Got a startup idea? Validate it with the Startup Toolkit
thestartuptoolkit.com
Got a startup idea? Validate it with the Startup Toolkit
1–10 of 35 posts
Re: Got a startup idea? Validate it with the Startup Toolkit
#2Hey guys, I put this together as a easier way to visualize & update your business hypotheses.
Writing down the beliefs your startup is based on is crucial... it keeps you focused on risks instead of features, makes communication w/ team & investors easier, and stops you from ignoring the evidence. Yet most people don't do it (and almost no one consistently updates them).
I thought Steve Blank's customer development worksheets were a good start, but it's hard to update quickly and doesn't provide an overview. The canvas you see on the app is a modification of the Business Model Generation canvas, which I re-vamped to better suit startups.
Hope it's handy.
Re: Got a startup idea? Validate it with the Startup Toolkit
#3Hey guys, I put this together as a easier way to visualize & update your business hypotheses. Writing down the beliefs your startup is based on is crucial... it keeps you focused on risks instead of features, makes communication w/ team & investors easier, and stops you from ignoring the evidence. Yet most people don't do it (and almost no one consistently updates them). I thought Steve Blank's customer development w…
I like it very much. In fact - I'm filling it out right now!
BTW - I love the potential of this app. I.e. you can expand Key Performance Indicators with some sort of the Steve Blank kind of small "no accounting" app with the API for integration - http://steveblank.com/2010/02/22/no-accounting-for-startups/ - to automatically track your performance...
Re: Got a startup idea? Validate it with the Startup Toolkit
#4My first thought was that this would be silly. Until I went inside and saw for myself. Very thought provoking, an exercise definitely worth my while.
Until I read this:
We'll try our best to preserve your data, but no guarantees. Your canvas is secured by obscurity, which is to say it's not very secure at all. Anyone with your canvas' URL may view and edit it. If and when we add a paywall, we'll make sure you can export any existing data.
Honestly, how hard would it be to just fix this first?
I think you're really on the right track to something good. But until you fix this, I'll just use my own text editor to save my thoughts on my own hard drive.
Re: Got a startup idea? Validate it with the Startup Toolkit
#5Hey guys, I put this together as a easier way to visualize & update your business hypotheses. Writing down the beliefs your startup is based on is crucial... it keeps you focused on risks instead of features, makes communication w/ team & investors easier, and stops you from ignoring the evidence. Yet most people don't do it (and almost no one consistently updates them). I thought Steve Blank's customer development w…
I like it very much. In fact - I'm filling it out right now! BTW - I love the potential of this app. I.e. you can expand Key Performance Indicators with some sort of the Steve Blank kind of small "no accounting" app with the API for integration - http://steveblank.com/2010/02/22/no-accounting-for-startups/ - to automatically track your performance...
Thanks for the kind words. And that's a really good idea..
I've been keeping a list of tools & frameworks that seem helpful to startups, and I hope to bring them together and have founders pick & choose the structure they think will be most beneficial to their situation. The accounting is a good addition. It's still unclear where I can add the most value, but, as you mention, there are lots of promising possibilities.
Re: Got a startup idea? Validate it with the Startup Toolkit
#6My first thought was that this would be silly. Until I went inside and saw for myself. Very thought provoking, an exercise definitely worth my while. Until I read this: We'll try our best to preserve your data, but no guarantees. Your canvas is secured by obscurity, which is to say it's not very secure at all. Anyone with your canvas' URL may view and edit it. If and when we add a paywall, we'll make sure you can exp…
Thanks for the feedback. I think that's more than fine. After all, paper is what I've been using until now ;). I wasn't really planning to "launch" this or anything. I pinged the lean startup mailing list to get feedback on the layout of the canvas, and it made its way here.
Security certainly wouldn't have been difficult to fix, but it would have added a few days and locked me a little bit further into a canvas design that may-or-may-not be correct. So I started with the big risk first, and the other stuff with fall into place fairly soon.
Re: Got a startup idea? Validate it with the Startup Toolkit
#7My first thought was that this would be silly. Until I went inside and saw for myself. Very thought provoking, an exercise definitely worth my while. Until I read this: We'll try our best to preserve your data, but no guarantees. Your canvas is secured by obscurity, which is to say it's not very secure at all. Anyone with your canvas' URL may view and edit it. If and when we add a paywall, we'll make sure you can exp…
> Honestly, how hard would it be to just fix this first?
I thought it was a breath of fresh air. The unique ID is clearly very random and long enough to be unguessable. Even if the user and document hashes are not picked in a cryptographically secure way it's still going to be much more secure than the average alpha web 2.0 app that's hacked together with some generic login&auth component.
I think you should be upset at products that do auth but do it insecurely, not those who make a conscious decision that a simple solution is good enough. Just look at the websites that don't hash passwords, that don't restrict login cookies to the domain of the app, that don't have SSL logins, and so on. There are a million points where it can go wrong, and even today it's pretty difficult to asses whether your application is secure.
Think about it for a second. The security system the authors have chosen is almost impossible to mess up. Given how the hash looks I'm almost entirely sure they used some kind of crypto library to generate it. (If their magic ids looked like the output of randrange(100000, 900000) it would've been obvious). There is no other point of failure. If the hashes are random and unguessable, you're done! For a free product, I'd say that's pretty good!
What you want is security, but what you ask for is a login page.
Re: Got a startup idea? Validate it with the Startup Toolkit
#8I like it, but the 'Save Changes' button is just a bit too low to be visible on my netbook screen (javascript says window.innerHeight is 481).
Re: Got a startup idea? Validate it with the Startup Toolkit
#9Hey guys, I put this together as a easier way to visualize & update your business hypotheses. Writing down the beliefs your startup is based on is crucial... it keeps you focused on risks instead of features, makes communication w/ team & investors easier, and stops you from ignoring the evidence. Yet most people don't do it (and almost no one consistently updates them). I thought Steve Blank's customer development w…
Thanks. This is great. Can you add an editable heading for the canvas page please?
Re: Got a startup idea? Validate it with the Startup Toolkit
#10Hey guys, I put this together as a easier way to visualize & update your business hypotheses. Writing down the beliefs your startup is based on is crucial... it keeps you focused on risks instead of features, makes communication w/ team & investors easier, and stops you from ignoring the evidence. Yet most people don't do it (and almost no one consistently updates them). I thought Steve Blank's customer development w…
Thanks. This is great. Can you add an editable heading for the canvas page please?
That sounds like a reasonable request ;) Will plug that in sometime soon.