Steve Blank

The Nine Teams Present
This week, our first team up was PersonalLibraries (the team that made software to help researchers manage, share and reference the thousands of papers in their personal libraries.) To test its Value Proposition, the team had face-to-face interviews with 10 current users and non-users from biomedical, neuroscience, psychology and legal fields.

What was cool was they recorded their interviews and posted them as YouTube videos. They did an online survey of 200 existing users (~5% response rate). In addition, they demoed to the paper management research group at the Stanford Intellectual Property Exchange project (a joint project between the Stanford Law School and Computer Science department to help computers understand copyright and create a marketplace for content). They met with their mentors, and refined their messaging pitch by attending a media training workshop one of our mentors held.

If you can’t see the slides above, click here.

In interviewing biomed researchers, they found one unmet need: the ability to cite materials used in experiments. This is necessary so experiments can be accurately reproduced. This was such a pain point, one scientist left a lecture he was attending to find the team and hand them an example of what the citations looked like.

The team left the week excited and wondering – is there an opportunity here to create new value in a citation tool? What if we could help scientists also bulk order supplies for experiments? Could we help manufacturers, as well, to better predict demand for their products, or perhaps to more effectively connect with purchasers?

The feedback from the teaching team was a reminder to see if the users they were talking to constitute a large enough market and had budgets to pay for the software.

Agora Cloud Services
The Agora team (offering a cloud computing “unit” that Agora will buy from multiple cloud vendors and create a marketplace for trading) had 7 face-to-face interviews with target customers, and spoke to a potential channel partner as well as two cloud industry technology consultants.

They learned that their hypothesis that large companies would want to lower IT costs by selling their excess computing capacity on a “spot market” didn’t work in the financial services market because of security concerns.  However sellers in the Telecom industries were interested if there was some type of revenue split from selling their own excess capacity.

On the buyers’ side, their hypothesis that there were buyers who were interested in reduced cloud compute infrastructure cost turned out not to be a high priority for most companies. Finally, their assumption that increased procurement flexibility for buying cloud compute cycles would be important turned out to be just a “nice to have,” not a real pain. Most companies were buying Amazon Web Services and were looking for value-added services that simplified their cloud activities.

If you can’t see the slides above, click here.

The Agora team left the week thinking that the questions going forward were:

• žHow do we get past Amazon as the default cloud computing service provider?
• How viable is the telecom market as a potential seller of computing cycles?
• We need to further validate buyer & seller value propositions
• How do we access the buyers and sellers? What sort of sales structure and salesforce does it require?
• Who is the main buyer(s) and what are their motivations?
• Is a buying guide/matching service a superior value proposition to marketplace?

The feedback from the teaching team was a reminder that at times you may have a product in search of a solution.

D.C. VeritasD.C. Veritas, the team that was going to build a low cost, residential wind turbine that average homeowners could afford, wanted to provide a renewable source of energy at affordable price.  They started to work out what features a minimum viable product their value proposition would have and began to cost out the first version. The Wind Turbine Minimum Viable Product would have a: Functioning turbine, Internet feedback system, energy monitoring system and have easy customer installation.

The initial Bill of Material (BOM) of the Wind Turbine Hardware Costs looked like: Inverter (1000W): $500 (plug and play), Generator (1000W): $50-100, Turbine: ~$200, Output Measurement: ~$25, Wiring: $20 = Total Material Cost: ~$800-$850

The team also went to the whiteboard and attempted a first pass at who the archetypical customer(s) might be.

To get customer feedback the team posted its first energy survey here and received 27 responses. In their first attempt at face-to-face customer interviews to test their value proposition and problem hypothesis (would people be interested in a residential wind turbine), they interviewed 13 people at the local Farmer’s Market.

If you can’t see the slide presentation above, click here.

The teaching team offered that out of 13 people they interviewed only 3 were potential customers. Therefore the amount of hard customer data they had collected was quite low and they were making decisions on a very sparse data set. We suggested (with a (2×4) that were really going to have to step up the customer interactions with a greater sense of urgency.The teaching team offered that out of 13 people they interviewed only 3 were potential customers. Therefore the amount of hard customer data they had collected was quite low and they were making decisions on a very sparse data set. We suggested (with a 2×4) that were really going to have to step up the customer interactions with a greater sense of urgency.

