Day one of SXSW was very wet and cold but a good trial of what to attend and what not to attend. We met some lovely new people and caught up with people we met the day before as well as organised meet ups for when we are in NYC next week.
The morning was spent catching up on the day’s schedule with the talks starting in the afternoon. Out of the three talks I attended, or 3 1/2 if you count the one I walked out on 10 minutes in, there was one in particular that I liked and that was Eric Reis’ The Lean Startup: The Science of Entrepreneurship. He talked a lot about how we mostly just hear about the first act of a startup, namely about how the entrepreneurs came up with the idea and how act two, how it actually happened, is often skipped in favour of act three talking about all of the success that startups have. But act 2 is the important one, the one we need to learn from and focus on in order to make sure we reach act 3.
Based on his own experiences with startups he told tales of unsuccessful ventuers and emphasised, with those in mind, that…
Failure is not about taking too much risk. It’s about building the wrong thing
…with one of the key points from Lean being that you should get your MVP – Minimal Viable Product – out as soon as possible to learn what in your current strategy and execution that works and what doesn’t and adjust accordingly.
Learning was one of the other key things he talked about and put it into relation to all of conflucting advice that is out there for entrepreneurs saying:
What ever advice you’re given does it help you learn?
If not it’s not the most useful advice. It’s related to an article that I read the other day and pulled out a quote from about whose advice to actually listen to.
The general take out, and challenge from Eric, was to test your MVP as soon as possible. It’s better to learn early on if something isn’t working and learn from that, than to ship something which looks or works perfectly but that no-one wants.
Tomorrow – Day 069 | SXSW Day 2
