Karthik Ramanujam is currently Digital Sales & MD, CricHQ. He has 14 years of experience with Startups and Corporates – in Sales & Marketing, Content Management & Licensing & Business Development. His past roles include, Head – Sales & BD, Qyuki Digital Media, GM Vdopia INC, Regional Head, Ad Sales, Ten Sports, Manager South, Ad Sales, Sony Entertainment Television, Snr. Sales Executive NDTV Media Ltd.
“Lean Startup” is a concept and management mantra that one hears oft. What does it exactly mean? And more importantly, how can it be applied to day-to-day Startup life – the session plans to address just this question. Bring along your thoughts and doubts and fire them away. There will be enough elephants in the room to address them.
“Bare Essentials – A Practical Guide to Building a Lean Startup”, was followed with an extended Q & A session. Background: The ‘Lean Startup’ term was popularized by entrepreneur Eric Reis on his blog “Startup Lessons Learned” and in his 2011 best selling book – ”The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses”. From last week’s talk and discussion, here are the key Lounge47 takeaways:
1) Lean Startup philosophy prescribes “experimentation over elaborate planning, customer feedback over intuition, and iterative design over traditional upfront big design”
2) Rather than develop a conventional business plan, build a business model after executing key steps – a. Develop hypotheses b. Test hypotheses by getting feedback from potential users, purchasers and partners c. Develop product “iteratively and incrementally with minimum waste of resources”, including time. Basically, Build, Measure & Learn quickly
3) Lean Startup founders discuss their ideas and seek feedback rather than operate in secrecy or “stealth mode”
4) Popular terms – MVP (Minimum Viable Product): a minimum version of product that “cuts the fat, not the essence”; Pivot (a sudden shift in strategy) affecting any and all critical moving parts of the business.
The Lean Startup is more a mindset and approach – there is no recipe book and founders have to make judgment calls for their Startups. The Q&A addressed such specific issues.
