Author Archives: Vidar Andersen

Education, startup

Startup – In hindsight

Hindsight has 20/20 vision they say. (Image CC Attribution 2.0 Generic, Nimish Gogri)

Someone asked me the other day about what I’d wish I’d known before founding a startup.

Which made me think for a bit, because it’s a lot.

But if I had to pick just a couple of things, it would be this — and it’s probably not what you wanted to hear.

To wit;

  1. Getting to somewhere interesting and relevant takes (much) longer than you think, and the health of your startup can be measured by the time it takes to get there, aka how long it takes to complete a build-measure-learn cycle, aka how long it takes from analysing data from the customer interviews and the analytics data from the product to implementing them in a new product release and test again.
    Insight: If it’s taking weeks, you’re losing already. Stop everything. Do everything and anything — short of committing outright felonies — to speed it up and keep the speed up. Fire co-founders if needed. When the amount of new learnings about new stuff to build outnumbers the amount of pre-existing learnings about the stuff you already know you have to build (the stuff you already have in the pipeline, the stuff you haven’t gotten around to implement or change yet), you’re probably already dead. 
  2. Just because you get the technical parts right (both in reading where the puck is going to be and how to develop and be in the right position when it does) doesn’t mean you have gotten the customer part right, aka just because you know it’s going to be possible doesn’t mean that people is going to be wanting and using it.Insight: Managing customer risk is the biggest challenge in a startup — so position yourself, your team and your product as fast as possible and with as little resources as possible to be in a spot where you can build-measure-learn your way to what the customer actually wants as fast as possible, wasting as few resources as possible. Screw the technology debt, it will all come out in the wash — you only have to deal with it if and only if what you’re building becomes interesting. And that’s a big IF.
  3. See 1. & 2. I wish I had known it in my bones, not just in theory, before starting.INSIGHT: Start. Do or don’t, there is no try.

This post was originally published on Medium.

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corporate entrepreneurship, Events, innovation, startup

Speaking at the pre-opening of the digital HUB Cologne

What Startups Need @ digital HUB Cologne


Recently I was honored to be invited to speak at the members-only pre-opening of the digital HUB Cologne about “What Startups Need”.

Spoiler alert: It isn’t corporate partners and digital hubs.

The digital hubs in the state of NRW in Germany is a political construct part financed with public money. It’s supposed to support and help small and medium companies get onboard with “digitalisation”, whatever that term means.

The ensuing panel debate and Q&A

As you might know, I’m much more of a libertarian than a socialist, so I’m not the biggest fan of this publicly funded hub concept for a number of reasons.

Some are:

  • I don’t believe taxpayers should be subsidising private enterprises
  • If the market had wanted or needed a “digital hub”, it would have created one already by itself
  • The market is Darwinistic and self- correcting – putting public support-wheels or bandaids on failing businesses is wrong
  • Creating publicly funded competition to existing local business offerings is wrong

You get the drift.

In sum, I think it’s a political innovation theatre paid for in part by us the taxpayers.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

These were the slides I used:

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Education, Lean Startup

Lean Startup – Am I doing it right?

Image credit: http://popkey.co/u/GykpX

One question I get all the time is how to do Lean Startup right, so I thought I’d take a minute and share a somewhat canonical answer.

The shortest 5 step description I can give goes as follows:

  1. Articulate your hypotheses (guesses about the unknowns) using the Business Model Canvas (BMC).
  2. Get out of the building and test these hypotheses using Customer Development.
  3. Validate learnings by building Minimum Viable Products and getting them in front of customers.
  4. Iterate (small variation, no real change in BMC) or Pivot (something changed in the BMC) as needed.
  5. Build – Measure – Learn (aka rinse, lather, repeat – because this is an iterative process, you have to get out of the building more than once to talk to customers)

By now, getting the the Lean Startup methodology right should not be a problem.

The hard part is still going to be creating a product people love. 

To learn more in-depth about the Lean Startup and how to do it right, I recommend taking the canonical free course ” How to Build a Startup” from the father of the movement himself, Steve Blank.

This text was originally posted on LinkedIn.

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