Lean Experiments 101 (given to IxD program at SVA)

Giff Constable lean, startups

In late January, Gary Chou and Christina Cacioppo asked me to come talk about lean startup ideas to their “Entrepreneurial Design” class in SVA’s Interaction Design masters program. Christina just wrote up some thoughts from the day and they put up the audio file. I have embedded the slides and audio file below:

Timeline Key to the Audio
0:00 Intro and teeing up lean startup
4:00 The process of designing an experiment
5:00 Examples of experiments
17:32 what an MVP is, and is not (marketing)
19:38 three phases: product-market fit, optimize, market and scale
23:18 commonalities of good experiments
25:08 importance of vision
26:46 assumptions exercise

Questions from the class (gets a little harder to hear in places)
33:33 Do you need to be making money?
36:03 would any of this change for a not-for profit?
37:08 are these ideas relevant when you are no longer an early-stage startup?
3:28 should people become entrepreneurs out of personal passion for a problem? (and what happens if you lose interest?)
43:03 why should one *not* be an entrepreneur?
45:18 do we need more female entrepreneurs?