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Survey Monkey and Amazon Mechanical Turk Validated My Startup Idea

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By Lindsay Harper (Founder, Swayable) So you have your genius idea that you just know everyone is going to love, why on earth would you need to do user testing? After all, since the idea is genius everyone is just going to "get it" from the first visit right?

To validate your genius idea (or invalidate it and save you wasted time, sweat and tears) as well as get actual users to test your site once you think it's ready for mass market, survey your potential and current users.

Testing your hypothesis won’t cost you a lot in money, or time for that matter, and will provide a great deal of insight to improve your product/service dramatically.

Here's what I learned about viability testing:

  1. Create a Survey Monkey first, then use Amazon Mechanical Turk to direct Turkers to click on the survey link and to complete the survey.
  2. Test your survey with a small group first and keep tweaking it until you get the right level of response.
  3. Sort and prioritize the results. Don't expect yourself to fix everything that every users tells you, so prioritize the feedback.
  4. You can use MTurk for consumer-facing as well as B2B products.
  5. Good tool for testing price points in Mechanical Turk to see where the sweet spot is for your survey/feedback.

Let's start from the beginning.

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Uncategorized1 min read
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Confident or Imposing? Self-Monitoring Can Lead to Rewards for Women Leaders

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By Katie Corner (Contributing Writer, Women 2.0) None of us want to be the disliked “career woman” who speaks up quickest and seizes projects only to get promoted faster. She's the one who doesn’t mind bad-mouthing her peers to make herself stand out. She's the one who talks with this unwarranted confidence, as if she is always right. About everything.

How many overly confident, aggressive women like this do you know? Probably very few, as most women don’t fall into this category. Research shows that traits such as aggressiveness are typically associated with males and masculine leadership. As a woman very early in my own career, I too occasionally slip too far on the other side of the spectrum: meek as a mouse, feeling slightly overrated and wondering how I fooled everyone into securing another dream job. It turns out I’m not alone.

Beating Imposter Syndrome

I first stumbled upon the Impostor Syndrome when my sister, also an electrical engineer, sent me a link the handbook How to Feel as Bright and Capable as Everyone Seems to Think You Are.

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Uncategorized1 min read
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From Boston Software Engineer to Running A Venture-Backed Startup in San Francisco

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By Leah Busque (Founder & CEO, TaskRabbit) The Beginning of TaskRabbit

It was a cold night in Boston in February 2008. My husband, Kevin and I were getting ready to go out to dinner and had just called a cab when we realized we were out of dog food for our yellow lab. We thought of our options -- have the cab stop on the way home to pick up dog food, or run to store real quick before dinner. None was very appealing.

Both my husband and I are in technology so we tend to have some geeky conversations. That night it turned into -- “Wouldn’t it be nice if there was just a place online we could go, say we needed dog food, and name the price we were willing to pay. We were certain there was someone in our neighborhood willing to help us out.”

In that moment of inspiration (or desperation), TaskRabbit was born. Little did I realize that my life would take a dramatic turn.

The Beginning of TaskRabbit

I spent four months talking to anyone who would listen about the TaskRabbit concept. One of the people I met was Scott Griffith, the CEO of Zipcar. I didn’t know Scott before, but a friend of a friend introduced us. I spent 30 minutes describing my vision for TaskRabbit and at the end of the conversation he said, “I think you are onto something here. I think you should see how far you can take it.”

In fact, this response “see how far you can take it” was a common theme with the people that I met. Thankfully, no one said, “You are insane, this is an awful idea!.” So four months later, in June of 2008, I decided to quit my job at IBM and build the first version of the TaskRabbit website. I cashed out my IBM pension to float us for the next six month, hoping that would be enough time to see what I could do with the idea.

Before that fateful night, I spent 7 years working as a software engineer at IBM, building enterprise software.

I loved my job and I really enjoyed the people I worked with at IBM. But that flash of inspiration had taken a hold of me -- I just couldn’t shake the feeling that I had more to offer and more skills to develop and share beyond programming.

I holed myself up for 10 weeks in the summer of 2008 and coded the first version of TaskRabbit. It was a rough MVP, but it was enough to determine if there was any interest from the market.

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Uncategorized2 min read
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Dress Me Sue’s Sing-Along Lean Startup Blog Post

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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.

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Uncategorized1 min read
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Getting Value from “The Dinosaurs”

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By Carissa Ganelli (Founder & CEO, Commerce Drivers) Why would a mobile commerce startup founder title a blog post, “The Dinosaurs”? Am I referring to the Steven Spielberg, “Jurassic Park”-type dinosaur? No.

I’m referring to very successful business people who have a wealth of traditional business and maybe even startup experience but know very little about tech startups. They exude confidence in their advice and recommendations because they’ve built successful businesses. The dinosaur part comes into play when they try to apply rules from the past to today’s tech startup environment.

Here’s what I’ve learned from Dinosaurs. They have some good advice that you should heed. They also have a bunch of outdated or inaccurate info that you would do well to ignore. Where to draw the line is up to your good judgment.

The good advice:

  • Cash is important to a startup. The number one reason startups fail is due to running out of cash.
  • You might need a demo (not a video) to show the PowerPoint-phobic how the product would work in real life and to show your product is beyond the idea stage.
  • Your pitch deck should be around 15 pages. You need to provide a good overview of the concept with supporting facts like market size, barriers to entry, and deal terms to whet the investors’ appetite. Investors can request more detailed information from you if they are interested in pursuing it further.

