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A TEXT POST

Losing Sight Of Lean In Your Startup Is Dangerous and Here’s Proof

It’s been a long time since I wrote here. Too long. And ironically  the last post was about celebrating the launch of Virally - back in May 2012.

And now, here I am blogging about how we lost sight of Lean at Virally. 

We’ve made a lot of mistakes during the last ~8 months and most of them come back to forgetting about Lean. Getting too close to the battles that we lost sight of the war. 

I hope other startup founders find this post useful…

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A TEXT POST

3 Week Product Launch Lean Startup In Practice

Yesterday we launched Virally at Fruitbowl Media, an online tool to allow content marketers to capture leads using social networks as opposed to webforms, and then creating a viral promotion effect once a lead engages with the content.

As a product, we think Virally is awesome. But thats not what im here to blog about. What’s more significant about virally is that we launched it following a “lean startup” methodology we’ve been adapting for future Fruitbowl products (and client products too).

We launched a product, from idea to public Beta, with payment processing, inside 3 weeks. Here’s how we did it.

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Entrepreneur Loans Present A Fourth Option To Young People

UPDATE 21st March: A £10m Youth Enterprise Loan Scheme was announced in the 2012 budget. News Link

Following pressure from Richard Branson’s Virgin Media Pioneers Campaign, and David Cameron’s support of the idea, a scheme that will offer young people a ‘Student Loan’ type business loan to startup a new company may in fact make it into George Osborne’s Budget on 21st March.

This means young people now have a fourth option, and perhaps this fourth option will become as socially accepted (expected?) as going onto University after college? How will it compare to going to University?

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A TEXT POST

3 Reasons Google Music Will Fail

Google launched their Google Music service to the public yesterday (previously in Beta) If you haven’t yet seen it, head over to the link where you’ll be greeted with Google’s trademark bland product tour page.

I’ll explain Google music as you’d hear it if it were an elevator pitch at a typical startup pitch:

“Google Music is going to totally disrupt the music industry. We saw iTunes & the iTunes Music Store, and we saw dropbox… [long pause for effect] and we said ‘hey guys, lets make something totally awesome that puts iTunes and Dropbox together. And so we made Google Music.”

Does this sound familiar?

That’s because Apple launched iTunes Match/iCloud and Amazon have Cloud Drive/Cloud Player

So who at Google was so arrogant, or ignorant, to assume they could arrive late to market, take iTunes & Apple music store head on, and take on the “Cloud Locker” market as well?

Here’s 3 reasons why Google Music will fail, from the perspective of listening to this elevator pitch

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A TEXT POST

Using A Slide Deck To Get Interest From VCs

Up until recently, we’d been approaching angel investors and potential contacts using our business plan. And I’ve already emphasized how important this plan has been for us, as founders, to really discover and analyse our product.

But maybe it hasn’t been the best tool of choice to explain Microwd properly. Maybe too much detail stifles their imagination?

And after much hesitation, I decided to produce a visual Keynote Presentation (AKA a slide deck, or Powerpoint for non-mac users) of 11 slides to email out to investors and VC’s. And it’s working great.

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A TEXT POST

The Lean Startup By Eric Ries Review

This is the brief summary of the book, as I’ve only ready it twice so far. If you need a more in-depth review and can’t wait, try the Amazon webpage.

I’ll review the book as I understand it so far, and hopefully come back after I’ve had chance to give it a few more pass throughs.

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A TEXT POST

5 Causes Of Losing Momentum In A Startup

Since we burst out of the gates with the development of Microwd, I’ve already experienced a mini rollercoaster of management, finance, strategy and business development.

This last week I couldn’t help but feel like the project had slowed in momentum though. And it was a horrible feeling, especially when I’m talking about a product worth millions.

I’m hoping that looking inwards at some of the factors that I think caused this will help me, and other startup founders, to avoid them in the future!

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A Business Plan Is For You, The Founders

The current Business Plan for Microwd is 10 pages long, 2,800 words and labelled V11. At it’s largest, it was over 6,000 words. It has currently been viewed by 16 people directly, and probably more including those 16 people showing it to trusted colleagues/advisors.

But our business plan isn’t for those people. It’s for us, the founders.

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A TEXT POST

Decide Your Most Important Tasks Each Day

I’ve recently read The Power Of Less as part of a Personal MBA project to read 100 essential business books. One of the key things I’ve been taken from this book is defining my Most Important Tasks or M.I.T.s for each day.

It’s a simple process, and I’d like to share my experiences with this awesome productivity technique. It’s helping me to stay productive while juggling the day job, a personal life and launching a startup [Update: Virally].

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