The Sunjay Times

Drinking the Customer Development & Lean Startup koolaid isn’t enough even if you understand 100% what to do. Actually doing it in a team in a time crunch while being pushed by mentors is priceless (where Lean Startup Machine comes in).

This is a confession of a solo tech founder, bootstrapping a startup in Silicon Valley. Yes, I have burned my boat; my years of savings dwindle every day (no safety net when I hit $0).

Last weekend, I attended Lean Startup Machine (LSM) in San Francisco. I know what Customer Development by Steve Blank is (ok, I only read up to the Customer Validation chapter since I haven’t got past that point and it’s a heavy read). I know what Lean Startup is too, I follow Eric Ries’ preaching as well. I’ve also read the cheatsheet by Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovitz. Twice.

The past month, I’ve been stuck with my startup: having trouble de-risking the market risk. Spun my wheels, really feeling that trough of sorrow, and not having a mentor to guide me and push me.

I can’t justify time & money on anything else other than my startup, but I know I needed to take a step back, reflect and learn something new, since everything I’ve been trying isn’t working. And I’m so glad I did. The typical hackathon is about hacking code whereas LSM is more about hacking your customers’ psyche [1]. My team got paying customers without writing a single line of code, over a weekend. I don’t think I’ve ever convinced a customer to give me their cold hard cash now with a promise of a product/service.

What I’ve learned from my LSM experience

Lesson 1: It’s one thing to be actually cust-dev’ing, it’s another thing to be actually doing it right.

I *was* already cust-dev’ing: the cold calls, walking up to strangers and striking up a conversation, getting out of the f**king building, but I was doing it wrong, and with nobody to tell me I was doing it wrong … <insert fail>. I was too close to the problem, and I was inexperienced in applying the principles properly. Let me rephrase:

Lesson 1: It’s one thing to be actually cust-dev’ing and think you’re doing it right, it’s another thing to be *actually* doing it right, with the guidance of a mentor. It’s like I needed to iterate on my own understanding & application of lean startup. Sounds meta—I know, but it’s true.

Lesson 2: If you were doing it right, results you think you can accomplish in a week, a month, a Wall St. quarter, you can do in a day or two.

The same conclusion that Eric Ries said at the start of LSM: that LSM made him realize how precious a single day can be. The key of course, is to be doing it right in the first place. I now feel dumb having been stuck for a whole month; but I couldn’t possibly know what I don’t know, without a mentor.

Lesson 3: If you’re a solo founder, doing it in a team (your weekend “cofounders”) is so much more fun!

Clearly, this is contingent upon the getting the people chemistry right, which is hard. I got lucky. But as a solo-founder for months, you get a taste of what you’re missing out on. It’s lonely and there is more to do than you can humanly handle. During the crunch, everybody was firing on all cylinders, and whenever I completed my task, I would ask my team, “I’m idling, what can I help with?” and just jump in and do whatever it is that is needed next.

Lesson 4: Get a real commitment from your customer. That is, your customer gives you a scarce resource: time, attention, or money. Before you go build.

At the start of my team’s journey, we were trying to validate “will people want this?” But that was actually the wrong hypothesis to test in our situation (as the mentors corrected us), the riskiest hypothesis was actually “will people pay for this?” because if we gave it away for $0, of course people would take it! We then proceed to well, ask for money. We offered a 100% money return guarantee, no questions asked policy, so strictly speaking, there’s absolutely no risk to the customer. But by asking for money up front, we’re asking them to commit to us, because we’re committing to them too (we’re working hard to provide them value!)

This one is basically the “get the purchase order” before you build as Steve Blank says – but this one really only sunk into my head this weekend. If you’re too scared during a conversation to ask your prospect for money/time/attention, remember these words, “F*ck You. Pay Me.” at minute 2:05 (ha, just noticed that this video was also taken at Typekit’s office, where LSM was held too.)

Lesson 5: Nevermind the saying “if you fail, don’t forget the lessons”, if you fail at the wrong things.

I’ve been talking to the wrong people, testing the wrong hypothesis, asking the wrong questions. I only now know that I’ve been cust-dev’ing wrong because I learned by doing at LSM. [2]

Lesson 6: If you really have the entrepreneurship “virus”, failure sets you free. LSM validated my hypothesis that I really am addicted to “temporary organization designed to discover a profitable, scalable business model.”

