Being fortunate to win a scholarship for this year’s web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco (appreciation to @ericries, @SarahM and @TechWeb for having this opportunity), it is also in courtesy that I share a startup’s takeaways and lessons learned from the conference.
In my approach writing for the scholarship program for lean startups, I pitched how EasyPeasy could learn from attending the conference and the Lean Startup Intensive. I described how EasyPeasy currently is seeking to validate Product-Market fit and, presumably in the customer validation phase, searching for its first transactions.
The Grand Pivot
Arriving at the conference after a 20 hours travel from Oslo, Norway and suffering from a mild jet-lag, I finally got to see Eric Ries, Steve Blank, Sean Ellis and Dave McClure and the reminder of the Lean Startup movement at work. In nearly every event that I was attending that week, either it was the in the talks, keynotes or unconferences, “Lean Startup” was buzzing. One major highlight was attending Matt Brezina‘s talk: 5 stages of Xobni’s growth and 5 pivots along the way.
Having been a fan of Xobni for some time, I was excited to learn from their practical implications in pivoting from offering an e-mail analytics suite to that of “just” an outlook sidebar plug-in. Nevertheless, by talking to @brezina and @hnshah I had my thoughts about customer validation and pivoting matured. One week later, EasyPeasy is smoke testing for a new product offering.
Minimum Viable You
During the Lean Startup Intensive one common denominator came into view. Steve Blank, advocate of validating hypothesis about business models, talked about how a startup must strike balance between a product’s minimum feature set and maximum sales. Accordingly, Dave McClure talked about how a startup must balance between user hypothesis and revenue. Lessons learned, and one key tenet with the Lean Startup methodology is that a focus on validated learning will enable startups to mitigate risk in new-product introductions, often by including continuous deployment, arguably a start-charging-now and learn fast/fail fast philosophy.
This is where the minimum viable product comes into the picture. At the second day of the conference a case of minimum viable tactics was elaborated by @drewhouston and @asmith in their excellent talk: From Zero to a Million Users – Dropbox and Xobni lessons learned. I think that this presentation gave a great many startups, including EasyPeasy, a lean toolbox at hand.
People Analytics
The Lean Startup advocates use of metrics for validated learning. Yet, there still is one vast amount of metrics to track, dependent on what line of business you are in. At the second day, Neil Patel gave an exciting talk on Web Analytics – Tracking People and Not Just Numbers, and an amazing Q&A session about what metrics you ought to track. In plenary, Neil asked the audience for their websites’ URL, he quickly analyzed their pro and cons, and gave the audience applicable tips and tricks, all in real-time. I highly recommend his slides to be found on Slideshare, 5 Metrics You Ought to Track.
iPad, Flash and HTML5
Soon after arriving San Francisco I found that nearly every overseas visitor who I got to meet at the conference, in their very first morning in town, had been rushing over to the Apple store. Ourselves, arriving one day after our Norwegian fellows (we organized by extending the #w2e Twitter hashtag with #w2eNOR), we found that the iPad 3G edition was already sold out. We put our names on a notification list, hoping that another delivery would arrive at the store before we were on our way back home.
Nevertheless, web 2.0 Expo hosted a couple of very popular talks on the tablet innovation, here and here. iPad were on everybody’s tongue and the big discussion tended to be about Flash vs. HTML5 and Adobe vs. Apple. Among a many good keynotes, Brady Forrest‘s chat with Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch did comb the debate. As when it comes to EasyPeasy, currently offering an open source operating system for netbooks, you might have a clue about how this might affect a pivot.
Learn Fast, Fail Fast
Truth is that there was many interesting talks, and unfortunately one did not have the time to attend all. The main theme of the conference being Web as a Platform, there was a lot of interesting stuff on social media marketing, cloud computing, mobility, usability, virtual and social gaming. Many more events and people should be mentioned, yet I think that the above is sufficient to draw some main characteristics.
Pivoting, minimum viable products and analytics were just some of the themes that were buzzing throughout web 2.o Expo. What these subjects have in common and what was an overall takeaway, whether we are talking about ever changing technologies, markets or startups, is that a strong learning culture can be source of success, or at least to fail fast. I certainly will attend the next year’s web 2.o Expo.
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The Methodologist 