THE LEAN STARTUP How the ‘pivot’ is changing the software industry #leanstartup ROBBERT VAN GELDROP (@RVANGELDROP)
May 10, 2015
THE LEAN STARTUPHow the ‘pivot’ is changing the software industry
#leanstartup
ROBBERT VAN GELDROP(@RVANGELDROP)
INTRODUCTION
WE GOT OUT OF THE BUILDING >
We founded BackupAgent back in 2004: Still in university Lousy entrepreneur, no experience Bad engineer; vain and lazy
Not a good basis for a high-tech startup at all, but…
SO WHAT DO THE PUNDITS SAY
STEVE BLANK - AWESOME
TALKED TO CUSTOMERS
WE BUILT A CRAPPY V1.0
We found that small businesses had a need: Some started paying us, before we had a
product We worked really hard to give them something We got the intention of an investor
The product S*CKED, but…
MEET ERIC RIES
DEVELOPED LEAN STARTUP
AHA! MINIMUM VIABLE PRODUCT
BUT WHAT IF YOU’RE WRONG?
So, you can build something and see if customers like it
BackupAgent v1 and v2 were MVP’s We learned that we needed to support SQL
Server, MS Exchange…
Underneath this was a far bigger problem, BackupAgent was not making enough money and convincing small business customers was hard…
WE CHANGED OUR BUSINESS MODEL
THIS IS A PIVOT – SELL TO ISPS
SUMMARY
SUCCESS = SPEED AND LEARNING
WHAT SHOULD YOU DO?
THIS IS THE HARD PART
BUILD
CONTINUOUS DEPLOYMENT
SUCCESS = SPEED
Continuous deployment means that all checked-in code goes into production immediately
Many releases on a single day, tested against a ‘cluster immune system’ which is based on TDD and business metrics (renders QA obsolete)
More and more Silicon Valley s/w companies are doing this now…
MEASURE
TEST IF FEATURES ARE USED
MEASURE
EXAMPLES
Use Mixpanel.com to measure exactly if users like your new features
Do A/B testing to see if website visitor engagement can be optimized
Use the ‘million dollar metric’ to determine if your business is ready to scale:
“How would you feel if I took this product away from you?”
LEARN: BUSINESS MODEL CANVAS
DON’T WRITE A PLAN, FIND A MODEL
CHANGING THE S/W INDUSTRY
FINALLY
Scrum might be too slow, if you release software 30 times per day… perhaps Kanban is more appropriate
Marketing and entrepreneurship becomes an engineering job
Building the feature is not good enough, you need to check its usage and kill it if nobody uses it (properly)
GOOD CODE VS BAD CODE
DOES IT PROVIDE ADDED VALUE?
THANK YOU!
Follow me on Twitter: @rvangeldrop
Read my blog: www.vangeldrop.com