Recap of Lean Startup Conference Streamed into Launch

Launch Fishers was kind enough to provide a venue for our live stream of Day 2 of the Lean Startup Conference, taking place this week in San Francisco. For those of you that aren’t familiar with the term, lean startups are all about maximizing learning and minimizing waste. If you’re a developer or an entrepreneur, your first instinct is often to build a product. But what happens if you build something that no one wants? The purpose of lean is to help you refine your ideas early in the process when it’s easier to change directions if you’re wrong.

 

One of the day’s talks was by Daina Burnes Linton of Fashion Metric. Their initial product was going to help clueless guys pick stylish clothes. Before writing a line of code, they went to malls in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York to talk to their prospective customers. It turned out that style wasn’t the main problem; it was fit. Fashion Metric put up a landing page to collect some email addresses and asked guys a few questions about their body types. Fashion Metric would send out a few shirts, ask the guys to rate the fit, then keep track of the best fitting shirts per body type. Once they understood the relationship between body types and fit, they wrote their first real code and built a “fit tech” engine to provide automated recommendations (commonly referred to as the “concierge” approach).

 

There were several other great talks about growth hacking, continuous deployment, and A/B testing. The videos were posted fairly quickly last year, so keep an eye on the official Lean Startup site, and check them out starting in late December.

 

If you’re interested in learning more about building great startups, join us on Wednesday, January 8 for the Indy Lean Startup Circle. We’ll kick off the new year with an intro to lean. Hope to see you there!