Recently I had the honor and pleasure to attend Ash “Running Lean” Maurya‘s talk at the first ever Lean Startup Circle Cologne meetup.
After his talk, Ash and one of the Lean Startup Circle Cologne initiators, Kamil Barbarski, sat down with me for an interview to talk Lean on camera for zoomm.me.
Here’s Ash’s talk at the first ever Lean Startup Circle Cologne, courtesy of NERDHUB:
The 3rd NEXT Cologne kicked off on the evening of October 23rd and this time we have four very early-stage startup teams attending the program – Including one team traveling all the way up from France to attend in Cologne – respect!
I’m stoked to announce it’s here again – We’re going for the third round of NEXT Cologne in STARTPLATZ!
For those of you who may not know, NEXT Powered by Google for Entrepreneurs is the premier experiential educational program teaching early stage startups how to build the skills and tactics your startup needs to prepare for an accelerator, investor, or early product launch, accessible at a nominal fee and on a schedule allowing for your day-job or studies in parallel.
NEXT is brought to you by the non-profit organization that also brings you Startup Weekends and Startup Digests – UP Global (recently mentioned by POTUS Obama) – and our partners include Steve Blank, TechStars and GAN – Global Accelerator Network.
It consists of a three hour evening meet-up, five times across six weeks, digital learning material with homework in between – and is adapted to people with day-jobs and university students.
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.
Recently I was honored and delighted to be invited to the Karlshochschule International University to introduce students to the Lean Startup and share from my startup lessons learned.
If you want to book me too, shoot me an email and let’s talk.