Lean Startup Jan Meetup was exciting, thanks to a presentation by Eric Ries. Thanks to HBS and their course on Entrepreneurial Management, I am hoping Eric will be around town more often, and we get to pick his brains on all kinds of interesting things on Lean Startups. The original announcement promised to go “Beyond methodology”. I felt like Eric couldn’t get to a lot of the  ”new material” until the end, which was a bummer, but the Q & A session made up for that in some ways.

This is Part 1 of my notes from the session (some of them are recaps, all the way back to #sllconf last year). Stay tuned for Part 2 over the weekend.

• The  Unit of progress in a startup cannot be that of  ”advancing to the next stage”.  That way of looking at things, is mostly based on three “Shadow Beliefs” :

  • We know what customers want

  • We can actually predict the future

  • Advancing the plan is “progress”

Instead, the more appropriate unit of progress in a Startup is ”Validated Learning”. In effect, your startup’s success depends on how many times you can go through the “Build -> Measure -> Learn” loop, and you maximize the number of times through the loop, by optimizing through the ENTIRE LOOP and not just a specific part of it.

• When you are in a startup, you no longer have a functional discipline. You are not a programmer, not a marketer, you should do whatever is needed at that moment. Personally, I am a big believer in this idea, and this is one big part of what motivates me to start / work for a startup. I have had intense discussions on term sheets, design and send email marketing, hack a script to do cohort analysis, figure out a weird issue with “phrase search” in our search engine and be on phone-support and live-chat support, all in the same week.

• Insert Customary slide about pivot being the “P-word” and funny NewYorker cartoon :

• Now it gets interesting. Eric crystallized Lean startups into 5 important principles:

  • Entrepreneurs are everywhere : In effect, wherever there is uncertainty, there is entrepreneurship. This is a bit of a blue-sky, mom-and-apple-pie notion, but I’ll play along. Every earth shattering idea is something simple at its core and this could be one such core of Lean Startups. The larger point is that Lean Principles need not be applicable only to startups, they can as well be applied to other contexts.

  • Entrepreneurship IS management : Entrepreneurial management is a peer-level to the more traditional MBA-like General Management. One is not better than the other, they are just different. General Management focuses on processes, efficiencies, scale while Entrepreneurial Management focuses on trying to find a sustainable business model.

  • Validated Learning: See notes above

  • Build - Measure - Learn: Refer to the Kent Beck session notes from my earlier blog post from #sllconf 2010

  • Innovation Accounting: It is essential for a startup to focus on actionable data, and not on vanity metrics. Metrics that always go up and to the right (such as Cumulative total accounts) don’t matter. Metrics that reflect random environmental events, press releases (such as Pageviews) don’t matter. Metrics that focus on Per customer engagement are very important. How many times have users logged in? How many people have they referred? (#aarrr). Eric’s point was that we need an accounting paradigm that lets entrepreneurs communicate quantitatively what they have done by way of validated learning. This kind of a paradigm will be helpful when raising money. (I really like this term, and I hope it doesn’t get abused and overused like Pivot was)

And here are the soundbites from my twitter stream during the event :

Did you attend the event? What did you get out of it? Stay tuned for Part 2, for some of the questions that every lean startup faces and how to head in the right direction when faced with those questions.

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Microsoft launched a iOS version of the popular OneNote software. Back when I was using Windows, I remember feeling pretty impressed by its functionality and ease of use .

I was curious to see if Microsoft had pushed any envelope / come up with something cool in terms of user-interface (The Ribbon interface, anyone?), so like any good kid, I installed the app from the app store. I still haven’t gotten to use it and the sign up process turned out to have as many roadblocks as you can possibly imagine. In effect, it seems that the signup was a hurried afterthought, not at all designed for the mobile platform. There is no clear and frictionless path to signup, no sense of instant gratification for the user.

Let me explain further:

When you try to sign up, it seems to display a web-page based form, as opposed to a native form. There is nothing wrong with this, especially, if it gets you to market quickly. But wait, the form is not designed for a mobile app. It has a captcha! Lets just make people type more in their virtual or tiny keyboards.

