Recently I was invited to Idea Lab, the founder’s conference at WHU in Vallendar.
Sitar Teli on what they are looking for in startups to invest in
My friend Liam “Rude Baguette” Boogar moderating the panel on Crowdfunding
The absolute highlight for me was seeing Oliver Samwer talk about how founders must be willing and able to live in the dirt for a long time to be successful:
The BeNeLux Bus
I was recently honored and thrilled to be invited by Hans van Gent and Mike van Hoenselaar to produce this year’s StartupBus Europe BeNeLux bus bound for Pioneers Festival in Vienna, together with Magnus Petersen-Paasche, after my previous stint with Startupbus.
And after a lot of preparations, we finally went on the road last week – and what an EPIC trip it was: It took us from Amsterdam to Pioneers Festival in Vienna via Antwerp, Cologne, Berlin, Prague and Munich – all within 72 hours!
Recently I was interviewed by Julia Fiedler at DRadio Wissen (Radio! Yes – it’s actually still around!) about what to do if you have a business idea an how to proceed. Should you start by writing a business plan? If you are copying an existing proven business model, say opening a new ice cream shop around the corner – maybe. If you want to create a new travel app that the world have never seen before, most probably not.
“No business plan ever survives first contact with customers!” – Steve Blank
Business Plans are guess-based works of fiction and what you want to be doing is to get from a guess-based fantasy to a fact based business as soon as possible.
So what should you do instead? In the radio interview I talk about the concepts and methodologies of Customer Development, Business Model Generation using the Business Model Canvas and building and testing Minimum Viable Products (MVP) – the minimum you need to build or create to start testing and measuring if the guesses about your product, customers and revenue model are correct.
Have a listen [in German] for yourself.
Fresh off the boat from Silicon Valley and back in Cologne town, I was recently invited to give visitors and students an introduction to The Lean Startup at the Startup Day at the University of Cologne arranged by the HGNC.
Panel debate on venture capital and startup ecosystems
And of course there was no better occasion to debut the new CGN <3<3<3 Startups t-shirt.
Here are the slides I used:
If you want to book me too, shoot me an email and let’s talk.
A video report from the event (German):
So because of you guys, I am now an official Lean Launchpad Instructor as trained by Steve Blank and Jerry Engel at Stanford – And I’m coming back to teach this most awesome curriculum for startup entrepreneurs in and around Cologne!
And the campaign didn’t go unnoticed by Steve: At our final presentations in front of him and the whole 91 educators strong class, I wore one of my sponsors’ t-shirts prominently featuring the central Steve-ism “Get out of the building!”, one of the core tenets of Customer Development, upon he laughingly took a minute to let me explain to class what that t-shirt was all about.
I was thus given the opportunity to explain to everybody present in class at Stanford that the Cologne startup community had sponsored my trip – and they loved it. There was a massive applause and laughter, a lot of pictures being taken. Steve even tweeted it live from class.
Previously that week, I had also been on a panel speaking about local challenges and opportunities where I spoke about the advantages of Cologne as a regional startup cluster and I think this little last gesture convinced a lot of people in the class that we do indeed have a vibrant and solid startup community in Cologne.
As the campaign and the program is now over, I thought I’d share some of the stats from it below.
Steve & Me @ Stanford on “graduation day”
One educator, Vidar Andersen @blacktar crowdfunded his airfare to the Lean LaunchPad Educators Conference http://t.co/RJJxtmZ8uh Wow
— steve blank (@sgblank) June 20, 2013
Views: 4,198
Total views to the campaign page – includes views by the same visitor.
Funders: 52
Contributions: 2.118€ of 1.042€ – 203,26% of the goal
Time to meet goal: 12 hours (wow – you guys are amazing!)
Campaign running time: 19 days
Followers of campaign: 55
Referrals: 1,707
Number of visits resulting from someone sharing this campaign using widgets, Facebook, Twitter, and emails from the ‘Share This Campaign’ section on IndieGoGo.
Facebook Likes: 243
Tweets: 32
Google+ Shares: 13
Number of contributors, Cologne vs Outside: 23 / 29
Amount of contributions, Cologne vs Outside: 1.028€ / 1.090€
Holy crap! We made the global front page of IndieGoGo!
The awesome Jerry Engel of Berkeley Haas & me @ Stanford