Wednesday, December 7, 2016

Startup Day Offer - One Build Measure Learn Loop with Liberty Ventures

The early startup journey is full of unknowns. It has a lot of beliefs about how the world can and should work. As entrepreneurs, we need to ground our beliefs in the reality of what our real actual customers will actually do. The Lean Startup path way to do this is to run experiments:

  1. Predict a result in the world
  2. Build an experiment/test that will 
  3. Run the test to see what really happens. 
  4. Measure the results
  5. See if your prediction (belief) matches what really happened (data)
We like Data Driven Startups. If you go through your whole Lean Canvas and associated business assumption, you will be able to learn quickly and to find a business in the midst of all the data.  

However, we see that entrepreneurs tend to lean into their assumptions and try to start building and then selling the solution that they have not tested and validated with the market. That is, they don't actually have meaningful Lean Customer Development conversations with real customers.  If they do talk to customers, they are either "themselves" as the customer, or they are so informal in the process, that they actually don't get good data about what people are actually willing to do. 

As outlined in the previous post, Just one Lean Experiment ( http://www.oomaat.com/2016/10/just-one-lean-experiment-to-progress-to.html ) , Liberty Ventures and Adam Berk (@adamberk) is offering $1000 for one Lean Experiment , which goes through the whole Build-Measure-Learn Loop and then documents it in a post. 

As a special opportunity for my Estonian trip and the Startup Day in Tartu, Adam has agreed to do a specific offer again. There has been $5000 set aside for up to 5 teams that choose to commit to, complete and then document only one Build-Measure-Loop. 

To start this journey ,  go to http://bit.ly/libertyventures 

You will get to a landing page. Click on the "Get Funding" page, and then you will be asked to do a tweet. Put into the tweet - "I saw this from @sechrest"  , 
You will then be asked to:
  1.  Form a prediction (a hypothesis) 
  2. Post it into a Trello board via email
  3. Run 5 interviews with customers
  4. Document the interviews in a report form
  5. Post a blog about it on medium (or your own blog) 
If you do this, loop, which should take a week or so, then you will get $1000. There is $5000 set aside. So the first 5 to complete it will get paid.