musings & critique about hi-tech, academia, building startups, and a journal to building eKita
Monday, August 6, 2012
Day 2 of LSM @ DC was intense!
A very, very long day full of action packed lean learning. Some good workshops, one by myself on ideation and techniques of how to use it in customer development; but otherwise a day full of participants getting out of the building and talking to customers, learning, and pivoting fast.
We've got everything from an educational project to help make education cool - a realization after attempting a learning platform that nobody would really use it because getting high grades and being smart in the US culture isnt considered cool. So the pivot is now working towards making high-grades and academic achievement highly rewarded by being able to have private channels of communication with student's favorite celebrities. Want to meet your favorite celebrity? Get straight A's and you will, on Smart-ly.com!
Obviously this is a very interesting project for us at eKita.
There's also group travel buying project Groovel (name change imminent: there's already a groovel.com) who help people looking to travel in groups get it that much cheaper - by group buying the travel and tour packages.
A similar concept to what Elan is doing over at MorePeoplePayLess.com.
Overall we've got about 8 projects here, with some very interesting ideas here that are evolving into solid solutions for painful problems - right in front of our eyes.
With its hyper-drive model of invalidating and validating assumptions about product->market fit and customer->product fit, LSM is definitely a success at making you learn lean!
The only cave-at I have so far about the intense 3-day approach of this is that there are lots of false negatives and false positives in the testing process. Something that I've seen happening here quite alot with teams, and have mentioned to them to keep this in mind: dont necessarily throw away an assumption simply because of a quick street-test that invalidates it!!!
All in all though - learning the techniques and methods is the goal of LSM - and at that, it is excelling incredibly well.
Participants are quickly becoming lean startup machines!
A very, very long day full of action packed lean learning. Some good workshops, one by myself on ideation and techniques of how to use it in customer development; but otherwise a day full of participants getting out of the building and talking to customers, learning, and pivoting fast.
We've got everything from an educational project to help make education cool - a realization after attempting a learning platform that nobody would really use it because getting high grades and being smart in the US culture isnt considered cool. So the pivot is now working towards making high-grades and academic achievement highly rewarded by being able to have private channels of communication with student's favorite celebrities. Want to meet your favorite celebrity? Get straight A's and you will, on Smart-ly.com!
Obviously this is a very interesting project for us at eKita.
There's also group travel buying project Groovel (name change imminent: there's already a groovel.com) who help people looking to travel in groups get it that much cheaper - by group buying the travel and tour packages.
A similar concept to what Elan is doing over at MorePeoplePayLess.com.
Overall we've got about 8 projects here, with some very interesting ideas here that are evolving into solid solutions for painful problems - right in front of our eyes.
With its hyper-drive model of invalidating and validating assumptions about product->market fit and customer->product fit, LSM is definitely a success at making you learn lean!
The only cave-at I have so far about the intense 3-day approach of this is that there are lots of false negatives and false positives in the testing process. Something that I've seen happening here quite alot with teams, and have mentioned to them to keep this in mind: dont necessarily throw away an assumption simply because of a quick street-test that invalidates it!!!
All in all though - learning the techniques and methods is the goal of LSM - and at that, it is excelling incredibly well.
Participants are quickly becoming lean startup machines!
Labels: 3DS, cowork, education, edutech, lean, leanstartup, startup, washington DC, workshop
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