Build, measure, learn

Trevor Owens from Startup Lean Machine gave us a couple advices about the best way to apply lean startup methodology.

About exploration he told to never as ”would you do something?”, instead ask ”why do you do something?” and ”how do you make something?”.

Don’t accept anything different from an enthusiastic yes¹ as a yes, so even a “maybe” is a no.

When you go out interviewing people try your best to get unbiased responses. Try to avoid conformation bias: don’t tell people about your solution so they can’t give you optimistic responses and try to avoid also observation bias: don’t look like an interviewer.

At centro culturale S. Chiara Enrico Letta, the italian prime minister, spoke about technology in Trento and about TechPeaks.

After invalidating hypoteses we made our first pivot. We changed customer hypothesis to “gym people” and the new problem to resolve was “too much informations about diet”. We repeated the process finding new core assumptions and selecting the riskiest to measure.

Melissa Perri told us about lean startup applied to product management with her experience at OpenSky. She made her company save a lot of time and money by applying this methodology.

A new experiment invalidated the first pivot so we went for a second one. We changed customer hypothesis to “people following a diet” and the new problem to resolve was “not sticking to the diet”.

After the experiment we validated our hypotheses. We found that a lot of people reach the first goal of their diet and than they just quit. Another interesting fact discovered with our last experiment was that people make diets to look better. Our hypothetic solution to the valid problem was an app that helps maintaining good diet habits.

To validate our solution we built a simple landing page asking for email and mobile number. We need at least ten emails in one hour, tomorrow morning we’ll see if people need this solution.