Lean LaunchPad NYU ITP Class 1: Adapting Lean LaunchPad for ITP

1. LEAN
LAUNCHPAD
AT NYU ITP
Class 1 / 12
January 27, 2013
Jen van der Meer | jd1159 at nyu dot edu
Josh Knowles | chasing at spaceship dot com
Rockets Sketches borrowed from Harry Allen Design

2. TODAY:
6:00 – 7:00
Course overview
7:00 - 7:45
5 minute business model canvas presentations
7:45 - 8:00
Break
8:00 - 8:55
First Guest Speaker: Christin Roman

3. ITP TEACHING TEAM
Jen van der Meer, Adjunct Professor at ITP since 2008
ITP courses + workshops: Bodies and Buildings, Products Tell Their
Stories, ITP VC Pitchfest, . Currently: Luminary Labs, Angel Investor,
Health Data Challenges, Judge for startup competitions, + SVA PoD
Josh Knowles, ITP ’07
15+ years as an independent developer/consultant, working with
numerous brands and start-up clients (currently under the aegis of
Frescher-Southern, Ltd.)

4. @CHASING

5. @JENVANDERMEER

6. LEAN LAUNCHPAD
OUR APPROACH

7. LEAN LAUNCHPAD AT NYU ITP

8. LEAN LAUNCHPAD AT NYU ITP
We embrace a creative, iterative, and collaborative
approach to making things -- but launching a product out
into the world takes a somewhat different set of skills.
How do we make sure people want to use what they
make?
How do we create a business plan to support the idea?
Is the idea strong enough to turn into a job -- or a career?

9. BEST OF BOTH
Experiential course in entrepreneurship
Based on the Steve Blank’s Lean Launchpad and the NYU
Summer Launchpad Accelerator,
We are applying the curriculum developed at Stanford and
Berkeley for the ITP culture and NYU community.
This course has been developed with support from the
NYU Entrepreneurship Initiative, and aims to mix the best
of the methods from the Lean Launchpad methodology with
the best of ITP's culture and practice.

10. THE ONLY TEXTBOOK WE READ:
10

11. 11

12. 12

13. ITERATIVE SEARCH FOR A BUSINESS MODEL
. Students work in self-formed teams of 3-4 to develop their
business model and product/service over the course of the
semester.
The focus of the course is the work of:
Customer development, speaking directly to potential
customers to help define opportunities that the startup is
designed to solve. We’ll go deeper into design approaches
to understanding through empathy.
Agile development: utilizing UX methods and tools to
ground teams in an understanding of how to launch a
minimally viable product.

14. CLASS TIMEFRAME AND
EXPECTATIONS

15. CLASS TIMEFRAME AND CADENCE
.
Walk through the full canvas
Build to MVP, space for iteration

16. CLASS TIMEFRAME AND CADENCE
.
2/3
Value Proposition
UX Tools, Frameworks
1/27
Business Models
Customer Development
UX Tools Intro
3/17
Spring Break
2/17
President’s Day
2/10
Customer Segments
Research Tools
3/24
Customer Development
Product Development
3/3
Customer Relationships
Partners,
Product Development
2/24
Revenue Streams
Distribution
Product Definition
4/7
Customer Development
Product Development
3/31
Customer Development
Product Development
3/10
Resources,
Activities, Costs,
Product Development
4/21
Product MVP
4/14
Customer Development
Product Development
4/28
Lessons Learned

17. TEAMS

18. STUDENT TEAMS
Team
Name
School
Cognitive Toy Box
Lindsey Jones
Stern
Tammy Kwan
Stern
Hsiang Huang
Stern
Rodrigo Derteano
ITP
Maximo Sica
ITP
Ajejandro Puentes
ITP
Alon Chitayat
ITP
Sam Slover
ITP
Shilpan Bhagat
ITP
Max Ma
ITP
Sergio Majluf
ITP
Su Hyun Kim
ITP
Christina Yugai
Stern
Yuliya Parshina Kottas
ITP
Rose Meacham
ITP
Hanna Moon
ITP
Ju Young Park
ITP
Alternative Monuments
NYBL
DiscoverEd
Advanced Expression

