#leanstartupmachine

[joyzginn]

Fail fast succeed faster #LSMUniversityEdition #YEAH #leanstartupmachine (at CU Innovation Hub)

[randreed]

Time for the #PhD students @ #BMWSummerSchool...

Time for the #PhD students @ #BMWSummerSchool to take-off, build, measure and learn at the #LeanStartupMachine. They will experience some of the best #design tools & methods in multidisciplinary teams of 5. Stay tuned for the award announcement on #Friday. #BMWGroup #next100

Time for the #PhD students @ #BMWSummerSchool...

Time for the #PhD students @ #BMWSummerSchool to take-off, build, measure and learn at the #LeanStartupMachine. They will experience some of the best #design tools & methods in multidisciplinary teams of 5. Stay tuned for the award announcement on #Friday. #BMWGroup #next100

BMW Group Insiders

[thelyst]

Strategic Partnerships Director- Lean Startup Machine

Strategic Partnerships Director

Our friends at Lean Startup Machine are looking for the an enthusiastic, friendly, and aggressive individual to lead their sponsorship effort.

The job responsibilities:

Ability to drive the sales process from plan to close—including stakeholder identification, customer influence, relationship building, and closing.

Create and manage a pipeline of potential sponsors – locally and globally

Train coordinators on how to properly position sponsorships

Manage warm and hot leads

Pitch and close deals and manage sponsor expectations

Renew existing business

Qualifications:

3-5 years sales or partnerships experience

Deep understanding of how to manage customer relationships

Clear communication both written and verbal

Proven ability to navigate through ambiguity

Strong leadership track record

» APPLY HERE

[leannewark]

Mac Stickers, The Budgetnista and Building Relationships

True Story - I'm sitting in Art Kitchen clearing a 1,000+ emails.  A pleasant young lady asks to take a picture of my Lean Startup Machine Fail Fast/Succeed Faster sticker.  Turns out it's Tiffany Aliche, The Budgenista.

I'd been following Tiffany's ascent from blogger to author to Today Show guest.  Between our mutual friends and Facebook, I felt like I knew her well (although we never actually met until a couple of weeks ago).  A week prior, I mentioned to Emily Manz of Brick City Development Corp that Tiffany would be a great case study for running Lean. Low & behold, she introduced herself on the strength of my sticker -- from there agreed to keynote the Lean Newark workshop on November 8th!

I'm excited for The Budgetnista to share her journey from experience, to business idea, to validation and scale -- it's what LeanStartup is all about.

And to think, our encounter was created by a sticker ... or really a willingness for us to share our beliefs with one another.  Few lessons learned I that day about creating relationships:

Engage in conversation. Communication is the first step to success. Whether it's developing a plan, pitching a product or more importantly meeting the talented people to push a vision forward.  Don't be afraid to build new relationships.  #ThePowerofWho

Always represent.  I believe in the power of lean principles to create change through entrepreneurship.  So I rep' it all day -- on my computer, in discussions with colleagues and even my own family when I'm approached about business ideas.  #StayTrue #BeYou

Be available.  It's the power of communal spaces like coffee shops, co-working facilities and the like.  The more you're willing to give of yourself, the more you receive in return. #GiveBeforeYouGet

[foodorbit-blog]

Should I start a Startup, possibly the most intense three days of my life...

It was a Friday afternoon back in September last year when I was having a late lunch with a colleague from work when he started telling me about Lean StartUp Machine (LSM).

I’d heard of Startup Weekend and a few other events, but I was new to the startup scene and hadn’t come across this before.  He gave me an overview of the event; turn up with an idea, pitch it to a room of 50 or so entrepreneurs, tech guys, mentors and the like, before they decide the ten most exciting, interesting or viable ideas, using a voting system to form teams to work on those ideas for the weekend.

                                                   He had a spare ticket for the whole weekend and offered it to me, which was great. It just so happened that LSM was starting that evening.  Lean Startup Machine sounded perfect for me, I had been playing around with an idea for quite some time and this seemed the ideal testing ground to see if the idea had any legs.

Four hours later, I had called my girlfriend stumbling through various excuses as to why our weekend plans had to be cancelled, and was standing in Fishburners, nervous over my pitch and lack of preparation for the weekend. 

The pitches, varying in quality and stage of development, take place and the votes get cast. I had a show of about 25 hands, which was a relief and put the nerves at ease, but the hard work hadn’t even started to begin. Five minutes of mayhem follows where the founders of each idea work the room to recruit a suitable team of interested people to work with for the next 2 ½ days.

               It was slowly approaching midnight on that Friday evening; we’d had some short presentations and gained some great insights into the lean methodology, started working on the validation board and highlighted our riskiest assumptions and hypothesises to test out the next morning on real customers.

Fail fast, succeed faster was something mentioned over the course of the weekend and we got to see that first hand.  The huge emphasis of the weekend, was to “get out of the building” encouraging you to go and talk to your customers.  Create your customer hypothesis, problem hypothesis, solution hypothesis and a series of assumption and go out and test them on your potential customers.  This was the only real way to learn.  No one learnt this as much as one team who had been working on their idea for nearly two years and within about 4 hours they had realised that it wasn’t a viable business idea and the team folded on that very first evening.

The idea that I was pitching was Food Orbit. I came up with the idea whilst working in the kitchens of London, England alongside Gordon Ramsay and a few other chefs where we noticed a fundamental problem in the local food movement, so the Food Orbit idea was born. An online platform to connect local farmers and producers with wholesale buyers. We planned on using e-commerce to make buying and selling local and responsibly farmed food, simple!  As the hours rolled on and the idea started to take shape through various pivots, we realized that focus was key. Chefs and restaurateurs who wanted to differentiate through quality local ingredients were to be our target market. Customer hypothesis pivot number one.

