Sorry for the lack of articles lately. Pick any of the following as an excuse:
- Been busy building stuff
- Been busy testing stuff
- Been fighting with my parole officer over the definition of “recreational” drug use
That said, I’ll be at the following events and if you will be too, coffee is on me. It would be my pleasure to treat for caffeine and chat about lean, customer dev, and anything else that suits you, since I haven’t been of any help here in the last couple months.
As I’ve mentioned before, LSM is an incredible experience. I highly recommend it to anyone serious about starting a company. The lessons you’ll learn over a weekend will literally save you months of time.
If that endorsement isn’t enough, here are two more reasons you should go:
- LSM will pay for you to attend a Startup Weekend. That means you’ll learn how to test your business model assumptions during LSM, and use that knowledge to build a product customers actually want at a Startup Weekend – all for the price of one LSM ticket. Double the learning and double the experience for the price of one LSM ticket.
- There are a handful of 50% coupon codes left. If this link still works, it’ll get you admission to Lean Startup Machine and Startup Weekend, for $149. I previously said LSM alone was worth $500, so to get LSM + SW (plus food & drink) for $149…it’s really…amazing.
I’ll be there helping teams test their hypotheses. Really, there’s no reason you shouldn’t be there.
NWEN’s got some big names speaking at their Entrepreneur University. If you’ve ever heard of Cranium, Molly Moon’s Ice Cream, or Jawfish Games, you’ll know the keynote speakers.
You may have also heard of some of the lesser known speakers. Mark and I will be doing a breakout session on “Interviewing Customers the Easy Way.” It will be a live version of our How to Interview 100 Customers in 4 Hours with Mechanical Turk post.
We’ll pick a couple startups out of the audience, learn a little bit about their target customers, and then see if we can interview a couple of them during the session so everyone can see easy and powerful interviewing customers is.
If you’re a member of the Founder’s Institute Seattle session, I’ll see you for a talk on Product Development. More specifically, we’ll be narrowing down the definition of MVP (which runs the gamut depending who you talk to).
If you’re not a member of FI, I think they’ll record the talk so if possible, I’ll post a link here afterwards.
And certainly not least…
I am nothing less than humbled and honored to be speaking at this year’s Lean Startup Conference with the likes of Steve Blank, Eric Reis, Ash Maurya, Patrick Vlaskovits, and on, and on… (oh, how clumsy of me. I just dropped all those names…)
My talk, “Crowdtesting: Using Crowdfunding to Test an MVP” will be only 5 minutes of what’s bound to be a day of innovative ways to build successful companies faster. It feels like a combination of TED + Ignite dedicated to Lean Startups. Come if you can.
Huge Thanks
To Ramphis Castro & Marcos Polanco for getting the speaking ball rolling, and to Mark Horoszowski for not only his encouragement, but his enthusiasm, coaching (and videography) during the Lean Startup Conference application process.
I’m Serious
With this much yapping, I’m may not be posting much over the next couple months, so like I say, please hit me up if you’re attending any of the above. I’d love help however I can.
Join the experiment – I’ve got killer data for our next post (testing your startup’s name). Subscribe via Email or RSS to make sure you get it.
See you at the Lean Startup Conference in SF next month, Justin. Thanks for the great work. And I hope your parole officer also lives in Washington…