19. TEACHERS
MENTORS
AND ADVISORS

20. TEACHERS, MENTORS AND ADVISORS
• Why we are doing this? We all see this class as an opportunity to
help the startup ecosystem of NYU, and NYC
• Teachers are here to provide guidance and support and ensure
you can grasp the practice of customer development and agile
development, and get to an MVP
• Mentors have volunteered to coach a specific team – and provide
guidance with business model development, and prioritizing
features for the MVP
• Advisors have volunteered to be on hand to answer your
questions, provide specific expertise, and connect you to who you
need to know
• Some have experience in Lean, others are here to learn more
about lean and contribute

21. MENTOR ROLE
•
•
•
Mentors play an active role in weekly coaching of a specific team of 3-4 students. The role of the
mentors is to help the teams test their business model hypotheses, and .
Offer teams strategic guidance and wisdom: Offer business model suggestions
Identify gaps in the team’s business knowledge and suggest areas of inquiry and
customer development that can help address those gaps
Provide teams with tactical guidance every week:
Review teams’ weekly presentation before they present in person or over
skype/hangout
Comment weekly on teams’ project blog
Respond to the teaching team’s critique of their team
Offer network help: “Why don’t you call x? Let me connect you.”
Coach the teams to make 5 to 10 customer contacts/week
Check in with teaching team twice over the semester to discuss student progress

22. MENTORS + TEAMS
Tom Igoe @tigoe
ITP, Arduino, Making Things Talk, NYU
ITP Pitchfest
Alternative Monuments
Julie Berkun Fajgenbaum @julieF
Stern Adjunct Professor, Former VP
Amex Open, now startup co-founder
NYBL
Michael Levitz @michael_levitz
ITP grad, R/GA, Lean
DiscoverED
Sarah Krasley @sarahkrasley
Autodesk, Sustainability, Berkeley
Advanced Expression
Chris Milne @greedo1000
IDEO, Toy Lab, Stanford, LEGO
Cognitive Toy Box

23. WHAT TO EXPECT OF MENTORS
• Proactively set up office hours here or at their convenience
• Mentors are available to help you through the work of determining
your business model, working through the business model canvas
• Mentors will help connect you to people you need to meet during
customer development (but this responsibility is ultimately yours)
• Later on in the semester, as you continue customer development
but move forward to launch an MVP, mentors are there to coach
you through timing, priorities, and pacing
• They are coaches, but not minders – you have to do the work of
orchestrating to fit into their schedules

24. ADVISORS
Briita Riley
Windowfarms
Tarikh Korula
Seen.co
Robert Fabricant
frog design
Matt Harrigan
Ben Cerveny
Advisorsphere
Samsung
Accelerator
Anthony Viviano
ESPN
Author of Lean UX
Manifesto
Valerie Casey
Phin Barnes
Christin Roman
UX Designer
Elise
Communications
Andy Weissman
First Round Capital Carrie Barnes
Union Square
Ventures
Adam Quinton
ASTIA
Ajay Revels
Polite Machines
Jess Eddy
UX Designer
Nihal Parthasarathi CourseHorse
John Bachir
Vlad Vukicevic
RocketHub
Jennifer Hill
Medstro
International Tech
Venture Lawyer
Matt Jones
Google
Frank Rimalovski
NYU
Lindsey Marshall
NYU
Summer Bedard
Betaworks
Thomas Gerhardt
Studio Neat
More to come
…

25. WHAT TO EXPECT OF ADVISORS
• Advisors are likely time constrained, but eager to help
• Advisors are available for counsel and advisory, and connections
• We’ll publish a contact list but lean on us to make the first intro
and set context, as each advisor has their unique perspective and
constraints for availability
• Advisors based in NYC will come to the Lessons Learned day at
the end of the semester

26. WHAT TO EXPECT OF TEACHERS
• We are here to help – reach out whenever you need it within
reason.
• Office hours Jen: 5-6 on Mondays, or schedule time at my office in
Tribeca: jd1159 at nyu dot edu
• Josh office hours: 5-6 on Mondays or earlier – schedule time
chasing at spaceship dot com

27. SHORT HISTORY OF A
MOVEMENT

28. WHAT IS A BUSINESS MODEL?
. A business model describes the rationale of how an organization creates,
delivers, and captures value… for companies, customers, and society
Business model canvas : can become a shared language that allows you to
easily describe and manipulate models to create new strategic alternatives
Described through 9 basic building blocks that show the logic of how a
company intends to make money
Business Model Generation
Alexander Osterwalder