After just over four hours sleep, myself and one other from my team were standing at Flemington markets in Homebush at 5:15am talking to growers, farmers, restaurant owners and chefs who were buying produce at the market that morning.  The feedback was amazing, and by that I don’t mean towards the quality of the idea as such, but in terms of the learning’s we could take from it.  We spoke to so many different people from so many different backgrounds, it really helped validate some core assumptions, test our problem hypothesis and pivot once again. 

               This is how the whole weekend went.  We went back to base at Fishburners, presented our learning’s to the team, worked through further iterations of assumptions, problem hypothesis and solution hypothesis, before jumping in the car and heading down to Leichardt Organic Markets to talk to some more customers of a slightly different nature.

There were mistakes over the course of the weekend and everyone makes them, we were no different.  I had recruited a team of predominantly tech-focused guys, trying to fill the void in my own skill set.  It meant that we spent too long on landing pages, making a youtube video; which admittedly no one was actually going to see, and creating more social media accounts than I even knew existed.  This wasn’t a hackathon weekend, far from it, it was all about Build, Measure, Learn but the build doesn’t relate to tech so much but more towards anything that will help you validate or invalidate the assumptions and hypothesis you’ve made.

A simple landing page from Unbounce, an ipad and hunting down potential customers for some genuine conversations was all it took to sign up 40 or so people in a couple of hours. A lesson that stuck with me ever since.

I probably crammed a months worth of work into just over two days with every hour spent adding considerable value to developing the business idea further.  In addition, I had a team of people only too willing to wake up at 5am, help until midnight each night and go along on the amazingroller coaster ride that it was. Tensions were high at times and time pressures were evident with the obvious element of competition that was only too noticeable the minute you entered the room.

                                    Ignoring my unhappy girlfriend just for just a minute, the weekend on the whole was invaluable to me personally and to the business idea itself. The entire experience; the learning, the networking and the real life practice of the Lean Methodology …. Get out of the building!

[leannewark]

Entrepreneurship Can Be Learned

[creativestartupkc-blog]

Joining a great team of inspirational people: Mission, help change the world

This is a good morning! A little angst awaiting some news. Here's hoping. knowing that whatever happens, that's the plan. But really, truly, hoping and praying I demonstrated dedication, interest in helping their bottom line, had good enough questions, etc. all that stuff. Of course in hindsight my own analysis is that in that aspect off prep, I wish I'd done better in preparing questions to ask about them. I never feel quite like I'm nimble enough on my feet to wing that and looking back that is the one glaring omission from my prep time.

So, here's hoping that what I had prepared was enough. And that, with some help from fate, and the great people at the organization, that they'll give me the callback.

Theirs is a mission that is truly an inspiration, providing organizations, enterprises  and individuals the tools they need to transform, inspire and build a better world. Making waves around the world, being surrounded daily by those people, dedication to working hard, inspired by both the city around, the mentors and the motivation of absolutely loving the mission behind what you do.

It truly would be a dream. So here's hoping. 

There truly area  lot of questions I have now having processed more thoroughly. Hoping for the chance to ask them, and potentially see what contribution could be in store from me being on one of the greatest teams, really, in the world.

[leannewark]

Get out of the Building and in Their Faces

Join the Movement to Unlock Newark and bring Lean to the city in 2014! Sign up in support here.

Guest post by April Peters, Recording Artist, Singer-Songwriter, and Founding Organizer for Lean Newark 

Before you find yourself in the pitfalls of false starts and failed attempts month after grueling month, perhaps even years, launching an idea or product, I’ve got something great for you! Last week, I spent quality time at Brick City Tech’s Meetup and fireside chat on Crowd-funding and Intellectual Property, featuring panelists David Postolski, a registered patent and intellectual property attorney at Day Pitney, and Kim Wales of Wales Capital, a thought leader in the crowd-funding industry. Conversation surrounded tech startup, protecting yourself and your ideas, and beating a lack of capital through alternative investment paths like crowd-funding.

The room was electric with riveting personal stories of stolen ideas, inventions on the market, copyright infringements, successful fundraising efforts and failed crowd-funding campaigns (this one hit close to home). David and Kim adeptly shared what differentiated the failures from the successes—such as lack of market research, unprotected inventions, sharing new ideas too soon, the need to sufficiently build networks (professional and social media) before launching a fundraising campaign, and ignoring the tried-and-true value of face-to-face personal interaction.

Now for that great thing…. Lean Startup Machine Weekends in Newark teach the above-mentioned key principles in only three days, treating startup like an experiment and helping you ask, “Should this product be built?” and “Can we build a sustainable business around this set of products and services?” During a Lean Newark weekend you’ll be able to: 1. Figure out the problem you want to solve; 2. Learn before you launch; and 3. Get out of the building to test the product’s/service’s viability with ACTUAL customers.

I’m excited to reconnect with our partners, Judith Sheft, NJIT, Anthony Frasier, The Phat Startup and Brick City Tech to co-host additional tech meet-ups and social events leading up to the Lean Newark 2014 workshop. We still need about 100 more signups to bring the workshop to Newark, so please add your email at https://www.leanstartupmachine.com/cities/newark to help us UNLOCK Newark!

Follow Lean Newark on Twitter

April Peters

LinkedIn | Twitter

[creativestartupkc-blog]

The test environment for #LeanKC sponsered by @KauffmanLabs and @leanstartupmachine. Thanks for a phenomenal weekend of learning, networking, and growth.

[creativestartupkc-blog]

Can we modernize the freight industry? Question to be answered by @leanstartupmachine. Thanks to the mentorship of @Adamberk @to2 @nagda @KauffmanLabs and a great team @SuperDispatch. We are well on our way.