Our latest video, the kick network

I'm working on video blog about startups, cool technology and entrepreneurs in Finland. In May we got the opportunity to follow Pauli Bragiel, Aaron Patzer, Russel Simmons and Sami Inkinen around as they visited Helsinki for the event Founders' Week.

This is part one from the video series we are creating, "We want to see Finland become a global Startup hub".

Test your hypothesis! Every new product is an experiment

In a traditional product development model you would find a problem you want to solve, make a business plan, develop the product and then launch. Erik Ries propose that we instead treat every product like an experiment where the main goal is to learn about our potential customers' needs. That means making the distance between idea and launch as short as possible, and a very short production cycles.

If you have read Steve Blank's book Four Steps to Epiphany, you know what I'm talking about. He calls it the customer development model. He describes it as a way to develop products with customers, not the product, in mind.

Source: The Four Steps to Epiphany

Ries' describes the same concept as a way to test the underlying hypotheses behind a product. He brings up four questions that Mark Cook from Kodak would ask his team every time they develop a new product:

1. Do consumers recognize that they have the problem you are trying to solve?

2. If there was a solution, would they buy it?

3. Would they buy it from us?

4. Can we build a solution for that problem?

"The common tendency of product development is to skip straight to the fourth question and build a solution before confirming that customers have the problem"

The takeaway is that we need to outline our hypotheses, test them and learn from the process. Only then can we create new products and services that form the basis of a successful business model.

Just Do It... or is there another way?

I'm reading The Lean Startup by Eric Ries, read the first post here. In this post, I want to emphasize this quote from the book:

"[S]ome entrepreneurs and investors have thrown up their hands and adopted the "Just Do It" school of startups. This school believes that if management is the problem, chaos is the answer. Unfortunately, … this doesn't work either."

During Founders' Week here in Helsinki I got the opportunity to speak to Paul Bragiel. He is very much a "just do it" kind of guy, I wish I would have read The Lean Startup before that so I could have challenged him on that point.

Ries' answer is that yes, the old school of management fails when it is applied to startups. But there is an alternative to chaos. That alternative is promised later on in the book. I'm all ears.

First name vs. middle name

My middle name Johannes was really popular in the 1790s. My first name has, after playing second fiddle for the last 300 years, overtaken my middle name. Erik appears in more books than Johannes in 1993. I was five at the time, and did not appreciate the significance of this event back then.

Ngram viewer is a tool from Google that lets you search for the number of times a word appears in books throughout history. Thanks XKCD for always showing me cool stuff.

Entrepreneurship is a kind of management

Part three from my read of The Lean Startup by Eric Ries.

"Lately, it seems that one is cool, innovative, and exciting and the other is dull, serious and bland." He's talking about the how the words entrepreneurship and management go together.

In another startup Eric was involved in, IMVU, they went at it determined to make as many mistakes as they could. They shipped the product as soon as they cobbled something together, they charged people for it, and iterated often - sometimes several times per day. And in 2011 IMVU had revenues of $50 million.


From this experience, Ries distilled five principles:
1. Entrepreneurs are everywhere. An entrepreneur is anyone who works with new products and services under conditions of extreme uncertainty.
2. Entrepreneurship is management. Startups require a management style geard to its context of extreme uncertainty.
3. Validated learning. In addition to making money, startups exist to learn how to build a sustainable business.
4. Build-Measure-Lean. Startups should make the cycle of building products, measuring their success and learning from the experience as fast as possible.
5. Innovation accounting. The boring stuff is also importan, measuring progress, setting up milestones, and how to prioritize our work.


As I wrote earlier, I'm also reading The One Minute Manager by Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson. One of the three pillars of the one minute manager is one-minute goals. These are goals no longer than 250 words that the manager and the managee agree upon as the measure of a project's success. Principle five says the same thing, that measuring and comparing performance to goals is an important part of a startup. as well as in established companies.

Continuing to read: The Lean Startup

My second entry on my read of Eric Reis' book The Lean Startup. This great quote comes up right at the beginning:

"And we really were on to something. We were building a way for college kids to create online profiles for the purpose of sharing ... with employers. Oops."

He then goes on to say "There is a mythmaking industry hard at work to sell us [that we too can achieve fame and fortune], but I have come to believe that the story is false, the product of selection bias and after-the-fact rationalization." There's a great book called Fooled by Randomness I read a while ago that gives a lot of food for thought on the source of success.


But, it's not all luck. Reis goes on to write that startup success can be engineered by following the right process.

Currently reading The One Minute Manager and the Lean Startup

I'm currently reading two classic books in the world of business. The One Minute Manager by Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson is a guide to becoming a good manager. The Lean Startup by Eric Ries is a book about creating startups that achieve great things without being wasteful.

The One Minute Manager outlines three techniques that managers should use; one-minute goals, one-minute praises, and one-minute reprimands.

The Lean Startup is about Ries' five principles for building a lean startup; entrepreneurs are everywhere, entrepreneurship is management, validated learning, innovation accounting, and "build-measure-learn".

The One Minute Manager is a short story about a young man who stumbles on a guy called the one minute manager in his search for good leaders. I've gotten half way so far and it's instructions are good, if not surprising. I haven't read a lot form The Lean Startup yet, but I'm looking forward to finding out what "entrepreneurship is management" means.