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Building Startups and Minimum Viable Products (NDC2013)

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Ben Hall
Ben Hall

Ben Hall is a hacker in residence at Cornershop and founder of previous startups. He discusses his approach to starting new ventures, which focuses on rapidly validating ideas by building minimum viable products and releasing early to test assumptions and learn from customers and metrics. Some of his key advice includes failing fast when ideas don't work, focusing on acquisition metrics over features, and prioritizing speed of delivery over perfect code in the early stages. The presentation emphasizes learning through quick iteration and putting products in front of customers as soon as possible.

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@Ben_Hall Ben@BenHall.me.uk Hacker in Residence at Cornershop / #1seed Building Startups and Minimum Viable Products
@Ben_Hall Ben@BenHall.me.uk Hacker in Residence at Cornershop / #1seed You talk about it, we ship it. #craftsmanship
@Ben_Hall Ben@BenHall.me.uk Hacker in Residence at Cornershop / #1seed Let’s make some money #craftsmanshipisdead
Who am I? • Hacker in Residence at Cornershop / #1seed – Meerkatalyst / MaydayHQ (Co-founder) – Swapit – 7digital – Red Gate Software • Multiple open source and side projects • @Ben_Hall or Ben@BenHall.me.uk
Agenda Idea Build Release
How I see the world With a bit of a rant, and various lessons learned along the way
Startup Mindset
Validate / Invalidate a concept as fast as possible
Lean Startup? • Toyota production system • Toyota Way • W. Edwards Deming • Eric Reis made it mainstream
Build MeasureLearn
Not about being cheap
It’s good to fail, as long as you fail fast
But not so fast that it’s impossible to succeed
The Idea
What happens if you don’t have an idea? Find a space, theme, problem that you personally find interesting
Building Startups and Minimum Viable Products (NDC2013)
Redstar Ventures, Science Inc, Rocket Internet
Cornershop Taps Pool Internal / External
BELIEVE IN THE VISION Without a core desire, you’ve already lost the game
People don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it.
Ideas to avoid / be aware of? • Market places / two sided markets – They do lead to digital transaction businesses == most likely to hit $1b – Winning once is hard. Here you need to win twice. • Viral – Generally all about luck • Photo Sharing etc – Yawn!!! Be original.
Business Assumption Exercise Business Assumptions Exercise I believe that my customers have a need to _____________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________. This need can be solved with _____________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________. My initial customers will be _____________________________________________________________________ The #1 value a client wants to get out of my service is: _____________________________________________________________________ The client can also get these additional benefits: ________________________________________________________ and ______________________________________________________ I will acquire the majority of my users/customers through ______________________________________________ and ________________________________________________ Business Assumptions Exercise I believe that my customers have a need to discover the best online services to solve their problems. This need can be solved with recommending them new services based on their existing tools and expressed problems. My initial customers will be early adopters working in the London tech scene people who use 5-10 apps on a daily basis and have signed up to over 100. The #1 value a client wants to get out of my service is: having a personalised recommendation service for apps. The client can also get these additional benefits: visualise all the apps their currently subscribed too and curated pages by thoughtleaders and social connections. I will acquire the majority of my users/customers through external integrations with apps and word of month / SEO
Building Startups and Minimum Viable Products (NDC2013)
Building Startups and Minimum Viable Products (NDC2013)
Leave the building Understand potential customer acquisition approaches early
Speak to everyone! • Influencers • Users of competitor products • Potential new users • People in different verticals with similar business models • Understand industry, customer segments • Test different value props, identify which connects best
Always discuss previous experiences. People are rubbish at predicting the future
Easy way to prove it’s a good idea? Get them to pay for it.
LISTEN TO CUSTOMERS NOT ADVISORS / VC
Naming & Branding Naming is the hardest problem Can kill days and suck motivation
Create a brand with any name (Google)
Let the name create brand (AirBnB, YouPorn, PornTube) Pivots are harder
MEERKATALYST IS A RUBBISH NAME!