Autonomow
The last team up was Autonomow, the robot lawn mower. They were in the middle of trying to answer the question of  “what problem are they solving?” They were no longer sure whether they were an autonomous mowing company or an agricultural weeding company.

They spoke to 6 people with large mowing needs (golf course, Stanford grounds keeper, etc.) They traveled to the Salinas Valley and Bakersfield and interviewed 6 farmers about weeding crops. What they found is that weeding is a hugeproblem in organic farming. It was incredibly labor intensive and some fields had to be hand-weeded multiple times per year.

They left the week realizing they had a decision to make – were they a  “Mowing or Weeding” company?

If you can’t see the slide above, click here.

Our feedback: could they really build a robot to recognize and kill weeds in the field?

The Week 3 Lecture: Customers
Our lecture this week covered Customers – what/who are they?  We pointed out the difference between a user, influencer, recommender, decision maker, economic buyer and saboteur. We also described the differences between customers in Business-to-business sales versus business-to-consumer sales.  We talked about multi-sided markets and offered that not only are there multiple customers, but each customer segment has their own value proposition and revenue model.

If you can’t see the slide above, click here.

Getting Out of the Building
Five other teams presented after these four. All of them had figured out the game was outside the building, with some were coming up to speed faster than others. A few of the teams ideas still looked pretty shaky as businesses. But the teaching team held our opinions to ourselves, as we’ve learned that you can’t write off any idea too early. Usually the interesting Pivots happens later. The finish line was a ways off. Time would tell where they would all end up.

———

Next week – Class 4 each team tests their Customer Segment hypotheses (who are their customers/users/decision makers, etc.) and report the results of face-to-face customer discovery. That will be really interesting.
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Filed under: Business Model versus Business Plan, Customer Development, Lean LaunchPad, Teaching | 12 Comments »

Our new Stanford Lean LaunchPad class was an experiment in a new model of teaching startup entrepreneurship. This post is part two. Part one is here. Syllabus here.

By now the nine teams in our Stanford Lean LaunchPad Class were formed, In the four days between team formation and this class session we tasked them to:

• Write down their initial hypotheses for the 9 components of their company’s business model (who are the customers? what’s the product? what distribution channel? etc.)
• Come up with ways to test each of the 9 business model canvas hypotheses
• Decide what constitutes a pass/fail signal for the test. At what point would you say that your hypotheses wasn’t even close to correct?
• Consider if their business worth pursuing? (Give us an estimate of market size)
• Start their team’s blog/wiki/journal to record their progress during for the class

The Nine Teams Present
Each week every team presented a 10 minute summary of what they had done and what they learned that week. As each team presented, the teaching team would ask questions and give suggestions (at times pointed ones) for things the students missed or might want to consider next week. (These presentations counted for 30% of their grade. We graded them on a scale of 1-5, posted our grades and comments to a shared Google doc, and had our Teaching Assistant aggregate the grades and feedback to pass on to the teams.)

Our first team up was Autonomow. Their business was a robot lawn mower. Off to a running start, they not only wrote down their initial business model hypotheses but they immediately got out of the building and began interviewing prospective customers to test their three most critical assumptions in any business:
Value Proposition, Customer Segment and Channel. Their hypotheses when they first left the campus were:

• Value Proposition:  Labor costs in mowing and weeding applications are significant, and autonomous implementation would solve the problem.
• Customer Segment: Owners/administrators of large green spaces (golf courses, universities, etc.) would buy an autonomous mower.  Organic farmers would buy if the Return On Investment (ROI) is less than 1 year.
• Channel: Mowing and agricultural equipment dealers

All teams kept a blog – almost like a diary – to record everything they did. Reading the Autonomow blog for the first week, you could already see their first hypotheses starting to shift: “For mowing applications, we talked to the Stanford Ground Maintenance, Stanford Golf Course supervisor for grass maintenance, a Toro distributor, and an early adopter of an autonomous lawn mower. For weeding applications, we spoke with both small and large farms. In order from smallest (40 acres) to largest (8000+ acres):  Paloutzian Farms, Rainbow Orchards, Rincon Farms, REFCO Farms, White Farms, and Bolthouse Farms.”

