and MBA's. As I’ve written before, academia has an important role to play in the new startup movement that’s afoot: documenting case studies, identifying emerging new practice, and doing original research to validate or refute theories. Harvard is, in some ways, a late entrant to this project; important work has taken place at Stanford in both the business and engineering schools; Berkeley's Haas School of Businesses was the place where Steve Blank first taught customer development.

Professor Tom Eisenmann is pioneering a novel approach at HBS, with a new class called Launching Technology Ventures:

Launching Technology Ventures uses case studies to examine lean startup practices. LTV focuses on the integration of marketing and engineering functions and emphasizes implementation rather than strategy formulation issues. The course does not examine financing options or the composition of founding teams. LTV draws heavily on the ideas of Eric Ries, Steve Blank, Marty Cagan and other practitioners.

The class debuts in a few weeks. I’m excited to be joining him for one of the first sessions on January 26 (for those who don’t attend HBS, I’ll also be doing a public event at the Boston Lean Startup Circle). Prof. Eisenmann has just published a series of blog posts describing the class, and they include three new resources that will benefit entrepreneurs and MBA’s everywhere:

1. A comprehensive reading list of the best sources on the new entrepreneurship: books, blogs, ebooks - everything. It’s the best such compilation I’ve ever seen. It should be considered the definitive (and mandatory) reading list for anyone who wants to understand modern entrepreneurship.
   
2. A series of new business cases documenting Lean Startup principles in a variety of companies. Many will be familiar to those who attended sllconf: IMVU, Dropbox, Aardvark. But he’s also documented cases of these principles applied in a variety of other situations. For example, for years Steve Blank and I have been saying things like, “if you’re working on a cure for cancer, these rules don’t apply.” But it turns out that this is not exactly true, as a company called Predictive Biosciences discovered. It’s a phenomenal case.
   
3. A compilation of tools and skills. The class also requires that the students explore – and master – some specific tools and techniques that entrepreneurs use every day. You cannot learn about entrepreneurship just at the blackboard. You have to get your hands dirty. This post outlines the skills that MBA’s who want to understand entrepreneurship have to master. For example, in my work with MBA’s who want to go into software entrepreneurship, I often encourage them to learn how to program. Managing a software company without knowing how to program is just as ridiculous as a factory manager who refuses to walk the factory floor. If you don’t understand how work is done, you cannot manage it. The same logic applies across a whole host of skills, which is why this compilation is so important - and why it'll be a long term project. (I'm hoping we'll get this hosted on a wiki soon.)

This class is just the beginning. If you’re an MBA student, I strongly encourage you take a class like this one – even if you’re not planning to become an entrepreneur yourself. First of all, if you pursue a career in general management, it’s extremely likely you’re going to find yourself managing entrepreneurs. Second of all, you never know – you might find yourself facing extreme uncertainty in your job, no matter what industry or company you work for. If you’re at Harvard or one of the schools where Steve Blank teaches, consider yourself lucky. If you’re not, advocate for your program to try something new.

And for my friends in Silicon Valley, I hope you get excited about this, too. Imagine a world where MBA’s are actually helpful and not just “suits” that get in our way. Wouldn’t that be a cool hack?

2011

Thank you, 2010.

I'm excited for 2011, and I want to share some of my plans for the coming year. But before I do, I also feel obligated to take a look back on my plans for last year.

I can't believe a whole year has passed since I wrote a blog post called "Towards a new entrepreneurship" laying out my priorities for 2010. Back then, I wrote:

"[Here is] an idea that I don't think is too widespread yet: that entrepreneurship is an industry. Sure, when entrepreneurs create startups that grow up into mature companies, they become part of an established industry, with its own ecosystem, norms, partners and best practices. But until that happens, we entrepreneurs have our own ecosystem, of investors and service providers, norms and even some "best" practices. The two ecosystems have diverged significantly in the past fifty years - and especially in the past ten. The reason is that the underlying theory that powers established business, the theory of general management, is increasingly inadequate for managing startups. And yet, so far, we lack a coherent theory to replace it. My belief is that the lean startup is that theory. Together, we are part of a movement that is redefining entrepreneurship."

