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06/16/11 | Uncategorized

Dress Me Sue's Sing-Along Lean Startup Blog Post

By Sue Kim (Founder, Dress Me Sue)

I always wanted to go to a sing-along Messiah at Christmas time. This is when the audience brings a score and sings Handel’s Messiah along with the professional choir and orchestra. Why? Because it’s Christmas and the music is awesome, and sometimes you just want to sing a long at the top of your lungs — but you need the people onstage to take the lead. (Now that I’m using Things maybe it’ll actually happen.)

Another startup buddy and I decided to get serious with Running Lean and do it like a self-led workshop. This is the first resource I’ve come across that lets me get really real — like actually pouring the concrete and hammering the studs, and putting muscle to something.

It occurs to me that maybe there are other people wanted to do lean startup who just need to roll up their sleeves. You know? Time to stop reading blogs, getting all excited watching videos, following lean guru twitter feeds, etc. Time to JFDI and take action — not just one action. But many actions inside a structured process.

Below is our syllabus for the first section — finding the Problem/Solution fit.

Today is our first work day, so you have to do some catch up.

Feel free to Sing-Along with us and report your progress. Why? Because sometimes you want to just sing along at the top of your lungs, but you need people to do it with. Sometimes you don’t want to carry a tune all by yourself.

Week 1

Working on Problem/Solution Fit:

Document Plan A
Prepare for customer interviews
Prepare problem hypotheses

Prepare for class:

Complete the initial lean canvas exercise in chapter 2
Read chapter 3
Set up landing page
Set up content publishing strategy
Secure 30 prospects, and schedule interviews (20 problem, 10 solution)
Read chapter 4
Formulate testable hypotheses
Write problem interview script

Class Session:

Discuss lean canvases
Present landing page, content publishing strategy, and prospect list
Present and discuss problem hypotheses & script

Week 2

Working on Problem/Solution Fit:

Problem interviews

Prepare for class:

Conduct problem interviews
Do your first weekly problem review

Class Session:

Present weekly problem review

Week 3

Working on Problem/Solution Fit:

Solution interviews

Prepare for class:

Continue conducting problem interviews
Read chapter 5
Build demo artifact (mockups, etc)
Formulate demo hypotheses
Write solution interview script
Do weekly problem review

Class Session:

Present and discuss demo, solution hypotheses & script
Present weekly problem review

Week 4

Working on Problem/Solution Fit:

Solution interviews

Prepare for class:

Conduct solution interviews
Do weekly solution review

Class Session:

Present weekly solution review
Solution exit evaluation
Discuss feature and script changes if necessary

This post was originally posted on suesunmi.posterous.com

About the guest blogger: Sue Kim is founder of Dress Me Sue, a self-help app disguised as a fashion app. She blogs about her first-time startup experiences at Tumblr (suesunmi.posterous.com) and welcomes any technical and copy-writing contributions to her crusade to dress the world and eliminate wardrobe pain forever. Sue lives with her husband Todd and silly greyhound Skeeter in northern Illinois. Go ahead and tweet her @suesunmi and her startup at @dressmesue.

Anne-Gail Moreland

Anne-Gail Moreland

Anne-Gail Moreland, an intern with Women 2.0, was on the StartupBus. She studies neuroscience at Mount Holyoke College, where she is trying to merge a passion for tech and the brain into a new wave of cognition-based technology

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