“We got some very interesting feedback, and overall interest in both systems,” reported the team. “Both hypotheses (mowing and weeding) passed, but with some reservations (especially from those whose jobs they would replace!)  We also got good feedback from Toro with respect to another hypothesis – selling through distributor vs. selling direct to the consumer.”

The Autonomow team summarized their findings in their first 10 minute, weekly Lesson Learned presentation to the class.

Our feedback: be careful they didn’t make this a robotics science project and instead make sure they spent more time outside the building.

If you can’t see the slide deck above, click here.

Autonomow team members:
Jorge Heraud (MS Management, 2011) Business Unit Director, Agriculture, Trimble Navigation, Director of Engineering, Trimble Navigation, MS&E (Stanford), MSEE (Stanford), BSEE (PUCP, Peru)
Lee Redden (MSME Robotics, Jun 2011) Research in haptic devices, autonomous systems and surgical robots, BSME (U Nebraska at Lincoln), Family Farms in Nebraska
Joe Bingold (MBA, Jun 2011) Head of Product Development for Naval Nuclear Propulsion Plant Control Systems, US Navy, MSME (Naval PGS), BSEE (MIT), P.E. in Control Systems
Fred Ford (MSME, Mar 2011) Senior Eng for Mechanical Systems on Military Satellites, BS Aerospace Eng (U of Michigan)
Uwe Vogt (MBA, Jun 2011) Technical Director & Co-Owner, Sideo Germany (Sub. Vogt Holding), PhD Mechanical Engineering  (FAU, Germany), MS Engineering (ETH Zurich, Switzerland

The mentors who volunteered to help this team were Sven Strohbad, Ravi Belani and George Zachary.

Personal Libraries
Our next team up was Personal Libraries which proposed to help researchers manage, share and reference the thousands of papers in their personal libraries. “We increase a researcher’s productivity with a personal reference management system that eliminates tedious tasks associated with discovering, organizing and citing their industry readings,” wrote the team. What was unique about this team was that Xu Cui, a Stanford postdoc in Neuroscience, had built the product to use for his own research. By the time he joined the class, the product was being used in over a hundred research organizations including Stanford, Harvard, Pfizer, the National Institute of Health and Peking University. The problem is that the product was free for end users and few Research institutions purchased site licenses. The goal was to figure out whether this product could become a company.

The Personal Libraries core hypotheses were:

• We solve enough pain for researchers to drive purchase
• Dollar size of deals is sufficient to be profitable with direct sales strategy
• The market is large enough for a scalable business

Our feedback was that “free” and “researchers in universities” was often the null set for a profitable business.

If you can’t see the slide above, click here.

Personal Libraries Team Members
Abhishek Bhattacharyya (MSEE, Jun 2011) creator of WT-Ecommerce, an open source engine, Ex-NEC engineer
Xu Cui (Ph.D, Jun 2007 Baylor) Stanford Researcher Neuroscience, postdoc, BS biology from Peking University
Mike Dorsey (MBA/MSE, Jun 2011) B.S. in computer science, environmental engineering and middle east studies from Stanford, Austin College and the American University in Cairo
Becky Nixon (MSE, Jun 2011) BA mathematics and psychology Tulane University Ex-Director, Scion Group,
Ian Tien (MBA, Jun 2011) MS in Computer Science from Cornell, Microsoft Office Engineering Manager for SharePoint, and former product manager for SkyDrive

The mentors who volunteered to help this team were Konstantin Guericke and Bryan Stolle.

The Week 2 Lecture: Value Proposition
Our working thesis was not one we shared with the class – we proposed to teach entrepreneurship the way you would teach artists – deep theory coupled with immersive hands-on experience.

Our lecture this week covered Value Proposition – what problem will the customer pay you to solve?  What is the product and service you were offering the customer to solve that problem.

If you can’t see the slide above, click here.

Feeling Good
Seven other teams presented after the first two (we’ll highlight a few more of them in the next posts.) About half way through the teaching team started looking at each other all with the same expression – we may be on to something here.

———

Next week – Class 3 each team tests their value proposition hypotheses (their product/service)  and reports the results of face-to-face customer discovery. Stay tuned
Listen to this post here: Download this Podcast here

Filed under: Business Model versus Business Plan, Customer Development, Lean LaunchPad, Teaching | 13 Comments »

For the past three months, we’ve run an experiment in teaching entrepreneurship.

