Startup people in Paris had a dilemma this week – choosing between two events on the same night: hear the good words from Ash Maurya author of Running Lean or listen to Heidi Isern and Blaise Bertrand from IDEO.
I ended up going to listen to Ash Maurya.
Here is what he said that I liked:
Most startups fail (still). Startup that succeed change along the way. They never end-up when they wanted to go.
The biggest risk is not finding customers.
If you cant get 10 customer off line. You can’t get 1000 online.
Ash runs a program where in 8 weeks, startups get paying customers and – here is the trick – they can’t write a line of code.
About validating assumptions: getting 2 positives answers out of 10 is not good enough. Change something and try to get 8 out of 10.
While doing customer development, most of the time spent on interviews is actually between interviews.
Referring to his book Running Lean, he said he can’t tell when the launch date was. It was the result of a continuous process. It’s concept ‘no launch date’ that I like, forcing you to be live with your poor product on day one.
Finally, he remained the limits of the methodology: it’s about getting feedback fast and being able to know if you are on the wrong path quicker. It does not guarantee success.
I suspect IDEO might have the rest of secret sauce…
