Arvi Krishnaswamy

How Scott Cook coaches innovation teams

2016-02-10T00:00:00+00:00

Great Coaches

There are great leaders and there are great coaches. Bill Campbell (to the right in the picture above) is one of Silicon Valley’s most well known coaches, having mentored the Google founders Larry and Sergie, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and Apple’s Steve Jobs. He was CEO of Intuit for half a decade before going to be the Chairman of the Board.

I have not had the fortune to interact with Bill during my time at Intuit, but have always had the greatest respect for the legend. However, I had a few opportunities to receive coaching from Scott Cook (to the left in the picture above). Scott Cook, one of the original founders of Intuit, and former CEO is involved as an internal coach, providing inspiration and guidance to innovation teams.

Scott’s approach

There’s a few things about how Scott approached his sessions with our innovation teams that stood out to me, and are a fine blueprint for most leaders.

Listen

I noticed that Scott first went around the room talking to each person and trying to understand different viewpoints from the teams. Innovation teams typically bring together product managers, experience designers and engineers. Scott probed for underlying dissent or differing viewpoints within the team to ensure they were being heard. This is important since it gets people to open up and talk about challenges they are facing. It can also help diagnose issues within a team that may need further resolution.

Scott probed for underlying dissent or differing viewpoints within the team to ensure they were being heard.

Help where help is asked

Next, Scott would ask us where we needed help. And here’s an interesting distinction - I’ve seen a number of leaders jump into problem solving and emphasizing their viewpoint right at the start. But, Scott started with where teams felt they needed assistance. By helping where help was being asked for, he had us listening with an open mind. So right there, it felt more collaborative with his being on the team’s side, working together on solving a problem. He worked with us on the areas we raised, offering suggestions, exploring different approaches, and helping with internal organizational connects to enable moving things forward.

By helping where help was being asked for, he had us listening with an open mind.

Get to the real issue

Scott would then move on to continue to discuss what next as a co-working exercise. The co-working exercise was root cause analysis, drilling down to the core of what the team may be missing and needs help with. Here’s where he would bring out his ideas in the context of what we were doing, and areas where he felt course correction was needed. These were approached in the context of Intuit’s CDI model (Customer Driven Innovation), framed around three key questions

Find an important, unsolved customer problem
that we, and those we enable, can solve well
and build durable competitive advantage

Scott’s feedback oriented around ensuring we were solving for a measurable customer benefit, and that this had been validated by rapid experimentation with real customers. An internal cadence of metrics used at Intuit called Succession Metrics established ‘Love’ criteria that opportunities need to progress through.

The “Unit of one”, your first customer who sees the benefit, will use your product, and will recommend others (NPS 10).
A Cohort of customers with strong funnel metrics, high NPS and growth levers identified.
Market penetration, ability to deliver profitability with scale.

The co-working exercise was root cause analysis, drilling down to the core of what the team may be missing and needs help with.

Summary

So, if you are coaching or mentoring a team, here’s the takeaways for you to remember

Start by listening to the team, see if there are divergent perspectives that come out
Help them with where help is asked for first
Dive into the real issue and work together with the team to solve for it

Did you find this helpful? Let me know!

How Scott Cook coaches innovation teams was originally published by at Arvi Krishnaswamy on February 10, 2016.

Chicken and Egg problems with Platform Experiments

2015-11-11T00:00:00+00:00

Lean Startup and Platform Experiments

I recently started working at Intuit, running market experiments as a part of the QuickBooks team. Here’s another post that’s a part of the ongoing lean startup series.

Chicken and Egg Problems

One of the challenges with building platform products or marketplaces is the classic ‘ghost town’ or ‘chicken and egg’ problem. It’s what happened to early Google Wave users who initially signed up, found that they had no one to wave to, and didn’t return. Or, e-commerce category launches where sellers dont sign up since the marketplace doesnt have enough buyer eyeballs, and buyers come only if there are enough sellers and a large collection that holds their interest.

Traditional wisdom generally says that the only way out is to make a significant upfront investment in seeding the platform for a few narrow categories until the network effects start to kick in.