In January, we introduced a new graduate course at Stanford called the Lean LaunchPad. It was designed to bring together many of the new approaches to building a successful startup – customer development, agile development, business model generation and pivots.

We thought it would be interesting to share the week-by-week progress of how the class actually turned out. This post is part one.

We were positing that 20 years of teaching “how to write a business plan” might be obsolete. Startups, are not about executing a plan where the product, customers, channel are known. Startups are in fact only temporary organizations, organized to search–not execute–for a scalable and repeatable business model.

We were going to toss teaching the business plan aside and try to teach engineering students a completely new approach to start companies – one which combines customer development, agile development, business models and pivots. (The slides below and the syllabus here describe the details of the class.)

Get Out of the Building and test the Business Model
While we were going to teach theory and frameworks, these students were going to get a hands-on experience in how to start a new company. Over the quarter, teams of students would put the theory to work, using these tools to get out of the building and talk to customer/partners, etc. to get hard-earned information. (The purpose of getting out of the building is not to verify a financial model but to hypothesize and verify the entire business model. It’s a subtle shift but a big idea with tremendous changes in the end result.)

Team Autonomow: Weeding Robot Prototype on a Farm

We were going to teach entrepreneurship like you teach artists – combining theory – with intensive hands-on practice. And we were assuming that this approach would work for any type of startup – hardware, medical devices, etc. – not just web-based startups.

If we were right, we’d see the results in their final presentations – after 8 weeks of class the information/learning density in the those presentations should be really high. In fact they would be dramatically different than any other teaching method.

But we could be wrong.

While I had managed to persuade two great VC’s to teach the class with me (Jon Feiber and Ann Miura-ko), what if I was wasting their time? And worse, what if I was going to squander the time of my students?

I put on my best game face and watched the seats fill up in the classroom.

Mentors
A few weeks before the Stanford class began, the teaching team went through their Rolodexes and invited entrepreneurs and VCs to volunteer as coaches/mentors for the class’s teams. (Privately I feared we might have more mentors than students.) An hour before this first class, we gathered these 30 impressive mentors to brief them and answer questions they might have after reading the mentor guide which outlined the course goals and mentor responsibilities.

As the official start time of the first class drew near, I began to wonder if we had the wrong classroom. The room had filled up with close to a 100 students who wanted to get in. When I realized they were all for our class, I could start to relax. OK, somehow we got them interested. Lets see if we can keep them. And better, lets see if we can teach them something new.

The First Class
The Lean LaunchPad class was scheduled to meet for three hours once a week. Given Stanford’s 10 week quarters, we planned for eight weeks of lecture and the last two weeks for team final presentations. Our time in class would be relatively straightforward. Every week, each team would give a 10-minute presentation summarizing the “lessons learned” from getting out of the building. When all the teams were finished the teaching team lectured on one of the 9 parts of the business model diagram. The first class was an introduction to the concepts of business model design and customer development.

The most interesting part of the class would happen outside the classroom when each team spent 50-80 hours a week testing their business model hypotheses by talking to customers and partners and (in the case of web-based businesses) building their product.

Selection, Mixer and Speed Dating
After the first class, our  teaching team met over pizza and read each of the 100 or so student applications. Two-thirds of the interested students were from the engineering school; the other third were from the business school. And the engineers were not just computer science majors, but in electrical, mechanical, aerospace, environmental, civil and chemical engineering. Some came to the class with an idea for a startup burning brightly in their heads.  Some of those applied as teams. Others came as individuals, most with no specific idea at all.

We wanted to make sure that every student who took the class had at a minimum declared a passion and commitment to startups. (We’ll see later that saying it isn’t the same as doing it.) We tried to weed out those that were unsure why they were there as well as those trying to build yet another fad of the week web site. We made clear that this class wasn’t an incubator. Our goal was to provide students with a methodology and set of tools that would last a lifetime – not to fund their first round. That night we posted the list of the students who were accepted into the class.

The next day, the teaching team held a mandatory “speed-dating” event with the newly formed teams. Each team gave each professor a three-minute elevator pitch for their idea, and we let them know if it was good enough for the class. A few we thought were non-starters were sold by teams passionate enough to convince us to let them go forward with their ideas. (The irony is that one of the key tenets of this class is that startups end up as profitable companies only after they learn, discover, iterate and Pivot past their initial idea.) I enjoyed hearing the religious zeal of some of these early pitches.