Not such good advice:

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Uncategorized1 min read
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A Day in the Life of a Startup Intern at Wednesdays

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By Crystal Yan (Intern, Wednesdays) I just finished my freshman year of college and I've been interning at Wednesdays for about a month. Wednesdays.com organizes employee lunch programs for companies and lunch clubs for organizations (like the Women 2.0 Lunch Club) and is part of the 500 Startups accelerator.

For anyone looking to work at a startup or start one, I thought I'd share some insights from my experience thus far on why working for a startup is awesome and what I've learned so far.

Reason #1: There's no work for work's sake, you get to do more in less time, every time.

My second day on the job, I sent out some emails and mentioned to the founders that we should have a demo video to keep our emails from being too long. So one of them said, "Great, go for it". On my third day, I wrote a script and pulled together a powerpoint with screenshots. I asked Rick, the UX advisor for 500 Startups, to help me edit the script, and he even helped with the voiceover. By the end of the fourth day, a 1-minute demo video was ready to go and was on every individual lunch club's landing page.

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Uncategorized1 min read
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Bootstrapping: Building Fashion the Lean Startup Way

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By Heidi Isern (Contributing Writer, Women 2.0) Lindsay Welsh McConnon believes in building from idea to execution. She is the co-founder of Velvet Brigade, a community driven women’s fashion brand. The company showcases aspiring designers from all over the world and makes their products available to the fashion-loving public.

Lindsay didn’t initiate Velvet Brigade with an idea, but rather a person, her former colleague Jena Wang. “We had complimentary strengths and knew we could build a competitive advantage,” she said. Previously a merchant at Macy’s, Lindsay knew how to select apparel. As a previous product developer, Jena knew how to make it. The only thing missing was that "aha" moment to build a company off of their combined strengths.

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Top Women Tech Entrepreneurs in China

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By Edith Yeung (Founder, SFentrepreneur and BizTechDay) There are now an estimated 384 million internet users in China, yes it is more than the population of the United States. The growth rate of China's internet user population has been outpacing that of any countries in the world.

With tens of thousands of startups booming in China, I am glad to see that women entrepreneurs are not far behind of their male colleague in the technology space.

Here is a list of women tech entrepreneurs who are very active in the China web space:

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Customer Development: Where the Startup Rubber Meets the Road

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By Eric Cantor (Participant, Founder Labs) The brainstorms flow, the sketches come together with a final flourish, and the engineers reason through how the database schema can be perfectly laid out. But the tough news for most potential startups comes when they “get out of the building” and go find out if the product fits the market. Who are you serving exactly? Do they really want it badly enough to engage with it in these crowded times where there are 5 apps for everything? What problem are you solving? These questions and more needed to be answered as we intensify the Customer Development (“CustDev”) process during week 2 of Founder Labs.

Getting Out of the Building

The emerging movement around Lean Startup methodology embraces the agile, nimble, incremental build of a product, starting with a clear focus on customer needs and navigating the way to a business model and an ecosystem. This focus on solutions and customers, rather than technology or product, is one I’ve always followed, and has served well in a variety of sectors and segments including my last few years of work in Uganda, where rapid prototyping was a critical step in everything we attempted.

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Uncategorized1 min read
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RailsBridge NYC Outreach Kicks Off Last Month

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By Karen Zeller (Contributing Writer, Women 2.0) On May 7th, 2011, RailsBridge NYC held its first free outreach and training targeted at women. Open to programmers and non-programmers alike, the event was booked solid within twelve hours of its announcement. Demand and enthusiasm for the event was so strong, attendees facing family emergencies made time in their busy lives to commit and show up for the cause.

Mimi Hui, a product strategist and founder of the consulting firm Canal Mercer of NYC, was the chief instigator and organizer of the event. Without her tenacity the event would not have been able to support the number of attendees as successfully as it had.

According to Mimi, “The attendees were surprising, we had the usual entrepreneurs and women who were interested in transitioning from HTML / CSS but additionally, we also had a woman who is trying to build a prototype to monitor world hunger in real time from the United Nations.”

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Uncategorized1 min read
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Announcing DEMO Partnership and Scholarships for Women-Run Startups

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The DEMO Conference and Women 2.0 announce a partnership and DEMO's offerings of multiple scholarship opportunities to enable a select group of companies to launch at DEMO. The DEMO Scholarship Partner Program will feature a total of 20 full scholarships for bootstrapped companies (valued at $18,500 each).

Of these DEMO scholarships, a minimum of 4 will be dedicated to women entrepreneurs; 10 partial scholarships will be awarded to angel-funded companies and 10 full scholarships will awarded to college students.

DEMO Fall 2011 will take place this September 12-14, 2011 in Silicon Valley. Scholarship application deadline is July 1. Apply now!

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What the Startup Genome Means to Female Founders: Very Little

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By Kaitlin Pike (Marketing & Community Manager, Web 2.0 Expo) Since it was released just two weeks ago, the Startup Genome report has inspired hundreds of blog posts, articles and discussions about the “science” behind successful startups and the causes of business failure here in Silicon Valley.

While the team behind the Startup Genome still has miles of analysis to wade through (including information from their new updated survey), they’ve already put together a number of summaries about the data including their post on VentureBeat -- The 7 signs of failure for internet startups and 14 key findings on their own blog. Here is a quick flavor of what the report authors are saying:

  • “Founders that learn more are more successful.”
  • “Startups that pivot once or twice raise 2.5x more money.”
  • “People who work half time are able to raise money, but ~24x less than founders who go full time.”

As startup business folks, we’ve learned to rely on data, data, and more data to test, plot, and move forward with our ideas, so it’s only natural a report of this nature has sparked such fervent interest. It’s also generated a significant amount of (hopefully helpful) criticism.

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Uncategorized1 min read

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The Women 2.0 Editorial Staff.