MissingUnicorns.com Technical recruitment tool
CORNERSHOP Investing in the name and the brand
Tag lines should be short and sweet
DON’T SAY YOU’RE DISTRIBUTING OR INNOVATING LAME!!! Only others can say that
CustDev can only get you so far Should have concept / vision clear in your own head
The Build
What is a MVP? • Enhance Learning • Enable you to ask new questions beyond what you’ve asked before
Don’t turn into a developer! • This isn’t an exercise in learning new technologies. • It’s an exercise in building businesses • Don’t confuse the two.
Lesson learned from Meerkatalyst Built an over complex system when a shell script would have done
Lesson learned from Mayday Stopped the MVP, started scaling (technical backend), didn’t have product/market fit. Massive Fail
Avoid writing code if you can • Email first startups are cool!! • Sunrise (Just raised $2.2m, started as morning email of your day’s schedule each day) • Mattermark
Speed of delivery is key • Beg, steal, borrow – just get it done! • Ability to lean • Should be based around your vision • BOA took too long… aim wasn’t to learn, missed a number of opportunities
LIFE IS TOO SHORT TO WRITE BORING STUFF Don’t reinvent the wheel
UI / Design • Bootstrap • Flat UI • ThemeForest + Wordpress • KISS!! Do you really need EmberJS, Backbone etc etc etc?
Middleware • NodeJS • GitHub • Community • NPM / Bower
Backend • NoSQL – Mainly because of migrations • ElasticSearch – *AMAZING*
Hosting • Heroku • Rackspace Cloud – Preference of choice. Great startup team. – Gave me lots of free beer at SXSW • Amazon Web Services
Paul Stack rocked my world – Vagrant
APIs • Easily accessible data – FourSquare • Screen Scrape Data – Dirty, but *powerful* – Node + Redis === *fast*
Personal collection of reusable code Copy and paste FTW!!!
Cult of the Software Craftsman • Code Quality is not a feature! • Do you really need 80% test coverage? What value is that actually adding? • Do you really need that abstraction? That IoC? That level of separation? That ability to scale? • Is that really going to change your world?
BULLSH*T
WHO CARES ABOUT CLEAN CODE IF THERE ARE NO SALES!
IF DEVELOPERS WERE IMPACTED BY REVENUE THEN THEY WOULDN’T SPEND 10 DAYS WRITING CLEAN CODE
STOPPED DOING TDD A LONG TIME AGO Write tests / code / shell scripts to speed up feedback loop – not about long-term.
BUT I ATTEMPT TO KEEP IT CLEAN
DON’T BE AFFAIRD TO THROW CODE AWAY
Facebook Rewrite Example Move fast and break things
Ideal Team SizeTeam Size Ideally Three People
Building Startups and Minimum Viable Products (NDC2013)
Identifying what’s required? • MVP needs to be a product you can learn from but generally everything can be dropped. – If it doesn’t answer a question, does it need to be there? If there is no question, then no. – Need X feature to be Y is generally incorrect. Other ways to solve the problem • Releasing and iterating at least every day
Fake it until you make it
Lesson learned from Rate it Slate it Prototyped Functionality Took 2-3 hours to go from a concept to learning valuable insights
Release something that moves the needle every day Zynga’s approach
But that won’t work in XYZ environment Really?!
The Release
Job done! If you build it they will come Must be true, Hollywood said so
Find the people who believe what you believe • Early Adaptors • Early Evangelists • Will market the product for you.
Key factors • Metrics • Drive Traffic • Listen to your customers
Metrics • Collect everything • Visualise key data • Have key metrics that you want to track
Backend system • Librato metrics • Rackspace / AWS
Librato
User Metrics • Google Analytics • MixPanel • KissMetrics • Your own database is most valuable source. Use it!
