The document discusses common reasons why startups fail, including insufficient investment, conflicts between partners, bad ideas, and wrong strategies. It emphasizes focusing on marketing, usability, solving real problems, and aligning features with business values like increasing revenue. The author advocates releasing early, getting feedback, incremental improvements, and monetizing through a paid model. Examples are given of startups like Sofa that focus on one problem and solution.

1. Minimum Marketable
Features
Maxime Guilbot – maxime (at) ekohe.com
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3. Ways to fail
• Insufficient investment
• Conflict between partners
• Bad idea from the start
• Wrong strategy
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4. Insufficient investment
• Expenses are too high (or too fast)
• Revenues are too low (or too slow)
• Forgot to include food in the business plan
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5. Wrong Strategy
• Forgot about the Marketing
• Too many features and not the right feature
• Terrible usability
• Didn’t think about the chicken & egg
problem
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6. Why my product will
be a success?
• Because it has more features than the
competition
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7. Why my product will
be a success?
WRONG • Because it has more features than the
competition
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9. Acceptance testing
• Cucumber / Webrat
• Test your web application
• Features & Scenario
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11. Ask yourself why?
• Pop the why stack max 5 times
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12. Business values
• Protect revenue
• Increase revenue
• Manage cost
• Increase brand value
• Make the product remarkable
• Provide more value to your customers
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13. • Why login?
• Why identify users?
• Why people like to know who is
publishing what?
• Why does content have to appear
trustworthy?
• Why do I want to get people interested in
the website?
• Why do I want to get more money in ads?
• Increase Revenue!
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14. If you’re about to
implement a feature
that doesn’t support
one of those values,
chances are you’re
about to implement a
non-valuable feature
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15. Make profit?
• Don’t try to be Facebook,Youtube, etc.
• Create a product that can be viable with a
small set of users
• Find a price!
• 30-day free trial
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18. Some Secrets
• Stay focused, offer one solution to one
problem
• Release very early
• Get feedback very early
• Incrementally improve your product
• Don’t forget to put a price on it
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19. Sofa
• sofa-app.com
• Timing management for small teams and
projects
• People simply record their time and team
leaders can invoice / bill their customers
easily
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20. References
• http://www.omnisio.com/startupschool08/
david-heinemeier-hansson-at-startup-
school-08
• http://cukes.info/
• http://wiki.github.com/aslakhellesoy/
cucumber
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