Marc Andreessen will be at The Lean Startup Conference - will you?

This post was co-written by Eric Ries and Sarah Milstein, co-hosts of The Lean Startup Conference.

Marc Andreessen hardly needs introduction, but we're pleased to introduce him anyway--as a keynote speaker for The Lean Startup Conference on December 3, 2012 in San Francisco. Among the most respected thinkers in Silicon Valley, Marc may be most familiar to you as co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz. Or perhaps you remember him as the guy who built the first widely used web browser. Or maybe you think of him as a founder of Netscape. Or of Opsware. Or of Ning. You get the picture. We'll be honored to have him on stage.

Among the reasons we're excited is that Marc helped popularize the idea of product/market fit, homing in on the absolute importance of creating a product that resonates with a specific market--a key concept that is foundational to many Lean Startup techniques.

Marc wrote about it way back in 2007 when he addressed the question, "What causes success?" In a must-read post, he explored startup teams, products and markets in ways that only a close participant could see:

"If you ask entrepreneurs or VCs which of team, product, or market is most important, many will say team. This is the obvious answer, in part because in the beginning of a startup, you know a lot more about the team than you do the product, which hasn't been built yet, or the market, which hasn't been explored yet...

"On the other hand, if you ask engineers, many will say product. This is a product business, startups invent products, customers buy and use the products. Apple and Google are the best companies in the industry today because they build the best products. Without the product there is no company. Just try having a great team and no product, or a great market and no product...

"Personally, I'll take the third position -- I'll assert that market is the most important factor in a startup's success or failure.  

"Why? 

"In a great market -- a market with lots of real potential customers -- the market pulls product out of the startup. The market needs to be fulfilled and the market will be fulfilled, by the first viable product that comes along. The product doesn't need to be great; it just has to basically work. And, the market doesn't care how good the team is, as long as the team can produce that viable product."

Marc then explored aspects of teams and products and markets, and the he concluded this about product/market fit:

"When you get right down to it, you can ignore almost everything else. I'm not suggesting that you do ignore everything else -- just that judging from what I've seen in successful startups, you can.  

"Whenever you see a successful startup, you see one that has reached product/market fit -- and usually along the way screwed up all kinds of other things, from channel model to pipeline development strategy to marketing plan to press relations to compensation policies to the CEO sleeping with the venture capitalist. And the startup is still successful.  

"Conversely, you see a surprising number of really well-run startups that have all aspects of operations completely buttoned down, HR policies in place, great sales model, thoroughly thought-through marketing plan, great interview processes, outstanding catered food, 30" monitors for all the programmers, top tier VCs on the board -- heading straight off a cliff due to not ever finding product/market fit.  

"Once a startup is successful, and you ask the founders what made it successful, they will usually cite all kinds of things that had nothing to do with it. People are terrible at understanding causation. But in almost every case, the cause was actually product/market fit."

Marc isn't just a unusually insightful writer; he also a thoughtful speaker. We'll hear more about what he's learned about product/market fit since 2007, what it's like to become one of Silicon Valley's most sought-after investors, and ways he thinks people misuse Lean Startup concepts to their detriment. We're excited to continue this conversation with him at The Lean Startup Conference. Register here to join us.

In related news, we just opened up another block of early-bird tickets for the conference so that you can see speakers like Marc at great rates. The last three blocks sold out quickly - and once this block sells out, prices go up. You can register here.

September in New York

I have been getting a lot of questions on Twitter about my upcoming trip to the east coast, so I thought I would post a brief update here. For the next month or so I'll be on the road, starting in Washington DC and then proceeding to New Haven, New York, and Boston. But most of the time - for almost the whole month of September - I'll be in Manhattan. I'm really looking forward to quality time with the startup scene there.

For some reason, most of my speaking events scheduled on this trip are private or corporate. In fact, I don't think anything is open to the public until I keynote the AdExchanger Conference on September 20.

For day by day updates, please follow me on the twitters. If you'd like to arrange a public event, please get in touch via email.

