TechPeaks Mentors and the Lean Startup Machine

Evan Nisselson pitched this morning. He is a serial entrepreneur and a professional photographer. He spoke about his experiences as an entrepreneur, what did well and what did not and why. He told us about the risks he took with his companies between failures and successes.

He told us about timing: you should choose the right timing to build for your idea; expertise domain: you should do something in a field that you know; trust between you and your customers and between you and your investors: be always transparent with your customers and require transparency from your investors.

We pitched ourselves to introduce each other and then we made elevator pitches about our ideas. A couple are about crowdfunding, good to know in prespective for the development of issuehunter.

James Roberts from Global Capital Law pitched about Starting up a start up where he told us the best way to get the best from our experience here at TechPeaks and how to relate with mentors. He also told us about the perfect slides deck: you should make it as clear as possibile, also remind to mention where you are now and where you want to go with your idea, not literaly of course.

Than we had some crazy time trying to apply the lean startup methodology with guys from the Lean Startup Machine.

Adam Berk introduced the process and some of us pitched problems fitting this kind of processing. Some of the ideas were selected, we divided into teams and we started to fill the validation board with problem hypothesis and customers hypothesis. We filled the core assumptions that make those hypotheses true and we selected the riskiest to get validated by the first experiment.

I’m trying with my team to validate the problem of gaining weight for underweight people by asking people some questions about the assumption that to gain weight they would change their diet. Tomorrow we’ll analyze data to know if our hypotheses have been proved or not and go on with the first pivot.