While this approach has certainly worked, there are also enough instances where it has failed.

I spoke to a friend who heads the product team at Amazon India and found that their early approach to the India market was not different - they started with a few categories, built out a large catalog, focused on improving ratings in those categories first and then grew from there. But then, they had an existing brand with clout that it brings, and deeper pockets than many. Unless of course you are a venture funded e-com player that’s already on a treadmill with money to burn and little time to do anything but panic, spray and pray.

If you’ve read my other blog posts, you’d already know that this post isn’t about how to burn your VC money.

It’s about how to step back to look at your business model canvas, assess areas of your strategic direction that are at risk, and identify rapid experiments to learn and evolve a sustainable approach.

Two sides of a Platform

Platforms and marketplaces almost always involve at least two ‘sides’. Most often, these are producers on one side and consumers on the other. Think Wikipedia, Waze, eBay, Flipkart, Quikr. But there are variants where the two sides may share similar needs - think LinkedIn, WhatsApp, or Tinder.

Challenges with experimentation

One of the challenges I’ve heard of with applying Lean Startup to platform/marketplace problems is that it can be hard to test experiments without your MVP including a network that is already seeded. In other words, building out the early community or marketplace with at least a few categories and active users has to be a part of your MVP in order to effectively test anything or learn about the market. Without that, you end up with false negatives and the experiment design itself is broken. However, it can take several months just to grow a community organically or to build out a category. This can quickly inhibit your ability to build-measure-learn through rapid loops.

The insight from Brant

When I caught up with Brant Cooper, the author of the Lean Entrepreneur over a dinner organized by LeanMantra recently, he shared an interesting way of thinking about these problems which I found insightful. According to Brant, in every 2-sided platform, there’s always one side that’s really the product.

In every 2-sided platform, there’s always one side that’s really the product.

The side that matters

So, the way to think about this is to protect the experience of the side that’s the product, while offering a velvet rope experience to the other side.

Let’s run through a few examples to see what this looks like.

1. Wikipedia - arguably the contributors are the ‘product’. Apparently the ratio of contributors:readers is 5:1000.

2. Flipkart - the site visitors are the ‘product’, whose shopping experience needs to be protected while leveraging them to bring in hordes of sellers to fill out the catalog.

3. Dating sites - Most straight dating sites are careful about managing the ratio of men:women. Invariably, it’s the women whose experience is protected.

Things aren’t necessarily as black and white as this, and there are nuances where this may not always fit. However, this provides a useful metaphor for how we think about experience and structure our experiments.

The Velvet Rope

Getting a velvet rope experience right in the context of an experiment can be tricky. The original Gmail approach of throttling invites may now be passé, but others like Quibb were more recently successful in roping in influencers with a high hurdle.

Quibb

Sandra, the founder of Quibb took the approach of manually curating every single invitee. Applicants were informed that Quibb had a 37% acceptance rate, and the chances of being accepted improved with social proof and a full bio. At first, you’d think the high hurdle would turn people away - but instead, it did the trick. The psychology behind this clever approach is well documented, and is a good example of the velvet rope experience in practice.

So in other words, think

high hurdle - bring in the best. the best attact the best.
curate - maintain a high quality with active curation.
hooks - use the hook method to encourage behaviors that benefit you.

Tinder

Other examples here include the story of Tinder. The founders first visited sororities and helped women install their app and post their profiles. Next, they hopped across the the fraternities nearby and the frat boys got in line to download the app and connect with their Greek sisters. In many ways, this was the best channel to find their ‘ideal customers’ - the early adopters you need who can’t not use your MVP despite its early kinks.

Summary

In every 2-sided platform, there’s always one side that’s really the product. Protect the experience of the side that’s the product, while offering a velvet rope experience to the other side.

I’m currently at Intuit using rapid experimentation to build a platform that brings together Small Business Owners and Accountants to solve long tail industry specific needs. While the experiments are still at an early stage, this model has helped us refine our thinking about how we structure our experiments. Thanks Brant for the insight!

Chicken and Egg problems with Platform Experiments was originally published by at Arvi Krishnaswamy on November 11, 2015.