Building Startups and Minimum Viable Products (NDC2013)
AARRR • Pirate Metrics. The only ones that matter. • Application Level • Feature Level (less for investors, more for product managers)
Building Startups and Minimum Viable Products (NDC2013)
Taskfirm.com
Metrics became the tests • Ensure the system is working as expected • Alerts when the system stopped working outside of normal bounds
Drive Traffic • PR (Hacker News, Techcrunch, The Next Web) • Newsletters (Own and others) • SEO – Inbound links • Blog (Own and others) • Tweet (MailChirp) • Email (MailChimp) • Influencers in the sector – Friends of Red Gate – Microsoft MVP programme
Paid Advertisement • 4 Hour Body tricks (Google Ad Words for title, in store hack for cover)
Speak to people using the product • Red Gate UX team • Watch, Listen, Learn • Introduce explicit touch points in the application for reaching out – Rate it Slate it inbox beta list • Do people want the feature? • Can we build a email list of people who are actively engaging with the product
Quickly qualify a lead & call • Rapportive • Intercom • Drop off time is around 90% a day after they used your product • Call them ASAP
Building Startups and Minimum Viable Products (NDC2013)
Building Startups and Minimum Viable Products (NDC2013)
A/B Tests? • Waste of time at the early stage. • Complex to configure, not enough traffic to make them statistically significant. – Mayday A/B tests • Took ages to get data, could have just asked people
Be prepared to kill it! • Referly • Meerkatalyst • Mayday • Pivot.
Be public about failing
Finally…
Summary • Stop playing with cool tech & start learning • Have a vision & execute it • Listen to customer over everyone else • Watch your metrics • Just get started!
To all the hackers, hustlers and hipsters – Good Luck! Ship stuff, change the world and have fun! Apparently it’s worth all the pain, stress and sleep nights
Thank you, please come again. @Ben_Hall Ben@BenHall.me.uk

More Related Content

Building Startups and Minimum Viable Products (NDC2013)

  • 1. @Ben_Hall Ben@BenHall.me.uk Hacker in Residence at Cornershop / #1seed Building Startups and Minimum Viable Products
  • 2. @Ben_Hall Ben@BenHall.me.uk Hacker in Residence at Cornershop / #1seed You talk about it, we ship it. #craftsmanship
  • 3. @Ben_Hall Ben@BenHall.me.uk Hacker in Residence at Cornershop / #1seed Let’s make some money #craftsmanshipisdead
  • 4. Who am I? • Hacker in Residence at Cornershop / #1seed – Meerkatalyst / MaydayHQ (Co-founder) – Swapit – 7digital – Red Gate Software • Multiple open source and side projects • @Ben_Hall or Ben@BenHall.me.uk
  • 6. How I see the world With a bit of a rant, and various lessons learned along the way
  • 8. Validate / Invalidate a concept as fast as possible
  • 9. Lean Startup? • Toyota production system • Toyota Way • W. Edwards Deming • Eric Reis made it mainstream
  • 12. It’s good to fail, as long as you fail fast
  • 13. But not so fast that it’s impossible to succeed
  • 15. What happens if you don’t have an idea? Find a space, theme, problem that you personally find interesting
  • 17. Redstar Ventures, Science Inc, Rocket Internet
  • 19. BELIEVE IN THE VISION Without a core desire, you’ve already lost the game
  • 20. People don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it.
  • 21. Ideas to avoid / be aware of? • Market places / two sided markets – They do lead to digital transaction businesses == most likely to hit $1b – Winning once is hard. Here you need to win twice. • Viral – Generally all about luck • Photo Sharing etc – Yawn!!! Be original.