PS. In case you haven't noticed my hundreds of messages about it, there's a Lean Startup Conference coming up on December 3-4 in San Francisco. Tickets just went on sale, so book yours before prices go up. For all of my east coast friends who want to make a trip out of it, we've arranged five full days of events starting November 30.

The Lean Startup Conference Registration is Open

This post was co-written by Eric Ries and Sarah Milstein, co-hosts of The Lean Startup Conference.

We’re pleased to announce that registration is officially open for The Lean Startup Conference 2012. Taking place December 3 - 4 at the InterContinental San Francisco, it will include terrific speakers, new case studies, lot of ways to learn and plenty of time to connect deeply with other attendees.  

Tickets go on sale today. We recognize that different people have different abilities to pay, so we’re trying a new pricing experiment this year, modeled on the way good airlines sell tickets: in blocks, where the first block is cheapest and the last block is most expensive. Each block has a limited number of tickets, and when the block sells out, the price goes up.

To test the registration system (have you heard of this cool thing called an MVP?), we started last week with a block of tickets at $299 each--and we alerted those of you who signed up to be notified (we did tell you to sign up if you wanted the lowest price). That block sold out immediately, and we offered the next block at $399, which also sold out right away. We’re now opening general registration at $485, still an incredible deal. When this batch sells out, the price will go up again, so if price is important to you, we urge you to register now. (We’ll continue to give the conference list early notification, so don’t hesitate to sign up for those emails.)

So what do you get for your money? On December 3, we’ll have a slate of top speakers sharing real-world lean startup stories and implementation advice that advance the state-of-the-art in our community. We’ll also have special lunches where you can connect with other people working on lean startup in your sector and evening events where you can join up with smaller groups. 

If one day of lean starup isn’t enough, how about five? On Tuesday December 4, we'll have a full day of workshops from some of the top Lean Startup leaders, including Janice Fraser, Patrick Vlaskovits, Brant Cooper, and more. We're excited to partner this year with the Warm Gun UX/design conference and Lean Startup Machine to offer five amazing days of learning and networking in San Francisco. 

Our Platinum Pass gets you, in addition to full access to all events, first dibs on the limited seats for hands-on workshops with experts, SF startup tours and special lunches. Here’s the basic schedule:

• The Warm Gun conference is on Friday, November 30.
• Lean Startup Machine starts the evening of the 30th and runs over the weekend until Sunday, December 2.
• The Lean Startup Conference is on Monday, December 3 for a full day of sessions with entrepreneurs and lessons learned. 
• On December 4, we're holding a day of hands-on workshops with experts and site visits with some of  San Francisco top startups.

The pricing for the Platinum Pass will always be better than the price of the individual pieces, but it will go up as The Lean Startup Conference ticket prices rise. Register today for the absolute best deal! 

If you can’t steal away for five days, you have the option of buying just the one conference day or a Gold Pass, which gets you the December 3 conference ticket plus the December 4 day of workshops and startup tours.

With our range of passes and prices, we’ve tried hard to make this show appealing for as many of you as possible--and we’re working on student passes and scholarships, too. We look forward to seeing you soon!

Seeking Speakers

This post was co-written by Eric Ries and Sarah Milstein, co-hosts of The Lean Startup Conference this fall.

Last week, we announced the date and venue for The Lean Startup Conference: Dec 3 - 4, 2012 at the InterContintenal in SF. Now we’re starting to reach out to speakers. We’re aiming for a mix of people: those well known for their work on lean startups and those who aren’t yet prominent but are applying Lean Startup techniques and have valuable lessons to share. And, although this should probably go without saying, we’ll say it anyway: we’re seeking people who can deliver great talks, whether they’ve ever spoken at a conference before.

We know how to reach people who are famous in our community. Previous speakers have included folks like Steve Blank, Scott Cook, Hiten Shah, Dave Binetti, Janice Fraser, and Drew Houston. You may have also noticed a trend: most of our past speakers have been men, and most of them have been white. As a conference organizer, there's always this dilemma: you want to put people on stage that you know will do good job and tell the truth. But that means you tend to put people on stage who have involved you in their work directly. And, as has been documented many times, people tend to work with people like them. 