Why Lean Startup Is Hard In Practice

2015-06-01T00:00:00+00:00

Over the last couple of years, I’ve blogged about my lean startup experiments (a popular post that made page one of HN). I’ve spoken at conferences about applying lean to building mobile apps. And, I was a mentor at Lean Startup Machine. Along the way, I’ve applied lean at my last startup across ideas incubated using an internal Y-Combinator incubation format. I’ve collaborated with other entrepreneurs as a part of a DHC lean peer group (who reviewed this post). And right now, I’m running lean experiments at Intuit, a large software company. I’ve come to the conclusion that while lean startup has been a terrific step forward in how we think about what to build next, there’s still many significant challenges involved in practice. This post is an attempt to surface some of the issues so that we can talk about them as a community, and we can learn from each other.

Before you read on, you may want to get past some of the common misconceptions about Lean Startup.

Experiment design is hard for beginners.

This may seem obvious, but it’s worth mentioning. Some folks get into lean startup thinking of it in the context of cost, but that’s a misnomer. While lean manufacturing is about cost, and is the origin of Eric Ries’ idea, Lean Startup is about translating a vision into a falsifiable business model hypothesis.

Crafting a hypothesis and finding your leap of faith needs discipline. Choices about validation criteria can be subjective and need judgment calls. Decisions about how minimal your MVP needs to be can be challenging with marketplace or mobile apps where experience matters. Is the right experiment broad based generative research or evaluative to find fitment? Are we testing for the market needs or product fitment? That said, there’s certainly a wealth of information out there now, and vibrant supportive community that’s making this easier.

Source: grasshopperherder.com

There are many tools that have emerged in the last few years like Lean Canvas, Javelin Board, Lean Monitor, Lean Lab, Lean Launch Lab, Brainstormand Lean Stack. There’s even a clever board game by Simen Fure Jørgensen. There’s also several consultants and trainers offering training to help new entreprenurs or intrapreneurs apply lean startup to new ideas. While these have eased the learning curve somewhat, it’s still hard for a beginner going beyond a launch page and into his first pivot to figure out what next.

Sampling sizes need to be large enough to hold significance.

In theory, you’d want to go out and find your ideal customer whose pain your can solve well, and then find more like them. In practice, the narrative isn’t quite as linear.

When you are looking for a strong signal, but looking to test with a minimal experience, you often look for early adopters whose pain is deep enough that they would use your MVP regardless of polish. Often, it can be a challenge finding enough early adopters who match your persona to test things at scale. What then happens is, conversions rates can tend to be lower if the sampling set includes mainstream users used to refined apps with a well designed experience. One way to address this is to craft an experiment that tests if improved design bumps up conversion numbers, but this poses a judgment call about whether you have sufficient validation to invest in further refinement.

One can argue that this is all about distribution. While distribution is always a challenge for startups working through different channels for traction, these challenges exist in larger companies too. Larger organizations can be defensive about exposing key influential users (who are often early adopters) to scrappy experiments, making acquisition just as challenging.

So what ends up happening? Some run experiments with broad, large sampling sizes whose personas type may be a mismatch, leading to invalidation. Or, run with smaller groups with qualitative feedback that yields deeper insights, but may not be statistically significant.

Whether choosing criteria for validation or making a pivot vs persevere decision, we’re often faced with situations that require a judgment call. Despite our best intentions, our decisions are often swayed by our biases. While our understanding of cognitive psychology may have improved over the year, we often let our biases get the better of us.

If you torture the data long enough, it will confess.

Sometimes we often spend endless analyzing things, and make ourselves believe we are arriving at deeper insights by armchair analysis. Instead, we are often just rationalizing our own thoughts with dialectical skills. While Lean Startup provides a framework that appears to helps reduce otherwise rampant confirmation bias, it doesn’t necessarily provide all the answers.

Managing control variables across experiment batches requires rigor and persistence.

A common challenge I’ve seen has been identifying the control variables that influence your experiments and managing them across experiment batches. Without this in place, it can be hard to draw a strong correlation, and understand if you were invalidated or not.

