Image taken from: http://gumption.typepad.com/blog/entrepreneuria/
What does it mean to go lean?
Going lean means to minimize your product as much as possible to the point where you can solve your customer’s problem with your solution and get the maximum amount of customer feedback with a MINIMAL product. Ideally if you can solve your customer’s problem with very little technology, very little user interface and very little design – then do it. Minimize features as much as possible! Also, constantly get customers to validate your solution while you’re building the product.
I wish I did that for my first start up, MyFitSolution.com, but instead I took the MBA strategy. I guess I shouldn’t be upset about it, because I did talk to potential customers, surveyed potential customers and talked to CEOs of successful Web Companies. I tried my best to learn what I could before I plunged into the Start Up world.
How going lean could have helped me with my first start up:
Really quick: MyFitSolution.com was my first start up. MyFitSolution.com’s purpose is to connect amateur fitness gurus with fitness beginners in the gym and lets them manage their work out sessions on MyFitSolution.com. The beginners pay MyFitSolution to be able to connect to these amateur fitness gurus and the majority of that is given to the amateur fitness gurus.
Instead of spending a year writing a business plan for MyFitSolution, months raising capital, a year doing the wire frames and development, we could have set up two html forms and had amateur fitness people fill one out and beginners fill out another, then my partner and I could have manually connected both those people together by calling them up and emailing them. Then we could have kept doing this until we understood the process. After showing this process to technical people, we could have made a simple web platform around this already working process. Now we’re 2.5 years into the business and we haven’t even proved the customer development process works. In addition, currently MyFitSolution.com has a bunch of bugs and the UI isn’t completely done. A big reason for all of this is because my partner and I didn’t take a lean approach to launching the business. It could have saved us a lot of time, money, head ache and put us on the fast track to success.
How I’m taking the LEAN start up approach with RankingClimber.com
Really quick: RankingClimber.com lets advertisers connect to bloggers by launching blog post contests. Bloggers get paid whether they win or lose by participating in these contests and bloggers also get their blogs promoted to a larger audience for free. Advertisers get higher search engine rankings for their chosen keyword phrases from the links they get from the blog posts. In addition, Advertisers get targeted traffic, branding, buzz and an increased Google Page Rank.
For RankingClimber.com, I didn’t write a business plan or make complicated financial forecasts, but only focused on building a very minimalistic product that fixed my target customer’s problem with a direct solution. After I figured out how the site should work, I talked to as many people as I could about the idea. After that, I made a basic wireframe for the website, hired a user interface/graphic design person to make the html/css/graphic design pages of the website, and then took those pages along with a product back log to a PHP developer to turn them into a live working website. While my developer built the product, I constantly showed the product to potential customers and asked for their feedback so that I could validate my solution to their problem.
A specific example of how I went lean with RankingClimber:
I made it so that users can’t message each other on RankingClimber. Why did I do that? Because there’s no reason users have to message each other. The site connects bloggers and advertisers together through contests. The bloggers and advertisers can communicate with each other on the contest page itself.
Here’s another example:
After doing some A/B, usability testing, demoing and pitching of RankingClimber, I saw there were a lot of things wrong that I assumed were correct, so I made a new product back log. But here’s the kicker: if all the features in the product back log were implemented, then I’d have a 3 to 6 month period of development, testing and excessive coffee drinking. Here’s one part of the six page product back log I made:
Problem: Bloggers might not want to do this because they might not win contests.
Why is it a problem? If bloggers aren’t participating on RankingClimber, then advertisers won’t want to launch contests.
Solution/Executable Step(s): Have the advertiser pick a reserve amount ($20, $50, $100 or custom – needs to be higher than $20), and have that amount split among the losers of the blog post contest). This needs to get put on the main page of the website so that Bloggers know that they get something no matter what. Advertisers should know this too on the main page, since the advertiser might think why do bloggers participate in contests for no guarantee of winning?
How I went lean with the above problem:
So instead of thinking like a Product Manager working for Microsoft, I thought like a Lean Product Manager. I thought to myself: how can I make the solution/executable step(s) happen with an extremely minimal iteration? And what I came up with is this: after a contest, I would individually credit the bloggers accounts by altering the database manually. Simple.
That requires no user interface creation, no graphic design, no development, no testing and no hair loss. How freaking awesome is that? I just saved myself so much time and money! HELL YEAH!
Tools to use for going lean:
The majority of the things in my product back log were User Interface related and had to do with the main page of RankingClimber and the Q & A page.
For example:
Problem: Bloggers don’t know what their chances of winning contests are.
Why is it a problem? This could stop a blogger from joining RankingClimber.
Solution/Executable Step(s): Have the following actionable text for a blogger to click on: What are my chances of winning the contest? An answer could consist of: “You get paid no matter what. If you win, you can get paid a lot (show me an example) or if you lose you get paid a little (show me an example). A lot should be the prize and a little should explain the reserve amount that gets split among the losers.
How I went lean with the above problem:
Instead of hiring some fancy designer to spend hours upon hours on coming up with concepts to solve the solution above, I could simply use the API from www.slidedeck.com to create a beautiful slide deck on the main page of RankingClimber.com addressing the above problem with the above solution without spending excessive time on image editing software.
Inspiration for this blog post:
This blog post was inspired by the Lean Startup Challenge by www.AppSumo.com.
Tags: BloggersCompete, lean start up approach, MyFitSolution, RankingClimber, tips
Your blogs posts are always short and straight to the point yet well written and always give very practical hands on advise for start ups. I’m very impressed and it’s slowly becoming my favorite blog to read on the web.
Karan that’s really flattering. Thanks dude. When you start a Company in the future, let me know how I can help.