In our not-very-humble estimation, our past speakers have been fantastic. But that invite-who-you-know approach means we've almost certainly missed other terrific speakers with valuable stories to tell. As Eric's written before: 

‘When a team lacks diversity, that’s a bad sign. What are the odds that the decisions that were made to create that team were really meritocratic? That’s why I care a lot about diversity: not for its own sake, but because it is a source of strength for teams that have it, and a symptom of dysfunction for those that don’t.”

Put another way: the past process helped us field excellent speakers, but it drew from a limited pool of candidates and thus didn’t achieve great equity. This year, we’d like to consider a broader pool of candidates, beyond those we know personally. 

Many conferences and programs complain that they don't get a diverse group of applicants. We believe that part of the reason this happens is that people naturally don't bother applying to programs they don't think they'll be accepted to. We believe that doing our utmost to build a transparent, merit-based selection process will help us field a wider array of candidates.

If you’ve previously held back on applying to speak at a conference like this one because you assumed it wasn’t a meritocratic system and that you needed to know the organizers in order to land a speaking slot, read on.

So how we can find people we don’t yet know who have very useful experiences we can all learn from? By asking all of you to help us find them, encourage them to apply, and convince them their stories are worth hearing.

In our earlier selection process, we got a lot of potential speakers who were already on the circuit. So we’ve closed out that selection form, and we’re pivoting to a new process. (Note: if you were nominated through that form, we WILL follow up with you in August.)

Here’s the deal: If you have a Lean Startup experience or lesson to share--regardless of whether you’ve ever spoken publicly before--we ask that you create a two- or three-minute video in which you explain the idea that you’d like to present at The Lean Startup Conference, and that you share the link via our new speaker nomination form. For new speakers, we’ll provide hands-on help developing presentations, plus speaker training. 

If you don't think you're qualified to speak at a conference like this, you're probably wrong! Most of our amazing speakers also feel that way. In fact, this is a well-documented and universal psychological feeling. So we hope you'll consider applying anyway.

A few notes: 
* Although it's impossible to review a video blind (your speaking skill is part of what's being evaluated), we promise to review the written part of your application blind. When we're evaluating your application, we won't know your name, ethnicity, gender or age. (This is the blind resume screening technique Eric's recommended elsewhere.)

* We care about the story or tips you have to share. You do NOT have to be an All-time Lean Startup Expert for us to take you seriously (indeed, that’s the whole point--we already know those people). What you do need is a relevant experience or some advice that other people can learn from. Most of the time, a straight-up story about how you followed lean principles at your organization and did pretty well with them is not that useful for other entrepreneurs. Instead, consider things like: What hypotheses did you have that you were wrong about? What unexpected challenges did you face? Where have applied a lean approach to a new problem we haven’t considered? You might also look at tactics that you’ve refined in an innovative way--say, a new take on A/B testing or continuous deployment.

* We also care about your presentation style. You don’t have to show us swank slides or a perfectly smooth delivery, but we do want to see that you can connect with people. 

* We don’t care about the quality of the video; go ahead and make it on your phone, then upload it to YouTube. (Before you share the link, though, we recommend that you make sure the sound is not ridiculously quiet.)

* This time around, you are welcome to nominate yourself. 

* There are a few other tidbits we ask for on the nomination form, but it’s short. Do follow the directions and read them first before emailing questions. After we posted the last form, we got a few dozen questions, almost every single one of which we’d already addressed in the directions. 

* The deadline is Thurs, August 23 at midnight PT.

If you work with somebody--particularly a woman, person of color, or anybody else typically under-represented at tech conferences--who has relevant experience to share, please show them this post. Note, too, that we’re looking for speakers from different sectors, including education, non-profits, government and established companies. Again, here’s the new form.

