There were 8 hours of non-stop startup insights at the Lean Startup Intensive held Day 1 at the Web 2.0 Expo May 3-5. The strategies and business metrics presented were enough for a 2 year MBA program.
These Lean Startup soundbites were the most retweeted:
1. If my iteration cycle is 1 week and yours is 3 weeks, I can be pretty stupid and still beat the crap out of you. Dave McClure – 500Hats
Execute. Quickly build minimum products to test your customer assumptions. Once you get your product out there, then check your user conversion metrics.
2. Ask people questions at bus stops and Starbucks. Matt Brezina – Xobni.com
Find market fit by getting out there and asking people what they want. People will tell you what to build. Matt Brezina is very personable and used face-to-face user interactions for Xobni. BTW – Xobni is Inbox spelled backwards.
3. Smoke test. Set up a page with a button that says “Click to pay”. This is how you can measure serious user interest. Dan Martell – FlowTown
Eric Ries started the day with his own story of writing 40,000 lines of code in 6 months. After all of his hard work, no one would click his “download” button. He could have published a page with text and a download button to learn that!
4. Use a Freemium business model. Sean Ellis – DropBox.com
The Freemium business model is a small featured free product with a premium upgrade to all features. Dropbox.com uses this model.
5. The customer is the expert. You are just the note taker.” Cindy Alvarez – KISSmetrics
Stop selling and just listen.
6. “Focus on User Experience (UX) – Users coming to your site is mostly due to pictures and text, not code.” Dave McClure
Thanks to Eric Ries and Sarah Milstein who set up 10 scholarships for the Web 2.0 Expo.
It made my month when I heard I was one of the lucky winners!
Eric Ries, Sarah Milstein, Michelle Waldorf at Web2.0 Expo Lean Startup Intensive May 3, 2010
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