The Teams
By the beginning of second session the students had become nine teams with an amazing array of business ideas. Here is a brief summary of each.

Agora isan affordable “one-stop shop” for cloud computing needs. Intended for cloud infrastructure service providers, enterprises with spare capacity in their private clouds, startups, companies doing image and video processing, and others. Agora’s selling points are its ability to reduce users’ IT infrastructure cost and enhance revenue for service providers.

Autonomow is an autonomous large-scale mowing intended to be a money-saving tool for use on athletic fields, golf courses, municipal parks, and along highways and waterways. The product would leverage GPS and laser-based technologies and could be used on existing mower or farm equipment or built into new units.

BlinkTraffic will empower mobile users in developing markets (Jakarta, Sao Paolo, Delhi, etc.) to make informed travel decisions by providing them with real-time traffic conditions. By aggregating user-generated speed and location data, Blink will provide instantaneously generated traffic-enabled maps, optimal routing, estimated time-to-arrival and predictive itinerary services to personal and corporate users.

D.C. Veritas is making a low cost, residential wind turbine. The goal is to sell a renewable source of energy at an affordable price for backyard installation. The key assumptions are: offering not just a product, but a complete service (installation, rebates, and financing when necessary,) reduce the manufacturing cost of current wind turbines, provide home owners with a cool and sustainable symbol (achieving “Prius” status.)

JointBuy is an online platform that allows buyers to purchase products or services at a cheaper price by giving sellers opportunities to sell them in bulk. Unlike Groupon which offers one product deal per day chosen based on the customer’s location. JointBuy allows buyers to start a new deal on any available product and share the idea with others through existing social networking sites. It also allows sellers to place bids according to the size of the deal.  

MammOptics is developing an instrument that can be used for noninvasive breast cancer screening. It uses optical spectroscopy to analyze the physiological content of cells and report back abnormalities. It will be an improvement over mammography by detecting abnormal cells in an early stage, is radiation-free, and is 2-5 times less expensive than mammographs. We will sell the product directly to hospitals and private doctors.

Personal Libraries is a personal reference management system streamlinig the processes for discovering, organizing and citing researchers’ industry readings. The idea came from seeing the difficulty biomed researchers have had in citing the materials used in experiments. The Personal Libraries business model is built on the belief that researchers are overloaded with wasted energy and inefficiency and would welcome a product that eliminates the tedious tasks associated with their work.

PowerBlocks makes a line of modular lighting. Imagine a floor lamp split into a few components (the base, a mid-section, the top light piece). What would you do if wanted to make that lamp taller or shorter? Or change the top light from a torch-style to an LED-lamp? Or add a power plug in the middle? Or a USB port? Or a speaker? “PowerBlocks” modular lighting is “floor-lamp meets Legos” but much more high-end. Customers can choose components to create the exact product that fit their needs.

Voci.us is an ad-supported, web-based comment platform for daily news content. Real-time conversations and dynamic curation of news stories empowers people to expand their social networks and personal expertise about topics important to them. This addresses three problems vexing the news industry: inadequate online community engagement, poor topical search capacity on news sites, and scarcity of targeted online advertising niches.

While I was happy with how the class began, the million dollar question was still on the table – is teaching entrepreneurship with business model design and customer development better than having the students write business plans? Would we have to wait 8 more weeks until their final presentation to tell? Would we signs of success early?  Or was the business model/customer development framework just smoke, mirror and B.S.?

The Adventure Begins
We’re going to follow the adventures of a few of the teams week by week as they progressed through the class, (and we’ll share the teams weekly “lessons learned,” as well as our class lecture slides.

The goal for the teams for next week were:

• Write down their hypotheses for each of the 9 parts of the business model.
• Come up with ways to test:
  • what are each of the 9 business model hypotheses?
  • is their business worth pursuing (market size)
• Come up with what constitutes a pass/fail signal for the test (e.g. at what point would you say that your hypotheses wasn’t even close to correct)?
• Start their blog/wiki/journal for the class

Next Post: The Business Model and Customer Discovery Hypotheses – Class 2
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Filed under: Business Model versus Business Plan, Customer Development, Lean LaunchPad, Teaching | 44 Comments »