Save the Date: December 3, 2012

This post was co-written by Eric Ries and Sarah Milstein, co-hosts of The Lean Startup Conference this fall.

Big news! We’ve got a date and venue for The Lean Startup Conference: December 3 - 4, 2012 at the InterContinental San Francisco. We’ll open registration in a couple of weeks and if you’d like to be the first to know when tickets go on sale--along with a shot at the lowest ticket price--we encourage you to sign up here for our short, friendly emails.

Sign up for The Lean Startup Conference updates

Note that this year's conference will be part of a multi-day series of activities, including workshops and more. If you're making plans to come from out of town, we recommend you plan to come for the weekend, too.

Some quick notes about the folks working on the conference.

First, the the larger venue this year is made possible by New Context, which is producing the conference. New Context is a consulting firm that helps companies and organizations develop software using lean principles. To support the lean startup community and help us share ideas, they’re getting behind this event in a serious way. Although Eric is a general partner in New Context, we’re observing a separation of church and state for the conference: you won’t see any on-stage ads from New Context, and while the firm may have clients with useful case studies or advice, New Context itself isn’t involved in deciding who speaks at the show.

That brings us to who is responsible for the program: Eric and Sarah, this year’s co-hosts. If you’re here, we assume you know Eric. :) Some of you may know Sarah from the Web 2.0 conferences, for which she was recently co-chair and general manager. She also pulled together last year’s successful Ignite: Lean Startup in SF, and she’s done some other stuff that you may have run across, too.

We’re actively working on the program now, and we’ll talk more soon about our process for finding speakers. Meantime, please sign up below to receive conference email and be among those with access to our special first-mover rates. 

Subscribe to The Lean Startup Conference mailing list

I want to mentor you in the Shopify Build-A-Business Contest 2012

I recently teamed up with Tim Ferriss, Daymond John, and Tina Roth Eisenberg to help you launch a business from scratch. It's called the Shopify 2012 Build-A-Business Competition and it launches today. Now is the time to take that idea you've been mulling over and put it in motion. All you have to do is come up with a product to sell, open your online store on Shopify, pick one of the awesome mentors, then get to work. We'll be there to help you every step of the way.

If you are one of the top sellers at the end of the competition, you'll get:

• $50,000 investment from your mentor

• VIP trip to NYC

• Meetings with all four mentors

• Fast Company Website Feature

• $20,000 Google AdWords Credit

Plus, just just for entering the Build-A-Business competition, you'll receive a free .CO domain for 12 months, $100 in Google AdWords Credits and $100 in MailChimp Credits.

Remember, DOING > TALKING. So if you've been thinking about taking the plunge into entrepreneurship, but are stuck on the fence, let this be an excuse to get started. Tim, take it away:

This is the third year of the contest, and so I wanted to get some perspective from past winners. Here is some insight and advice from the two previous winners to help get you started, in their own words.

2011 Winners: Coffee Joulies

1. How to keep the first product minimal:
I think Coffee Joulies actually exists because we decided to keep the first product as minimal as we could. Dave and I had both tried to start other companies in the past that had a thesis, but did not provide concrete assumptions and lacked the discipline to identify and test them effectively. I was working in manufacturing studying lean principals on the factory floor when I came up with the idea for Coffee Joulies and asked Dave if he would help me. There were two things that made this idea different. The first is that it was 'the simplest idea I had ever had,' a Joulie has only two parts and no moving parts, and the science behind it was so simple I knew it would work. The second is that we strictly enforced a framework that we called 'Original Vision' early on. Basically it said that we had this idea that we knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that we could achieve (make some coffee joulies) and that even though we might come up with some additional good ideas along the way while trying to make them a reality, we were going to focus all of our efforts just to get some Coffee Joulies made and into the hands of customers as fast as possible. It's only the customers opinion that matters, not the opinions of all of your friends who you talk to about your idea. Not even your own additional ideas you come up with along the way are necessarily better. It took months before we could test our original assumption; that people would like a little metal coffee bean filled with phase change material. The reason we were able to make some Joulies on such a small budget and relatively quickly is because we had this framework that allowed us to focus and spend our time only doing things that moved us towards testing that idea. Looking back none of the effort we put into Joulies early on turned out to be wasted.