For instance, it’s easy to mix up testing out a channel hypothesis with a value hypothesis and get muddled. One of the medical startups that was at Lean Startup Machine went out and spoke to ten people on the street to test their initial value hypothesis. They got a lukewarm signal, but decided to persevere with a modified value hypothesis. They then went out and spoke to ten people at hospitals. Since the signal was weak, they felt they were invalidated, but weren’t sure if their original value prop might have appealed to the hospital.

In scientific lab experiments, control variables are carefully managed. If an experiment is run again with the same setup, the same results are expected. If not, the original experiment is usually considered to have been flawed.

However, tests in the real world are exposed to several variables which are often beyond our control. While a scrappy approach helps us try things out quickly, keeping in mind the different control variables that apply to your experiment and holding them constant may help derive better inferences about the result of an experiment.

Risk of missing big opportunities.

I think it was Peter Thiel who opined that we may have swung too far from ‘determinate optimism’ towards ‘indeterminate optimism’. He appears to believe that the Lean Startup approach of attempting small bets make not really translate into big high impact ideas that can disrupt industries.

Indefinite futures are inherently iterative. You can’t plan them out; things just unfold on top of each other. The question is thus whether an iterative process can lead, if not to the best of all possible worlds, at least to a world where there is a path of monotonic and potentially never-ending improvement. If it can, we may not get to the tallest mountain in the universe. But at least we’ll always go uphill.

Put simply, he doesn’t think you can experiment your way towards a grand vision. But on the other hand, many great startup ideas that seem visionary now sounded terrible when they started.

Iteration and machine learning are often excuses for not thinking about the future and short time horizons.

Part of his thought process there is that post the 2008 subprime crisis, the world has largely slipped away from the top left quadrant towads the bottom half.

Effectuation and Lean Startup

There’s also the views of Professor Saras Sarasvathy, who was a speaker at a fabulous iSprt roundtable last year. Saras’s paper on “What makes entrepreneurs entrepreneurial” is now regarded as a seminal piece on Effectuation.

Source: effectuation.org

In simple terms, her view is that causal reasoning is used when the future is predictable. But effectual reasoning is used when the future is unpredictable, which is most often the case for entrepreneurs. She believes that instead of causal or systems thinking, entrepreneurs look to leverage available resources at hand to see where they can go from there. In many ways, some of her ideas resonated with the audience and felt more intuitive than Lean Startup. Some, like Rob Fitzpatrick have opined that Effectuation may be the better suited tool to decide what to do next.

Ultimately, most of these views are inherently hard to digest since there’s no easy way to examine how any of these approaches are working in practice. While there are some people who claim to have succeeded using one framework or the other, those declarations have mostly come after they achieved success with limited visibility into the journey. Are we just falling for survivorship bias?

Slope of Enlightenment?

10/Founders and employees often have running room to try multiple products within a single startup; hence popularity of the term "pivot".
— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) March 24, 2015

That @pmarca storm emphasizes two key ideas: founders can gain portfolio economics via 1. pivots and 2. making entrepreneurship a career
— Eric Ries (@ericries) March 24, 2015

It feels like we are past the peak of inflated expectations around lean startup. But are we on to the slope of enlightenment quite yet?

Irrespective of whether we are in a startup or a big company, we’ve come a long way in the last decade with how we think about building products. Lean Startup has radically changed how we think about taking a new idea forward. While there are challenges, it’s great that there is an active community that shares ongoing experiments and trades notes. Continuing to do this will help us learn from each other, and continue to refine our working models.

We are now well beyond thinking of lean startup solely in terms of cost saving, or an excuse to put out half assed MVPs, or to keep pivoting at a whim. If you believe the traction Eric seems to have around his new book The Leader’s Guide, a significant community has embraced Lean Startup in the context of both entrepreneurship and intrapreneurship across a wide range of industries. While challenges remain, we continue to learn.

We cannot afford to have our success breed a new pseudoscience around pivots, MVPs, and the like. This was the fate of scientific management, and in the end, I believe, that set back its cause by decades.

