If you’ve been following along at home, we
hope you’ve noticed that this year The Lean Startup Conference will be a two-day
affair, with top-quality workshops on December 4. Gold and Platinum Passes get you into the workshops, and we’ve conducted a series of short
interviews with the workshop leaders to give them a chance to share their insights with the broader community.
“Lean Analytics: Using Data to Build a Better Startup Faster” will be led by Alistair Croll, a serial entrepreneur and
the author of three books on web performance, analytics, and IT operations, and
Ben Yoskovitz, author of the Instigator Blog and VP Product at GoInstant.
The two are co-authors of the forthcoming Lean Analytics
book.
What
aspect of Lean Startup methods most inspires you?
Alistair:
The one advantage of a disruptor is they have nothing to lose—no rules to
follow, no risks to consider—compared to the big, incumbent organizations
they're trying to replace. So what I like is that it focuses on fast iteration
and learning, which provides an asymmetric advantage to the underdog. It levels
the playing field. Lean favors the entrepreneur who can ask the right question,
rather than guess the best answer.
Ben:
For me, it's the idea that you can be diligent and disciplined in your approach
to building a company (as opposed to wandering around aimlessly, hoping you'll
hit the mark) without losing your big vision and the dreaming that you have to
do as an entrepreneur. Lean startup isn't intended to "suck the life"
out of entrepreneurship; quite the opposite--it helps guide you through the
process, and provides the foundation for achieving bigger goals, more quickly.
What
makes it hard for companies to implement this process?
Alistair:
All entrepreneurs need some amount of reality distortion just to get out of bed
in the morning. But that also means they lie to themselves, and they develop an
emotional attachment to the things they're building. They're necessarily proud
of them, committed to them. Yet creating a startup is fundamentally a
destructive act: killing a particular feature; stopping a clever campaign that
isn't working; ignoring a market segment because it's too soon.
In many ways, Lean Startup isn't about
building a product—it's about building a tool to show you what product to
build. Along with creating the product itself, entrepreneurs have to create the
instrumentation that makes the product a learning machine, and that requires a
lot of focus. It's a lot easier, and certainly feels more heroic, to "wing
it." But a methodical, persistent approach is the better choice if you
care about building something people actually want.
Ben:
For starters, it's hard. Discipline of any kind is hard. Any of us that have
tried to get into an exercise routine post Thanksgiving or Christmas holidays
can attest to that. It's also very early still--the ideas, concepts and
principles of Lean Startup are still taking shape and being molded.
Unfortunately, people look too quickly--like the next fad diet--for the perfect
answer. Of course there isn't a perfect answer, there isn't an absolute
formula. It just doesn't work that way.
What
will people take away from your workshop?
Alistair:
We'll share some basic business models that most startups will recognize, and
look at what's "normal" for those models, so entrepreneurs have a
baseline against which to compare themselves. And we'll spend time talking
about the many case studies—and cautionary tales—we've learned from companies
we've worked with and interviewed. Attendees will learn how to keep score, when
to step on the gas, and when to rethink the fundamentals of their business.
Ben:
I hope they'll gain a new appreciation for metrics and how to wrestle them into
something meaningful and valuable. Almost everyone understands that metrics are
important, but we want to provide some narrowly focused ideas around how to use
metrics, and how to think about metrics in order to succeed. Ideas like The One
Metric That Matters or the Penny Machine go a long way to making analytics
approachable, and giving people the confidence to jump into their own numbers
and tease out the value.
Here’s video of Alistair in action at a
recent Ignite show, talking about why tomorrow, serendipity will be for the
rich. Here’s Ben speaking about his life as an entrepreneur.
Here are two reasons to register today: 1)
space for the workshops is limited; and 2) we have a block of early-bird tickets
on sale right now. When this block sells out, the price goes up. Register now
for a Gold or
Platinum Pass to attend the workshops.
