I was recently invited to give a talk to a group of local business people about some of my trials and tribulations as an entrepreneur. You can check a short excerpt here.
The topic of successful exits came up. I recounted my most recent startup where my partners and I were building a quantified self platform.
This particular company was by far the fastest I had ever gone from conception to exit and I think a big part of that was the focus on design and gaining user validation early on.
We focused on using the sprint method where we got all the steak holders in a conference room for 5 days and pushed through from concept to mockup based on the feedback we got from potential customers along the way.
It was a fairly stressful and rigorous process but the outcome was great. 60 days after the design sprint we had a working beta that we were testing.
While we were raising investment from the company traveling around, one of the potential investors was very interested in the tech we had developed and offered to acquire the company outright instead of investing.
The acquisition of the company was simply just a case of the right place at the right time, but I think the design thinking method and seeking customer feedback really played into putting us in that position.
I have started a number of companies over the past two decades and this was by far the fastest I had ever gone from concept to beta, had we not sold the company I am certain that we would have launched within a few months, so we would have gone from concept to beta to successful launch in less than a year.
This method is put forward in a booked called “Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days” It’s well worth the read.
The topic of successful exits came up. I recounted my most recent startup where my partners and I were building a quantified self platform.
This particular company was by far the fastest I had ever gone from conception to exit and I think a big part of that was the focus on design and gaining user validation early on.
We focused on using the sprint method where we got all the steak holders in a conference room for 5 days and pushed through from concept to mockup based on the feedback we got from potential customers along the way.
It was a fairly stressful and rigorous process but the outcome was great. 60 days after the design sprint we had a working beta that we were testing.
While we were raising investment from the company traveling around, one of the potential investors was very interested in the tech we had developed and offered to acquire the company outright instead of investing.
The acquisition of the company was simply just a case of the right place at the right time, but I think the design thinking method and seeking customer feedback really played into putting us in that position.
I have started a number of companies over the past two decades and this was by far the fastest I had ever gone from concept to beta, had we not sold the company I am certain that we would have launched within a few months, so we would have gone from concept to beta to successful launch in less than a year.
This method is put forward in a booked called “Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days” It’s well worth the read.