I compared it to taking a long hike. We knew just where we were going, and that we could easily get there. There were a lot of steps we needed to take along the way. Each step is easy and must take them one at a time, adjusting your balance and foot placement each second. You can't skip ahead and you cant plan more than a few steps in advance, but you still know that by the end of the day, you will reach the summit. Hiking is a piece of cake and its always fun. Very similar analogy to Eric's 'driving the car' from his book.

2. Things that wasted time that seemed necessary at the time:
After we had successfully funded our business on Kickstarter, we had proof that people liked the idea of Coffee Joulies. It was also no longer a hobby, it was all of a sudden much more serious and important, and became both of our full time jobs. The opportunity to waste time and money was way bigger than it was before. We were still very careful to take small incremental steps in order to fulfill our Kickstarter orders. It was obvious that we had to test and iterate on our manufacturing process in the absolute smallest batches, as fast as possible. This helped us get a great and robust manufacturing method figured out relatively quickly, without spending large sums to learn the same lessons using large batches. One thing that we did waste some time on was all of these little details that exist when starting your own business that have these old and ridiculously wasteful methods built up around them. Now we just know how to avoid these. In retrospect it obvious that we can simply look at something and think 'is this a batch for no reason?' and 'is this the fastest, closed feedback loop to test this assumption' but early on it was not so clear.

I'll give two examples. First: product packaging. Packaging salesman would come into our office and take up tons of our time. We would go through weeks of 'iteration' on samples so that we could get a quote at the end of it all that was too expensive and had huge minimum order quantities (batches) and long lead times. Working with a great and creative packaging salesman is fun, and can feel great. At the end of the day you're making a cardboard box. Now we get all of our packaging from ULINE which ships next day, has tiny minimums and we print stickers that we design ourselves and can change in one day. The idea of working with someone else to do a simple task like make a box that literally takes weeks to do, and at the end gives you the privilege of ordering in huge batches with long lead times is just crazy. We are still coming up with ways to improve our packaging that can keep the process lean but make an even better finished product. Meanwhile we've already shipped 20,000 little MVP ULINE boxes to our customers. 

Second: Web design. Dave and I are both mechanical engineers. We're not web designers and we don't know much about hosting a robust website. Since we had all the kickstarter cash in the bank we hired a designer and a developer to make us a good looking Shopify template. Same kind of thing happened with the packaging, a couple weeks turned into a couple months of development. When we finished with Kickstarter orders and decided that the Shopify store HAD to be opened and taking orders for the holidays, the designs were still not done and the store was inoperable. We launched with a bone stock template that Shopify provided instead. Real MVP. The next week we had done tens of thousands of dollars in sales through that template, and not a peep from our customers that it 'looked bad.' We ended up going right through the holiday season and then some, over $300k on that bone stock template. Now if there is ever a choice between a minimal SaaS product and a more custom and powerful solution that requires working with designers or salesman to use, we always pick the off the shelf option to try first. It can feel counter-intuitive but I think people have a tendency to undervalue their own time and the cycle times of installing new parts into their start up.

3. How did things change along the way?
We actually lucked out. The general concept of Coffee Joulies is written down in a gchat in June 2010, almost exactly as it exists today. When we were able to test the assumption, 'do people want/like using this?' We heard a resounding 'yes.' There were a couple of instances along the way where we had to alter the idea in the absolute minimum way possible because our original idea was putting up unnecessary road blocks. For instance, the original idea was for the material to be copper, and be gold plated. We switched to stainless steel because a factory, and a manufacturing method fell into our lap to make stainless steel parts. The impact it had on the product was immediately measurable and good: it looked better and it was way less expensive.

