rob blog.

Simply put, if you’re interested in startups you need to attend the Chicago Lean Startup Circle Meetup. It’s the easiest way to hear from the horse’s mouth how to take your startup idea and to turn it into a real company with paying customers.

Before I get into last week’s meetup, I’d like to give a little more context of the LSC.

In the beginning, there was Bernhard

The attendance of the LSC has increased exponentially since it started. It takes place in a pretty large room at the ITA — and every seat was taken. I was among the legions standing. One of the organizers, Bernhard Kappe (full discloure: he’s the CEO of Pathfinder Development, the company I currently work for) opens up describing the concept of the lean startup. He then usually goes into a quick game of “Name that startup,” in which he tells the audience a company’s early product and has them guess what company it is now. Example, “in 1887, this company used to sell playing cards.” Then every guesses what company that is — and it turns out to be Nintendo. The point of this game is to push home the point that companies rarely end up focusing on the product that they originally envisioned. This is one of the key tenets of the lean startup methodology: You constantly validate your assumptions by talking to your customers . This way, you make sure that you create the right product at the start — that is to say, you build Wii’s from the get-go instead of playing cards. Bernhard then closes by recommending some good books.

In the middle, there were panelists

Last night’s meetup featured a panel consisting of alums from YCombinator, Techstars, and Excelerate Labs.

• Adam Siegel of Inlking, a YCombinator alum.
• Sue Khim of Edulender, a Excelerate Labs alum
• Sean Corbett of HaveMyShift, a Techstars alum.

Siegel was matter-of-fact in his delivery and gave a no-frills version of his time doing YCombinator. He was tired of his job at Accenture, a place he had been for eleven years and decided to take the startup plunge. He was in the YCombinator class of 2006, one of the first. He kept reminding us that this was before YC was as glamorous as it is today. From what he says, the model at YC was, “you live in a house with your team and you crank out a product.” While he looks back fondly at his time at YC and the benefits thereof, he admits that they didn’t really help much when it came to acquiring customers for the product.

Khim seemed very much of a go-getter type A personality. An interesting bit of affect, because she insists that she wasn’t that way before Excelerate Labs. Her story of making it into EL was an interesting anecdote. It’s something she doesn’t recommend anyone else trying: calling up everyone on the board of EL and having lunches with them to talk about her idea. Her team made it into EL without having much beyond an idea. Originally, their app was little more than a scraper program that aggregated and spit out lender data.

Corbett’s story was noteworthy for two reasons:

• his web application had existed for years
• he and his cofounder split up

After the middle, there were some tips

According to the panelists, it is very important to have a team. Incubators don’t take kindly to products who only have one person. It makes sense, it’s hard for one person to take in a variety of perspectives or be challenged by the ideas of her peers.

One of Siegel’s tips was, “don’t piss anyone off.” Goodwill goes a long way. He noted that there were leads that he generated years before they came to fruition because he left a good impression upon someone.

Lastly, maybe the biggest tip was the need to remind oneself that starting and maturing a new product is hard. Khim had taken out 30k in loans to pay for her project, Siegel had left his job. Corbett still works seven days a week on HaveMyShift.

In the end, there were my observations

One thing I noticed from the panelists was that they were all programmers and very code-centric. They spoke abou their products as things to be built, invested in, and sold to customers. None of them spoke about the actual “experiences” of their products. If we were to think of their products as actual architectual spaces, they didn’t talk about the things that they did to give their customers pleasant encounters within those spaces. For instance, I’m very curious to know whether or not design or the user experience of a product is important in an incubator — or if only the technology alone is the selling point. A functioning product is only part of the story of a successful application, it must also be a joy to use to thrive.

Tags: incubators, lean startup, lean startup circle chicago