You wanna start something?
(photo by John C Shaw)
The Pivot
Did you know?
- Paypal started as a way for cell phones to make payments
- The original goal of Microsoft was to make a small tool for programmers
- Flickr started as an online game service!
Throughout your "startup" experience you are going to constantly be refining the direction you are going. Eric calls this a pivot. A pivot IS NOT deciding you are going to change from selling auto parts to cosmetics. When you pivot (in sports) you have one foot grounded. This is how companies should change directions as well, they should keep one foot grounded in what they have already learned, and pivot the other foot in the new direction they should go.
A pivot is something that is based upon trying something, gathering the data, and learning what works. Eric maintains that the key to success when starting something is minimizing the time between pivots. Thus as you can reduce the time it takes to try and learn, the more pivots you can make, and the greater your chance of success.
Learn Faster
The rest of the conference was about minimizing the time through this learning loop. A few of my favorite pearls were:
- Test your riskiest assumptions first. Don't waste your time doing the easy stuff first - the most important things to learn first are the risky ones.
- Embrace your visionary customers. You will have a few customers who will get your vision better than you do - let them design your product.
- Update continuously. When making improvements to your product, do it continuously if possible- don't store it all up for one big "release day".
- Actionable Metrics. When building your product, build in ways to measure your progress and test a hypothesis. When you measure something, the results need to be simple enough that you know exactly what to do. For a website, Google Analytics is an example of THE EXACT OPPOSITE of this.
So there it is. You want to start something? I do.