2010 Winners: DODOcase

1. How to keep the first product minimal:

Focus, focus, focus! One of the best pieces of advice we received during our first months in business was to make a list of the 10 most important things we wanted to achieve in the first year, then tear off 70% of the list and focus doing the remaining 3 things exceptionally well. We applied this philosophy DODOcase and for the first 5 months of business we focused on product simplicity by offering only one color (black/red http://www.dodocase.com/products/dodo-classic), as well as focusing local scalable manufacturing and building the story and the brand. This allowed us to simplify our production efforts and focus on telling the story that makes our product so special. This 'less is more' approach allowed our eventual introduction of individual specialty cases followed by full collections to be all the more powerful.

2. Things that wasted time that seemed necessary at the time:
At DODOcase we made the unique decision to manufacture locally in San Francisco and originally thought we’d handle everything pertaining to the business in-house.  We quickly realized we had our hands full just managing production of the physical product, so we immediately identified and outsourced 'non- essential' components of our business to local partners. We found accounting and fulfillment resources that could integrate closely into our business while operating outside our day-to-day infrastructure. We stayed laser focused on building our product offerings and overall brand while leaving the less critical functions to trusted partners. This proved to be the smarter approach overall and to this day we operate in this model. 

3. How did things change along the way?
We have not pivoted from our original vision of protecting bookbinding from extinction.  Our product and manufacturing techniques have evolved over the last two years to include an in-house bookbindery and wood shop operation, but the basic premise of the product and promise of the brand remains the same.    

And, last, here are a few thoughts from me about the contest:

Announcing the 2012 Lean Startup Conference in SF

I’m pleased to announce that I am once again hosting a Lean Startup Conference in San Francisco this fall. 


(The eagle-eyed among you will note that for the past two years, the conference has been called SLLCONF, after Startup Lessons Learned. I think it's time to rename it since that's the phrase people actually use.)

Although we’ve changed the name, the format will be the same as the past two years. We'll continue our rule of “by entrepreneurs, for entrepreneurs.” We’re assembling a lineup of speakers and case studies, from famous companies you've heard of as well as up and coming ones you haven't. They’ll share real-world stories of lean startup principles in action and answer your questions. We'll be long on case studies, examples, and how-to, and short on propaganda and exhortation.


Want to get a taste of what the conference will be like? Be sure to check out complete (and free video) of our past events at justin.tv and Udemy. Or you may prefer Sean Murphy's outstanding conference summaries.
In addition to our conference day, we’re thinking of adding two new elements this year: a day of intensive workshops, and site visits to actual practicing startups. We’ll launch registration soon, promise.

In the meantime, we’re looking for a few things:

* Speaker nominations. We’re particularly interested in hearing from people we don’t yet know who have teachable experience implementing lean startup practices. Some of those folks might be speaker newbies. At the same time, we want really engaging presenters. So we’ve created a short nomination form where you have to include a link to a video of the speaker. Our preference is for videos of speakers in action at a conference, meetup, Ignite or anywhere else they’re presenting in a traditional setting. For totally new speakers, however, we’ll accept a two-minute video of the person describing the lean startup experience they want to share on stage at our conference. For people who are promising and who have unique stories to share, we’ll provide hands-on help developing presentations, plus speaker training.

Because we want speakers that our community can vouch for, you can’t nominate yourself, and you can’t be the nominator if you’re a PR agent and the speaker is your client

Note that we’re keen on lean startup stories from unusual industries or types of companies. We’re particularly interested in bringing in the perspectives of women, people of color and other groups typically under-represented at tech conferences. If you work with somebody who fits that description and who has a usable lean startup story to share, hit the form--it’s mercifully short.  

* Bay area startups that want to host a stop on the group tour. Let us know if that’s you.

* Sponsors. If you’re interested in sponsoring or want more info, email us.

Finally, I want to note that this year’s conference is being produced by New Context, where I’m a general partner. They’ll bring a terrific team to work on the event, and I expect this to be our strongest conference yet.

This is only the first of many updates I'll be posting here. Stay tuned for more details.