being lean from the start
(photo by Robert Scoble of the Lean Startup sessions at SXSW 2011)
Last week I sat down in SF with my friend Joel and over the course of an afternoon we developed a new business venture. We agreed to spend the next five weeks fine-tuning our ideas and testing our hypotheses so that we can launch an initial product at the 2011 Annual Conference of the American Society on Aging in San Francisco the last week of April.
We deliberately gave ourselves a short runway to bring our product to market. I have been a proponent of the Lean Startup philosophy from early conversations on the topic before Eric Ries was speaking on the topic around the world. In fact, he and I had conversations about the subject while he was still at IMVU in their downtown Palo Alto offices.
Our Minimum Viable Product will be in the form of a research project which will explore how older adults (age 50+) play games online and offline. To obtain the kind of insights which we think will eventually form the basis of a more extensive “information-as-a-service” deliverable, we will be launching a Facebook application and cultivating a community that generates extensive behavioral data about their gaming activity. We will reach out to online game players and those who are online but who do not generally play online games. We plan to interact with them and learn from them and see where that takes us.
But how do we get to an MVP from where we are today - two guys, in two different cities, with ideas that need to be investigated and tested in a short time-frame and with little money? Good question since not only must we collaborate extensively despite him living in Chicago and me living in San Francisco but we’ll soon be integrating other people and strategic partners into our work and need to communicate regularly with them.
Our initial answer was to purchase the second Lean Startup Bundle offered by Appsumo and make extensive use of the applications, services and references included within that bundle as we quickly move ahead.
The bundle includes dozens of services and tools and many have already helped us get momentum this week. We may not use everything in the bundle and we may also need to find some complementary pieces (for those we’ll likely start with Steve Blank’s Startup Resource page). However, our intention is to use as much as we can from what we obtained via the Lean Startup Bundle. We’re going to share our experience as we go and see what we and others might learn from the process.
Here’s how we started:
Hours after we bought the bundle, Joel and I were using HipChat to set up a simple, cross-platform, private chat to brainstorm internally and to preserve those brainstorming sessions in histories we could refer back to in the future and could invite new partners or employees to review in the future. While we could use any IM client, HipChat offers us a private yet simple internal immediate collaboration tool.
Later today we are meeting with a developer to collaborate with him on the simple application portion of our Facebook community. As he develops we will be looking carefully at and probably using PivotalTracker to help us track and manage the code development project. Again we will set this up even when we are a three person team with only two of who can read sourcecode so that in the future as we bring on additional people they can refer back to the full and ongoing history of the projects and applications.
In a week or so after we have launched the Facebook application we expect to use Postmark to help us manage bulk emails (possibly in the apps we are building but likely also in apps we will use internally to help promote the app and community).
We are also going to explore whether a combination of AYTM (Ask Your Target Market) and Pandaform could get us started collecting research (and managing internal tracking of the process, costs and research) to help us, in turn, iterate quickly on the application we build for Facebook and how we market and promote the application and community.
To contrast with the qualitative research we will be gathering in the application we build and via services such as AYTM we expect to leverage Infochimps and their many deep datasets to add quantitative data to inform the qualitative conclusions of our surveys and interviews.
And in the next week both Joel and I have some reading and viewing assignments - Running Lean, LaunchBit and uDemy among others offered great and immediately useful content as part of the Lean Startup Bundle which we will both review and refer to as we move forward.
Yes, this blog post is inspired by the Lean Startup Challenge as part of the Lean Startup bundle. Sure, we could use some funding - though we are already exploring non-equity funding sources to fund this and future research projects (partners who will use this research to design better products or to market - either directly or on behalf of their clients).
Our focus is on the needs, interests and current behavior of the aging population. We want to get past often cited statistics (based usually on infrequent annual studies) such as "the fastest growing population on Facebook are the over-50's" and explore both how those populations are actually using technology today. And to build a near-realtime ability to explore how this usage changes over time. Further we are exploring how demographics and interests really do overlap (or don't) - in what areas do demographics matter more than interests and usage.
We will start with a simple question – Who do you play?
From there we will explore play and competition - online and offline.
And from the answers to that simple question we'll begin to explore the more complex question - How might games improve and optimize the experience of aging?
But as we understand who people play with and how they play we will also learn more about the differences within demographic groups - and how these differences reflect in their product needs. And not just digital or online product either we anticipate insights which will help designers of products of all types from insurance to health care products design both better products and in turn better marketing for those products.
