How does Lean model work in case of marketplace? Should you first get good amount of sellers on board before opening the beta version as marketplace ?
I Am Eric Ries, Author of the Lean Startup. AMA
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Re: I Am Eric Ries, Author of the Lean Startup. AMA
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well the first thing to think about is: are you in a position to tell your client the truth, which is that this is not going to work. A giant part-time committee isn't going to accomplish this kind of work. If you can tell the truth, try to win the argument now, before it's too late. But not everyone is so lucky. If for whatever reason, you can't tell the client the truth, you're not totally doomed. What I would look…
Thank you very much for this advice. Until I can play this card how I act currently as methodology-champion is that I pre-think/pre-work/"pre-cook" every working step for every sandbox-team. So the volunteers do not need to start from zero - they get everything prepared, comment it and thus can get good quality results out of their work - even on a slow pace do to long intervals between meetings. What do you think ab…
I hate to be a downer, but I'm not very optimistic that this will work. The limiting factor is that you can't learn for another human being, they have to do it themselves.
Maybe you can ask a few of the volunteers to join you for an extra-curricular set of meetings, like over a weekend, to try and give them a tiny taste of acting like a real startup.
Re: I Am Eric Ries, Author of the Lean Startup. AMA
#23Eric--for the above-average engineer (lets call him a 3X-5X), but not a 10X or 100X engineer--what advice would you give if they were interested in beginning a tech venture? How much does personal will play a factor compared to personal ability? Do they stand a chance to compete? Can you think of founders that have achieved great success despite lacking supreme talent? And, finally, to expand a little-- can you think of a character trait that is MOST important for a founder to possess other than great intelligence / clever execution?
Re: I Am Eric Ries, Author of the Lean Startup. AMA
#24How does Lean model work in case of marketplace? Should you first get good amount of sellers on board before opening the beta version as marketplace ?
Nope, that's almost certain to fail. Why should sellers join if there are no buyers? And if you do convince them, how can you ensure that they will have a good experience on launch day?
The only way to test a marketplace is to get a small number of highly-interconnected buyers and sellers to transact in low volume by hand. Think eBay and beanie babies or Facebook just on the Harvard campus. Read PG's http://paulgraham.com/ds.html for more.
Re: I Am Eric Ries, Author of the Lean Startup. AMA
#25With today's trends of massive series A rounds, how should entrepreneurs think about staying lean with so much pressure to go big and a prevailing winner-take-all mentality within the VC world? Moreover, what's your take on the series A mega-round?
Re: I Am Eric Ries, Author of the Lean Startup. AMA
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank you very much for this advice. Until I can play this card how I act currently as methodology-champion is that I pre-think/pre-work/"pre-cook" every working step for every sandbox-team. So the volunteers do not need to start from zero - they get everything prepared, comment it and thus can get good quality results out of their work - even on a slow pace do to long intervals between meetings. What do you think ab…
I hate to be a downer, but I'm not very optimistic that this will work. The limiting factor is that you can't learn for another human being, they have to do it themselves. Maybe you can ask a few of the volunteers to join you for an extra-curricular set of meetings, like over a weekend, to try and give them a tiny taste of acting like a real startup.
Thank you so much for your honest advice. I will try to include this into my work and talk to my client. Great that you do AMAs these days. I very much appreciate it!
Re: I Am Eric Ries, Author of the Lean Startup. AMA
#27Eric--for the above-average engineer (lets call him a 3X-5X), but not a 10X or 100X engineer--what advice would you give if they were interested in beginning a tech venture? How much does personal will play a factor compared to personal ability? Do they stand a chance to compete? Can you think of founders that have achieved great success despite lacking supreme talent? And, finally, to expand a little-- can you think…
There are so many assumptions baked into these questions that it's a little hard to answer. First of all, I'm not a fan of the "10X engineer" framing. I'm much more interested in the systems that companies can build to create 10X teams.
I am thinking of two conventional "10X engineers" right now that I've worked with in my career. One is extremely loud, brash, judgmental and basically scary. If you are brave enough to come to him with a question, and he thinks it's stupid, you will basically never live it down. The second is extremely humble, quiet, and gentle. If you come to him with a question, he probably won't answer it but will show up two days later with a fully-implemented solution that he created at 2am just to see if it was possible.
In most companies, the first 10X engineer tends to get promoted to a position of seniority, while the second is generally allowed to quietly leave the company when they get bored. And don't even get me started on all the incredibly talented people out there who our biased hiring processes can't ever identify as "10X."
If you ever get the chance to mingle with some of the truly famous founders, ask yourself if they strike you as the smartest people you've ever met. Now, many of us get star-struck when we meet people who are rich and powerful, and we rationalize whatever garbage comes out of their mouths as genius utterances, because deep down we're all still primates. But if you can get past that, you'll notice that a lot of really successful founders (and investors for that matter) aren't especially bright or thoughtful. But they do have other critical character traits that helped them succeed. Here's a PG classic on the subject: http://www.paulgraham.com/bronze.html
He also has a great essay about the importance of grit and determination but I can't quite remember the title.
Re: I Am Eric Ries, Author of the Lean Startup. AMA
#28Hi Eric, our startup is hosting live video AMAs with entrepreneurs. Would you be interested in hosting a session at http://talkingnext.io/ ? We actually have an event scheduled for tonight with Raj Singh from Dronecast at 5PM EST if you want to check it out live.
Sounds cool. Email me (it's right on my blog).
Will do!
Re: I Am Eric Ries, Author of the Lean Startup. AMA
#29I'd be curious what the equivalent idea of what you are doing (by posting here as AMA) would be if you weren't Eric Ries posting on HN. So for Eric Ries this is "lean" (or what used to be known as "gorilla marketing") but for someone who doesn't have name recognition what is the equivalent? [1]
[1] Simply recognizing that someone without name recognition doing something similar on HN is not assured of getting any attention.
Re: I Am Eric Ries, Author of the Lean Startup. AMA
#30With today's trends of massive series A rounds, how should entrepreneurs think about staying lean with so much pressure to go big and a prevailing winner-take-all mentality within the VC world? Moreover, what's your take on the series A mega-round?
Hilariously the HBO show Silicon Valley had a pretty decent take on this last night: just take less money. There's no law that says you have to slurp up as much dumb money as the market will throw at you.
But regardless of how much money you take, lean is about a disciplined process of decision making. Can you build a culture of high-tempo testing and make it stick not just for the founders but for all employees? That really has nothing to do with how much money you take.