If you have suggestions or examples from your experiences, please drop me a note or connect via Twitter @twitortat.

Why Lean Startup Is Hard In Practice was originally published by at Arvi Krishnaswamy on June 01, 2015.

Himalayas Trek: Triund, Mt Dhauladhar Base Camp

2014-10-20T00:00:00+00:00

If you are considering trekking from McLeod Ganj up to [Triund], this travelogue should serve as a quick and dirty rough guide.

TLDR? Read this first

The trek from McLeod Ganj up to Triund (2875m/9432ft), base camp of Mt Dhauladhar is a popular trek in the Himalayas. Trekkers are rewarded with stunning views of snow capped mountains.

If you are a rookie trekker, take a guide along for the 18 km roundtrip journey. They don’t cost much, and may just save your life. If you’re used to trekking, here’s the gist of your pit stops:

McLeod Ganj (Start)
Galu Devi Temple (3 km)
Magic View Chai Shop ()
Chai Shop
Chai Shop
Basecamp - Top of Triund (9 km)

If a trail of expedition mules come down your path, quickly find a safe spot and let them pass. If startled or nervous, they’ve sometimes pushed unsuspecting tourists over the cliff.

Why is this so amazing?

Well, the highest peak of Mt Dhauladhar is 5,639m (18,500ft). From Triund, these are clearly visible just a few kilometers across the valley. That’s higher that Mont Blanc (4,807m) and Mt Whitney (4,418m) and nearly as high as Mt Kilimanjaro (5,895m). In other words, this is possibly the shortest day trek you’ll take to catch a close glimpse of one of the worlds tallest peaks.

Preparation for the Trek

I’d recommend ensuring you’ve got these checked off.

Good walking shoes
A bottle of water or gatorade (Don’t carry more - filtered water is available at the half way point for a refill)
Warm clothes (even on a sunny day - weather patterns higher up are unpredictable)
Energy bars or fruits (Apples and Persimmons from the markets at McLeod Ganj are delicious)
A good nights sleep, and a moderate breakfast
Hiking stick (optional, but your knees may appreciate it on the descent - available for rent for Rs 50 from shops by the Galu Devi temple)

Starting Point

Start off from the basketball court sized “Main Square” of McLeod Ganj and take the road up towards Dharamkot. Your first stop will be at the Galu Devi temple.

Galu Devi

The Galu Devi temple in Dharamkot is around 3km from McLeod Ganj. There’s two ways of getting here.

The first option is to take a local taxi cab from McLeod Ganj up to Dharamkot. Do not attempt driving yourself or heading up with a chauffer from the plains. The narrow gravel and pebbled road is just about wide enough for one car, and requires careful handling of drift around the bends. Also, the seasoned locals seem to have a system in place when two drivers end up in a narrow stretch. The guy heading downhill (yes, you got that right!) backed up (yes, upwards!) until he found a place that was just about wide enough for the two to squeeze past. The newer Maruti 800s that these guys drive must have good reverse gear mechanics. Once you get past the fact that this can be a precarious ride, the taxi ride up is worth it since it’ll save you a good hour of climbing. In addition to the energy which you’ll save up for the rest of the climb, this will also give you more time to enjoy the sights on top of Triund before you have to head back down. Taxis cost about INR 300-400 each way, but the price may be higher during the tourist season.

The second option is just walk up the gravel path taken by the taxis. It’s broad and a bit long winded and will take you a bit of time, but the ascent is gradual.

The third option is to take the steep but short path up. There are steps, but the climb is moderately steep, and should be a good warm up for serious trekkers.

Now that you are at Galu Devi, consider picking up a hiking stick from the shop there. They rent wooden sticks out for Rs 50 (return them on the descent). If you’ve already brought your stick along, you are all set.

Head on and follow the trail upwards past the village huts.

Magic View Point

The pathway during this stretch is mostly sheltered, and you are surrounded by thick foliage. The path is broad enough for a few people to walk alongside and the ascent is gradual. Along the way, you’ll see a variety of ferns and flowers. You can also hear the sound of water rushing through the different spouts in the mountain and converging at the Bhagsu waterfall downhill. It’s a beautiful, energizing, fresh sound that spurs you on.