29. BUSINESS MODEL CANVAS
CONCEPT HERE
Who are
our key
partners?
What key
activities do our
value
propositions
require?
Which one of
our customers
problems are
we helping to
solve?
What needs
are met?
What key
resources do
our value
propositions
require?
What are the most important costs in
our business model?
What is the
product/service
?
How will we get
keep and grow
customers?
For whom are
we solving a
problem /
needs met
Who are the
customers
Through which
channels do
our customer
segments wish
to be reached?
Does the value
proposition
match the need
Single sided or
multimarket?
What is the revenue model? What are
our pricing tactics? For what value
are customers willing to pay?

30. THE SHIFT – FROM PUSH AND MARKET TO
CUSTOMER DEVELOPMENT
The Four Steps to the Customer Epiphany by Steve Blank
30

31. FIRST CAME STEVE
The Customer Development
process changes the way
startups are built
Startups are not smaller
versions of large companies
•
•
•
•
•
Co-founded 8 startups.
1996: E.piphany
1998: $3.4 MM sales
1999: IPO raised $72 MM
Author of Four Steps to the Epiphany, Startup
Owner’s Manual
A startup as a “temporary
organization designed to
search for a repeatable and
scalable business model”

32. THEN CAME ERIC
Continuous customer
interaction
A startup is an experiment
A hypothesis to be tested
Assume customer and
features are unknowns
Low burn by design
•
•
Founded IMVU
Parallels between Lean and Agile, caught fire in
the startup community for software businesses,
particularly mobile and SaaS models.
Are we on the path to a
sustainable business

33. WHAT CAME BEFORE STEVE AND ERIC
Lean Manufacturing
Total Quality
Management
Kanban
Continuous
Improvement
Agile
33

34. WHAT CAME BEFORE STEVE AND ERIC
34

35. KANBAN
The Kanban Method respects the human condition. People resist
change for emotional reasons. When change affects their self-image,
self-esteem, or position with a social group, people will resist and the
resistance will be emotional.
The Kanban Method adopts the Zen Buddhism concept that "water
goes around the rock." Hence, it focuses on changes that can be made
without invoking emotional resistance, while visualization and limiting
work-in-progress raise awareness of deeper issues allowing for an
emotional engagement that helps to overcome resistance.
Now take a deep, cleansing breath. Again.
35

36. AGILE AND LEAN INFLUENCES
Hat tip: Ajay Revels
36

37. LEAN IS NEW AS A MOVEMENT, AND IS EVOLVING
We’ll work on integrating design thinking practices
Deeper UX methods
Ethnography, particularly participant observation
Customer interview techniques
To get us deeper into unmet needs, latent and hidden needs
Over the course of the semester
And contributing back to how Lean LaunchPad evolves
37

38. FOR NEXT WEEK

39. STEP 1: CUSTOMER DISCOVERY
. Customer discovery translates a founding team’s vision for the company into a
hypothesis about each component of the business model and creates a set of
experiments to test each hypothesis.
Customer discovery is not about collecting features lists from prospective
customers or running lots of focus groups.
The founders define the product vision and
then use customer discovery to find
customers and a market for that vision.
-Steve Blank, The Startup Owner’s Manual

40. ESTIMATE YOUR TOTAL ADDRESSABLE MAKRET
Total
addressable
market
Served
available
market
Target
market
Total addressable: how big is the universe?
Served available market: how many can I reach with my sales channel?
Target market: who will be the most likely buyers?

41. NEXT WEEK PREP:
. Alexandar Osterwalder on Business Model Canvas Video
Read: Business Model Generation pp. 14-49.
Video Lecture: Value Proposition
Talk to at least 5 potential customers. Post first discovery narratives on your
team blog.

42. NEXT WEEK PRESENTATION:
. Prepare a presentation – guidelines below:
· Cover slide
· Latest version Business Model Canvas with changes marked
· Market size (TAM, SAM, Target Market)
Total addressable: how big is the universe
Served available market: how many can I reach with my sales channel?
Target market: who will be the most likely buyers?
· Propose experiments to test your value proposition. What constitutes a
pass/fail signal for each
test?

43. NEXT:
CANVAS REVIEW AND CRIT
GUEST SPEAKER:
CHRISTIN ROMAN