Making a product is tough, and at a startup weekend the teams only have a couple of days to make stuff.  At Startup weekend Venice I gave a quick talk based on a morning observing the teams, to try and help them with their (really rapid) product development.

I spoke about how product development hinges on fuzzy and then focused thinking - and to make sure that they don’t take too long hypothesising rather than making their product.

FUZZY

The first stage of produce development is fairly unconstrained creative thinking. Thoughts need to come and go, be added to, mixed up, and thrown around to come up with the unique entity which your startup will become. This took place over the Friday night and continued over the Saturday morning of the Startup Weekend.

One of the teams was looking at making mobile search more personal to your tastes.  Around that topic they thought about searching for gigs, shops, regional facts, how users search when out and about, their interests, and business models - before deciding to focus on locational marketing based on offers specific to a users tastes. Textbook brainstorming based around a fairly well defined topic (to avoid overly vague thoughts), with the avoidance of making the process too output driven which makes folks scared to share.

In brainstorming not much is physically achieved, but that isn’t the point, these ideas and visions will eventually provide the foundations and plans for the building.

FOCUS

The tough bit, converting the big ideas into stuff people want, in errr, a couple of days.  My advice was to focus, like reallllly focus.  I felt it important enough to illustrate with a 6 step plan on how to focus.

The teams needed to rapidly produce a product which they think will solve the problem they are tackling, and by focusing they are more likely to crack the key part of the puzzle.  The hypothesising over what that might look like or feature is done, and more theorising is unlikely to produce additional insight as customer data is required to prove/disprove your product concept.  Borrowing from the current wave of lean startup thinking, I spoke about how a minimum viable product is a great way to gather this insight and therefore a good aim for the startups weekenders.

“The minimum viable product is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.” - ERIC RIES, Startup Lessons Learned

This product can be anything from a mockup, to an adwords campaign to demonstrate people are searching for what you aim to make.  This social proof is then used to iterate your product and ensure that you achieve product/market fit.  Making this first prototype is an amazing achievement for these fledgeling companies, in previous startup weekends companies have even generated revenue by the end of Sunday!

Lean startups are all the rage at the moment and there are some great articles about them written about by folk far smarter than myself - Sean Ellis, Eric Ries and Stephen Blank.

The startup weekend was a great success with GoWar (Risk type war game using the locational social network Gowalia) as the eventual winners.  Well done all who took part!