From a few spots, you are greeted with lovely views of the Dalai Lama’s headquarters and the large cricket stadium in Dharamsala where the IPL matches are hosted. It’s nice to look back along the way and see how you’ve come. It makes everything worth it.

Chai Shop 1

There are no Cafe Days, Baristas or Starbucks along the way. Even better, there’s lovely little chai shops with incredible views of the plains. The first stop along the way, the Magic View Cafe is arguably the best perch you’ll find. In addition to bottled water, they also offer filtered water at a reasonable price. You can use the filtrs to refill bottles you may carry. There’s also a number of snacks available at the shop. If you have garbage to dispose, this would be a good spot. The shop has well segregated dry and plastic waste, which are safely transported back down to the plains. Bio waste is left on the cliff.

Once you’ve caught your breath here, begin the next stage of the climb up. If it’s a clear day, you should soon start to see beautiful glimpses of the snow capped mountain peaks.

There’s a few points along the pathway that start get a little narrow. Take your time and watch your step, especially in places where the rocks and pebbles are slippery.

Chai Shop 2

By the time you reach the second chai chop, you would have covered over 80% of the distance to the top. In case you have made it this far without a break, you may want to take one here. The sights are lovely. But importantly, the last stretch to the top is slightly steep and you may benefit from the pit stop. If you are lucky (we were), the shopkeeper may get his flute out and play some lilting mountain melodies. Ok well, he also started playing Titanic, and that’s when we knew it was time to leave.

From here onwards, the path gets steadily steeper as you near the 9000ft mark. As you follow the trail, you’ll get to a bald stretch without any trees. The stretch would appear to lead up to a flat horizon beyond. You’re there.

Chai Shop on Top

The flat horizon is the little tableau of Triund. Covered by gorgeous lush green meadows through most of the year, and snow in winter, it’s a stunning sight. The tableau itself is about the size of 4 football fields. At one end, it tapers away upwards into the mountain trail headed up towards the snowline. Right in the middle of the tableau is the final chai shop of the journey. It’s covered by a blue tarpaluin sheet, and is well stocked with snacks, water, and even tents and sleeping bags. The chai shop with the best view.

It’s a view that’s so stunning, you wouldnt even have noticed the green meadows and the chai shop when you arrived. The mighty mountains of the Dhauladhar range seem so close to you, you almost feel like you could reach out and touch them. And they all have lovely names.

The hard part about a day trek is that it’s hard to predict when there’s cloud cover. So most day trekkers end up seeing only a partial view of the mountains, since clouds keep passing through. If you ask me, I’d say that’s part of the charm of the place itself - a clear day would be lovely, but atypical.

There are no toilets on top, but that shouldn’t surprise you. What might surprise you, is that there arent any bushes nearby on the lovely green tableau either. The sides facing the plains are a steep precipice. When you’ve gotta go, you’ve gotta go. There’s secluded spots slightly further uphill or on the side of the tableau overlooking the peaks.

Heading down

You’d want to start to head down no later than 3PM. Ensure you ask locals if its safe to leave at that time, and if they suggest you stay the night over instead on top instead due to inclement weather, they will help you find tents and sleeping bags.

You’ll likely make your way downhill much faster than you did on the ardous trek up. Be kind to your knees, and watch your step. Ironically, the downhill journey is often more dangerous than the uphill trek. It may be the speed of the descent, or just fatigue.

Travels & Guides

If you are looking for a guide, I’ll highly recommend Babu. He was super helpful, resourceful, and fit as a fiddle (or a mountain goat!).

I hope this helps, and you have a safe trek to Triund. Be responsible, collect your trash with you, and have fun!

Been to Triund, have experiences to share? Planning a trip, and need tips? Let me know @twitortat.

Himalayas Trek: Triund, Mt Dhauladhar Base Camp was originally published by at Arvi Krishnaswamy on October 20, 2014.