I too was caught up with these worries (“garden variety” as Mark Suster might call it):

• What if my startup results in an utter failure?
• What if I run out of all of my money, worldly possessions, and can’t pay for food and a roof over my head? (note: I have a spouse to support, which makes just crashing at your buddy’s floor difficult)
• What if I lose to the competition? (hat tip: Hitenism)

I’ve burned up yet another month of runway without progress on my startup, and thoughts of “What should I at least get out of this experience if I completely lose everything I have?” crept in to my head. Maybe I could at least become even better at my forte Django, Python, scaling LAMP (back-end web) Django. Or maybe I could become good at something I’m “just ok” at, like jQuery, CSS3, slicing PSD’s (front-end web), or maybe even design, UX, UI.

They’re all good things to have in my inventory of technical skills, should I walk away with nothing else – but I felt something missing. I couldn’t really say “get better at cust dev” as a skill, since reading the books repeatedly and failing on my own didn’t seem like it was making me better at cust-dev’ing.

I hang on to my dear startup as if it was my life, but if I fail, I’ll be doing yet another. If I succeed, I’ll also be doing yet another. After being on the team at LSM and cust-dev’ing it like there’s no tomorrow, I realize that should my startup tank, I know exactly what I want to get out of it: getting better at cust-dev’ing! Mentors halp?

Thinking about attending the Lean Startup Machine?

I highly recommend it. Here’s what I’d do differently. When you’re picking an idea + team to join ..

Swing for the fences, or at least, don’t hedge.

Don’t optimize for an idea that’s tractable within the confines of 2 days. I thought to myself that since we only had 2 days, I’d better pick a simple idea to work on that seems tractable (Evan William’s definition tractability). I ruled out ideas that I thought were too difficult to implement much less cust-dev in 2 days. Notice how I said “implement” before “cust dev”? Engineer in me thinking about implementation risk first before market risk again. Oops. Don’t do that.

If you’re not failing enough, you’re not learning enough.

With my team, I felt as though we didn’t fail enough, which is to say we could have learned more. We largely got it right too easily. That’s not a bad thing, but if you find yourself by and large having it easy, just keep aiming higher until you get it wrong and fail. If we aimed higher, got it more wrong, we would probably still end up at where we did, but we would have learned much more.

This requires a mental shift from trying to make things look pretty and everything working nicely (to externally impress whoever), to being publicly open / honest about about how you aimed high and really screwed up. Playing it safe is not for startups. Pretending to look as good as possible is for your boss in a big company. LSM made me embrace failure even more so, and being open and public about it. Another thing to read & understand, a whole nothing thing to actually do and have that message sink in.

Set your expectations right and don’t forget it’s a team sport

One thing I suspect my team did right was we didn’t bicker about status or roles. Everybody jumped in and did whatever work (glamorous or otherwise) was needed to accomplish the overarching goal. We didn’t discuss before we started who would be CEO post-event, who would get how much equity if we got funded and IPO’d. We were one well-oiled execution machine. For me, my expectation from LSM was that I learn about lean startup and that is exactly what I got.

Camaraderie and working alongside other startups

Working alongside the other teams during LSM gave me a taste of what it feels like to be working in a startup accelerator, alongside other startups. Everybody’s fighting against a common enemy for early-stage startups: irrelevance. Non-consumption.

The alumni network built from just a 2-day LSM crunch is impressive (for 2-days, it’s very “sticky”). Many people even across different teams have developed relationships that I suspect will go much further post-LSM. I explicitly mention this because I’ve never felt this sense of belonging to a community post-event from any other startup event, code hackathons and networking events included.

LSM Thank Yous

A big thanks to Trevor Owens, Steven Liu, Nate Berkopec and the rest of the LSM crew I know I’ve missed out on for making this happen.

And a big thanks to the mentors!

Thanks to Dan Martell for holding my feet to the fire; Hiten Shah, Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovitz for giving me advice here and there over time.

I’ll never forget what Dan Martell told me: “Do you want to be a real entrepreneur, or are you like the wannabes? If you want to be a real entrepreneur, then you must all the things that the wannabes are afraid of doing.” (paraphrased).

Just as Hacker Dojo was born as a permanent fixture of SuperHappyDevHouse success, I hope that LSM will keep snowballing larger and one day give birth to its own permanent fixture

My LSM Team

RezAmaze came in 3rd place with best MVP (paying customers without a single LOC)!

From left to right: Navneet Loiwal, Tommy Tsai (sitting), me (standing), Jessica Rosenberg.

[1] It’s not that you can’t bust out your IDE and start stuffing your interpreter with code. Participants have only 2 days to work. Most startups are market risks (“will they come?”), as opposed to a technical risks (“can you build?”). If you can de-risk the market risk while also building product in 2 days, all the more power to you.

[2] Ok, I’m not a complete utter moron unable to grasp lean startup; I’d say I was “slightly” off, but evaluated from pure results, it was just wrong enough that I might as well be one.