  • 22. Business Assumption Exercise Business Assumptions Exercise I believe that my customers have a need to _____________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________. This need can be solved with _____________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________. My initial customers will be _____________________________________________________________________ The #1 value a client wants to get out of my service is: _____________________________________________________________________ The client can also get these additional benefits: ________________________________________________________ and ______________________________________________________ I will acquire the majority of my users/customers through ______________________________________________ and ________________________________________________ Business Assumptions Exercise I believe that my customers have a need to discover the best online services to solve their problems. This need can be solved with recommending them new services based on their existing tools and expressed problems. My initial customers will be early adopters working in the London tech scene people who use 5-10 apps on a daily basis and have signed up to over 100. The #1 value a client wants to get out of my service is: having a personalised recommendation service for apps. The client can also get these additional benefits: visualise all the apps their currently subscribed too and curated pages by thoughtleaders and social connections. I will acquire the majority of my users/customers through external integrations with apps and word of month / SEO
  • 25. Leave the building Understand potential customer acquisition approaches early
  • 26. Speak to everyone! • Influencers • Users of competitor products • Potential new users • People in different verticals with similar business models • Understand industry, customer segments • Test different value props, identify which connects best
  • 27. Always discuss previous experiences. People are rubbish at predicting the future
  • 28. Easy way to prove it’s a good idea? Get them to pay for it.
  • 29. LISTEN TO CUSTOMERS NOT ADVISORS / VC
  • 30. Naming & Branding Naming is the hardest problem Can kill days and suck motivation
  • 31. Create a brand with any name (Google)
  • 32. Let the name create brand (AirBnB, YouPorn, PornTube) Pivots are harder
  • 33. MEERKATALYST IS A RUBBISH NAME!
  • 35. CORNERSHOP Investing in the name and the brand
  • 36. Tag lines should be short and sweet
  • 37. DON’T SAY YOU’RE DISTRIBUTING OR INNOVATING LAME!!! Only others can say that
  • 38. CustDev can only get you so far Should have concept / vision clear in your own head
  • 40. What is a MVP? • Enhance Learning • Enable you to ask new questions beyond what you’ve asked before
  • 41. Don’t turn into a developer! • This isn’t an exercise in learning new technologies. • It’s an exercise in building businesses • Don’t confuse the two.
  • 42. Lesson learned from Meerkatalyst Built an over complex system when a shell script would have done
  • 43. Lesson learned from Mayday Stopped the MVP, started scaling (technical backend), didn’t have product/market fit. Massive Fail
  • 44. Avoid writing code if you can • Email first startups are cool!! • Sunrise (Just raised $2.2m, started as morning email of your day’s schedule each day) • Mattermark
  • 45. Speed of delivery is key • Beg, steal, borrow – just get it done! • Ability to lean • Should be based around your vision • BOA took too long… aim wasn’t to learn, missed a number of opportunities
  • 46. LIFE IS TOO SHORT TO WRITE BORING STUFF Don’t reinvent the wheel
  • 47. UI / Design • Bootstrap • Flat UI • ThemeForest + Wordpress • KISS!! Do you really need EmberJS, Backbone etc etc etc?
  • 48. Middleware • NodeJS • GitHub • Community • NPM / Bower
  • 49. Backend • NoSQL – Mainly because of migrations • ElasticSearch – *AMAZING*
  • 50. Hosting • Heroku • Rackspace Cloud – Preference of choice. Great startup team. – Gave me lots of free beer at SXSW • Amazon Web Services
  • 51. Paul Stack rocked my world – Vagrant
  • 52. APIs • Easily accessible data – FourSquare • Screen Scrape Data – Dirty, but *powerful* – Node + Redis === *fast*
  • 53. Personal collection of reusable code Copy and paste FTW!!!
  • 54. Cult of the Software Craftsman • Code Quality is not a feature! • Do you really need 80% test coverage? What value is that actually adding? • Do you really need that abstraction? That IoC? That level of separation? That ability to scale? • Is that really going to change your world?
  • 56. WHO CARES ABOUT CLEAN CODE IF THERE ARE NO SALES!
  • 57. IF DEVELOPERS WERE IMPACTED BY REVENUE THEN THEY WOULDN’T SPEND 10 DAYS WRITING CLEAN CODE
  • 58. STOPPED DOING TDD A LONG TIME AGO Write tests / code / shell scripts to speed up feedback loop – not about long-term.
