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!

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Read my blog: www.vangeldrop.com