Being the relentless guy that I am, I went through with it, and signed up. But wait, I first am going to have to confirm my registration using a link that was sent to the email address I provided. I need to switch apps, and unless I am really motivated, I probably wont come back to it. But I was. So I switch to my Mail Client, opened the email, and clicked the confirmation link only to find out that the link cannot be activated on a mobile platform.

Fail, Fail, and Fail. Next.

Last week, I had posted an analysis of a customer service email I received from Apple. It had all the elements of a well-written email (and there is a happy ending to that story, Apple refunded me the money!). Flowtown, (which I knew first as a case study for a Lean Startup ) has dissected the anatomy of Apple’s promotional email.

Clear layout, Well designed call to actions, and useful tips (such as Did you know?) are the hallmarks of a good converting email. Here is the complete anatomy . Thanks, Flowtown.

In my observations on the Mac App Store yesterday, I had mentioned that I had accidentally purchased an App and noted that the support URL from the FAQ didnt work (it was subsequently fixed).

Meanwhile, I had opened a support request with the iTunes App Store (which is different than the Mac App Store). I wasn’t really hoping on anything concrete, and likely a “We are iTunes App Store, we can’t help with Mac App STore” style email, so I was pleasantly surprised to receive an email from Apple Customer Service today.

This email has all the ingredients of a well-written customer service email :

• It has a conversational tone by using my first name at the end of sentences.
• It communicates empathy (“I can appreciate how eager you must be to get your money back”).
• It tells me what action has been taken now (The transaction is flagged)
• It tells me when I can expect something to change (5 business days).

For a somewhat related post on the best way to respond to customer criticism, check out Cindy Alvarez’s well written post on The 4 A’s of responding to customer criticism

iFanboi is happy

Like any i-fanboi, I spent a few precious hours on the Mac App Store (and ironically mostly looking at Productivity and Business Category of Apps !). Here are my observations :

The Good

• Thank God, the App Store is a separate app and wasn’t made part of the bloated, crumbling-under-its-own-weight, cant-get-any-more-clunky iTunes. It maintains the iTunes App Store experience.

• Most likely to jumpstart the store, products that were sold as bundles (iWork, iLife etc,.) can now be bought individually (Yay! I can buy iPhoto without having to pay for GarageBand too), and buying everything in the bundle is still cheaper than buying the CD version before. This could also be because Apple can now enforce licenses more strictly (as opposed to the CD world where anyone can share willy-nilly). The CD version probably had a premium built in for piracy that is not there anymore.

• Apps already installed but not bought from the App Store are recognized as being installed (Although, apparently they cannot be upgraded from within the App Store

• Good for Apple, it is so easy to buy apps. (see the third items under “The Bad” too)

The Bad

• No easy way to pay just for upgrades (you got to buy new)

• No trials and beta. This is a big deal. I have bought so many pieces of software for my Mac and not ONE of them did I buy without trying it out first. I hope there is a way around this.

• Bad (for me!), it is so easy to buy Apps. I just accidentally bought one yesterday (for nearly 15 bucks!) . I have done this a couple of items in iOS, but there is a pretty big difference between 99 cents and 15 bucks!

• So I figured, I could contact Customer Service and was surprised to find a nice link from the FAQ. The bad news is that the link was broken. This was a bit surprising, given Jobs’ famous attention to detail, but hopefully this will get addressed soon. Update : This seems to have been fixed by now)

• App store review and HIG still don’t seem to stop people from creating crappy apps

The Promise

• No matter what, this is going to be one monstrous distribution channel. Evernote, an app that is already pretty successful by many measure, reported a 1800% increase in new users. If an already successful app is seeing this, I can only imagine the goodness it will bring to apps and startups looking for a nice distribution channel.

• Kudos to Apple for continuously learning across its product eco-systems and adding good business models around long-standing technical innovations (Yum, RPM  are all app stores, if you think about it.)

There are still a lot of unknowns (in-app purchases, subscriptions) and lot of things to be improved, but this is a good start, and hope it heads in the right direction.