  • 59. BUT I ATTEMPT TO KEEP IT CLEAN
  • 60. DON’T BE AFFAIRD TO THROW CODE AWAY
  • 61. Facebook Rewrite Example Move fast and break things
  • 62. Ideal Team SizeTeam Size Ideally Three People
  • 64. Identifying what’s required? • MVP needs to be a product you can learn from but generally everything can be dropped. – If it doesn’t answer a question, does it need to be there? If there is no question, then no. – Need X feature to be Y is generally incorrect. Other ways to solve the problem • Releasing and iterating at least every day
  • 65. Fake it until you make it
  • 66. Lesson learned from Rate it Slate it Prototyped Functionality Took 2-3 hours to go from a concept to learning valuable insights
  • 67. Release something that moves the needle every day Zynga’s approach
  • 68. But that won’t work in XYZ environment Really?!
  • 70. Job done! If you build it they will come Must be true, Hollywood said so
  • 71. Find the people who believe what you believe • Early Adaptors • Early Evangelists • Will market the product for you.
  • 72. Key factors • Metrics • Drive Traffic • Listen to your customers
  • 73. Metrics • Collect everything • Visualise key data • Have key metrics that you want to track
  • 74. Backend system • Librato metrics • Rackspace / AWS
  • 76. User Metrics • Google Analytics • MixPanel • KissMetrics • Your own database is most valuable source. Use it!
  • 78. AARRR • Pirate Metrics. The only ones that matter. • Application Level • Feature Level (less for investors, more for product managers)
  • 81. Metrics became the tests • Ensure the system is working as expected • Alerts when the system stopped working outside of normal bounds
  • 82. Drive Traffic • PR (Hacker News, Techcrunch, The Next Web) • Newsletters (Own and others) • SEO – Inbound links • Blog (Own and others) • Tweet (MailChirp) • Email (MailChimp) • Influencers in the sector – Friends of Red Gate – Microsoft MVP programme
  • 83. Paid Advertisement • 4 Hour Body tricks (Google Ad Words for title, in store hack for cover)
  • 84. Speak to people using the product • Red Gate UX team • Watch, Listen, Learn • Introduce explicit touch points in the application for reaching out – Rate it Slate it inbox beta list • Do people want the feature? • Can we build a email list of people who are actively engaging with the product
  • 85. Quickly qualify a lead & call • Rapportive • Intercom • Drop off time is around 90% a day after they used your product • Call them ASAP
  • 88. A/B Tests? • Waste of time at the early stage. • Complex to configure, not enough traffic to make them statistically significant. – Mayday A/B tests • Took ages to get data, could have just asked people
  • 89. Be prepared to kill it! • Referly • Meerkatalyst • Mayday • Pivot.
  • 90. Be public about failing
  • 92. Summary • Stop playing with cool tech & start learning • Have a vision & execute it • Listen to customer over everyone else • Watch your metrics • Just get started!
  • 93. To all the hackers, hustlers and hipsters – Good Luck! Ship stuff, change the world and have fun! Apparently it’s worth all the pain, stress and sleep nights
  • 94. Thank you, please come again. @Ben_Hall Ben@BenHall.me.uk

Editor's Notes

  1. I have fun with startups
  2. http://www.flickr.com/photos/newyorkbaltimore/8010607852/sizes/k/in/photolist-dcSsCu/Taking everything you’ve heard this week and applying it to real businesses with the aim of making *money*
  3. Stages of a startupBuild, measure, leanDon’t be scared to failDon’t be scared to kill it if it’s not workingBe public, be visible, talk to everyoneDon’t fail too early!
  4. Meerkatalyst example Thought I understood customer problem. Problem I had personally while at 7digital, knew others had it, ran with it as a side project before joining Springboard startup accelerator
  5. PoolTapsInternal / External
  6. Ideas by themselves are worthless100% on executing the visionPrevious company tried to split attention across 4 company streams. It doesn’t work.Without a core desire, you’ve already lost the game
  7. 3 people max.Designer/UI, Backend, CustDev/Biz DevUnicorns!!