This idea has become a reality in many ways this year. Our ideas have entered the mainstream of startup thinking and even the popular culture. I mean, who ever thought we'd see this cartoon in the New Yorker magazine?

Lean Startup Meetups are now in more than 75 cities, with more than 12,000 combined members. More and more, I am meeting entrepreneurs and managers from companies large and small who agree on this one point: entrepreneurship is management. By applying the same scientific principles that gave rise to general management in the first place to entrepreneurship and innovation, we are unleashing incredible creativity. But we still have a long way to go.

In that spirit, I want to review the four priorities I laid out at the start of this year. For 2010, I announced four main projects. Here's how I laid them out (in their original embarrassing order), and here's how each one turned out.

1. The Lean Startup Cohort program. Verdict: FAILURE. This seemed like such a promising idea at the time. Take a small number of high-growth companies and have them pay a premium price to learn from me and from each other how to apply Lean Startup ideas in depth. My main hypothesis was that making the program expensive would act as a quality filter, and that if we could find smart, committed companies to participate, they would all benefit tremendously. Thus, I assumed the biggest risk was finding participants who could afford the price.
   
   Unfortunately, I was completely wrong. Finding participants was no problem; the program quickly filled up. And the quality of participants was way higher than I imagined. And yet, when we actually started to run the program, it still failed. Teaching Lean Startup concepts in a fixed order really didn't work, since all active companies face different challenges at different times. And even in a strict, high-quality filtered room, most companies didn't want to share their problems and internal data, nor did they particularly want to engage with other companies' problems. In retrospect, that should have been obvious to me - as an entrepreneur, I would never have had the patience for a program like that.
   
   What's that you say? Even "gurus" have to get out of the building, build a minimum viable product, and pivot? Why, yes, they do. Embarrassing, but at least we failed fast. (Peter Drucker thought people used the term guru because it was easier to spell than charlatan.)
   
   
2. Teaching in academia. Verdict: MIXED. I started the year co-teaching a Lean Startup class for MBA's at Berkeley with Steve Blank. In some ways, it was a big success: the class was oversubscribed, had a record number of auditors, and received positive reviews. But the experience left me with doubts about whether that is the right way to engage with academia, for me.
   
   I strongly believe academia has an important role to play in transforming the practice of entrepreneurship. Luckily, Steve has been leading the charge to bring a new way of teaching entrepreneurship into academic programs, and 2010 saw the debut of his Durant School of Entrepreneurship at sllconf, as well as new programs like the Lean Launch Pad at Stanford and the Business Model Competition at BYU.
   
   I believe significant new research also needs to be done. What we know today is just the tip of the iceberg about this new entrepreneurial management. How many of our beliefs are just tactics that sound good, or that only work in certain situations? Much more is needed, and 2011 will see the first few buds of that research project flower. My colleagues at Harvard Business School will debut a new Lean Startup-themed course for MBAs this spring, as well as a new $50,000 Minimum Viable Product Fund. As part of that project, HBS has commissioned a series of new case studies on Lean Startup practices, both in and (importantly) outside the software industry. (You can see a little taste at Jeffrey Busgang's blog here.) I've also begun a collaboration with Nathan Furr at BYU to research actual practitioners, following them over time with an eye towards discovering ways to test some of our beliefs about Lean Startup ideas empirically. You can follow our work (and volunteer to be studied) here.
   
   Also along these lines, I've worked with a variety of collaborators to produce case studies right here on Startup Lessons Learned. Hopefully, more will come in the new year. You can see our efforts so far.
   
   
3. Startup Lessons Learned Conference (sllconf). Verdict: SUCCESS. This was a project I almost didn't do this year, because the prospect made me so nervous. Boy am I glad I did. I still receive regular feedback from people who were there live or in one of our 60+ simulcast locations around the world. It was always a dream of mine to produce a conference where knowledge - not hype - was king, where information was presented in a useful order, and where success theatre and vanity metrics were banned. I believe we succeeded on all three counts.
   
