My Experience at Lean Startup Machine

A few weekends ago I participated in Silicon Valley’s Lean Startup Machine. LSM is a weekend of experimentation, learning, and business discovery using lean practices. On the last day, each team presents their findings and makes a case for their business idea’s validation (or sometimes, invalidation).

If you find an opportunity to go to the Lean Startup Machine, do it. Don’t make excuses, just do it. You’ll learn a ton.

Here are a few key learnings that stood out to me:

• MVP = Minimum Viable Experiment - the goal of an MVP is to quickly gather feedback and validate or invalidate your business idea. In most cases, this doesn’t require a prototype. A dummy landing page, face-to-face interviews, and competitor usability studies are a few techniques that provide this insight without having to build something functional.
• Invalidate Assumptions ASAP - there’s a 99% chance your first idea is wrong. The goal is to identify this early and pivot to something viable that people actually want. Be humble and honest with yourself.
• Limit Variables When Measuring Viability - focus on specific assumptions and use cases when measuring product viability. Introducing more, often unnecessary variables in these experiments will lead to mixed results and make it more difficult to identify what worked.