   In case you missed it, here's a little taste of the event itself, courtesy of my friends at Micro-Documentaries:
   
   
   
   And don't forget, you can watch full video of the entire conference courtesy of our sllconf Justin.tv channel.
   
   In 2011, we will do sllconf again, probably in mid-May. As always, I will look to you readers for guidance and suggestions of what we should do different. Stay tuned for details. If you are interested in speaking or mentoring at sllconf 2011, we will accept suggestions and nominations. If you would like to nominate someone, please post a video of them giving a talk (with slides if possible).  Grainy low-def youtube videos are perfectly adequate. We had far too many submissions last year on behalf people I didn't know. I had to be confident they would meet the standards I laid out above, but I couldn't take the time to meet them all. Therefore, if you'd like to speak this year at sllconf, a great way to get a leg up would be to speak at a Lean Startup Meetup, and ask someone to record the session. And if you are a meetup organizer, and have had a great speaker who you'd like to see at sllconf 2011, please let me know.
   
   In other conference news, we'll also have an event at SXSW. We'll make details available soon, I promise. If you're going to be in town for SXSW, and might like to join as a speaker, sponsor, or attendee, please let me know.
   
   
4. Writing a book. Verdict: TBD. I am in the final weeks of preparing a manuscript for The Lean Startup Book which will be published by Crown (one of the largest business book publishers in the world) in 2011. I sincerely hope you'll like the final result; it has been a labor of love for me all year.
   
   Deciding to publish this book through traditional channels took a lot of thought. I believe it is time for our movement to Cross the Chasm into mainstream awareness. Our early successes have been impressive, but we are still just at the beginning. In my talks all this year I have been exhorting audiences to Stop Wasting People's Time. Our modern economy is full to the brim of waste: building products that have few customers, that produce negative returns for investors, or companies stuck in the land of the living dead. And yet, the people who are responsible for this waste are not generally early adopters of new ideas about entrepreneurship. They are not scouring blogs for the latest gems in innovation thinking. They are overwhelmed, doing the best they can, and get information from only a few sources. They don't want avant garde advice, they want to be reading the same things everyone else is reading.
   
   My belief is that, in order to reach this mainstream audience, we need to produce a book that is accessible to them, and then make that book a bestseller. That's one of my main goals for 2011, and I will be asking you to help many, many times in the coming year. I hope you'll continue to support me as you have this past year.
   
   As a reader, the rational thing to do with a new book is to wait until the book comes out, see if your friends and colleagues read it, and if they do, see if they think it's any good. That's classic mainstream customer thinking. Hopefully, the early adopters and visionaries among you will disregard this advice, and agree to pre-order the book instead. The more of you who do that, the more people we'll be able to reach when it debuts next year. Remember, mainstream customers will be looking to you to see if it's worth buying.
   
   You can pre-order it from me directly, or get an even better price at Amazon.
   
   (If you'd like to help, I'm still looking for test readers, case studies, and - most importantly - help bringing traffic to the book website. We're running constant A/B tests there; anyone who is able to donate traffic, ads, or a link from your own blog/website will have my gratitude.)

So that was 2010. I believe 2011 will be even better.

It's an auspicious time. Entrepreneurship is in a new renaissance. There are more startups operating today than at any time in history. New ideas about entrepreneurship are in the air. And the dominant management paradigm of the past century has run its course. Literally.

2011 will mark the one hundredth anniversary of the idea of management. I date its origin to the publication, in 1911, of Frederick Winslow Taylor's The Principles of Scientific Management, one of the most important management books ever written. Management's second century will be very different than its first. Our problems are more complex, faster moving, and we face greater uncertainty. In other words, we need entrepreneurs to solve them. I'm excited to see what comes next.

I hope you've all had a happy holidays, and I wish you the best for a new and exhilarating New Year. Here's to 2011!