My Second PyCon

2014-10-11 10:23:16 +0530T00:00:00-00:00

A decade back, college kids used to get taught assembly, C/C++ and Java. Javascript has taken over as the assembly language of the web. And, the place of C/C++/Java in the educational institutions is now dominated by Python.

I was honored to go from being a speaker at last year’s PyCon to being a part of the program committee for the 2014 PyCon which concluded in the last week of September. The Pycon conference is organized by PSSI, a community driven non-profit similar to PSF in the US. The program committee’s focus is primarily on the content of the conference, and assists with curation and mentoring speakers. The committee is a part of the significantly larger volunteer driven organizing team which handles other aspects of sponsorship, logistics, food and setup. While I’d chaired the Droidcon committee earlier, this was a new experience in a very different tech community.

Here are my 10 highlights of the event. This is of course a personal account, and my views are my own.

Python is Everywhere.

It’s been a privilege being a part of what is arguably one of India’s largest tech events, and one of the largest PyCon events around the world. I’m always amazed at how this little microcosm of the python universe reminds us of how far and wide the language is used. Web programming. Machine learning. 3-D Modeling. Weather forecasting. Gaming. Education. Embedded Systems. And in the local community, a wonderful effort has been initiated by Anand to expand Python Month to a year long initiative to help educate newbies with Python. Say hello to Python Express. If you are a professor, a student or a trainer, I’d encourage you to consider signing up or seeing if there’s already a workshop happening close to where you live.

Collaborating with an amazing Program Committee.

The core program committee consisted of Krace, Konark, Kushal, Senthil and I. We were faced with the challenge of having to look at the 140+ submissions and choose around 20 from them. This ended up being incredibly hard since there were several excellent proposals.

Rough Approach.

Here’s the rough approach we took, and a full account deserves a formal post on the PyCon blog.

Between us, we broke out the different sections of submissions for review with a primary and secondary owner for each section.
This let us divide and conquer so that each person need not review more than 30-40 proposals.
We would read through the abstracts, go through slides (where available), request past speaker videos, and go through upstream contributions.
Having a primary and secondary owner reduced the bias that a single reviewer may have, although it’s hard to completely avoid group think.
To the extent that was possible, we interacted with people via the submission funnel, requesting additional information and posting feedback.
Based on this, we shortlisted about 30 odd speakers, including a few who were waitlisted.
We then rigorously followed up with each individual speaker to whet their slides, talk through their presentation structure, demo content, and key takeaways for the audience.

We were supported by Noufal and Anand who joined us on a number of the hangouts we organized every few weeks to ensure we were on the same page, and had consensus on key decisions being made. Senthil, in addition to his review of core and embedded content, also drove the workshops. Pratap and Kathir were external reviewers who helped with inputs of the scientific computing submissions since the committee didnt have sufficient experience internally. Vijay, in addition to several other duties running the conference, helped put together most of the schedule.

Also, here are some structured guidelines we put together for the speakers. If you’d like to view the full 12 page slidedeck, it’s up here on SlideShare.

The feedback ratings post conference show a significant improvement from the previous years ratings. Apart from two talks, all the other talks had relatively positive ratings, and a handful had high ratings. So we must have been doing something right with several long hours in our spare time that went into this. That said, there’s still lots of room for improvement, and there always will be.

Original Work.

The session by Sandeep on an Sharq, open source rate limited queueing system he’d built was one of the standout sessions of the conference. It wasn’t one of the most popular sessions, and it mostly attracted a niche crowd. But where it stood out, was in terms of original work that had been done. I had a chance to check out his work before the conference, and played around with it. Although unacknowledged, it may be partly derived from work by Alan Shreve (whose work is however not open sourced). It’d be great to see more people in the community come forward and show off their original work, and perhaps more importantly, leverage the conference platform to find others to collaborate with and build on each others good work.

Conferences are fun.

Heh, we even found time to shake a gangnam leg on stage for posterity later in the evening.

Kushal’s Keynote.

Kushal delivered a personal keynote that chronicled his journey. From his beginnings in his village, through learning technology, contributing upstream, learning from others around him, coaching and mentoring others, it was a wonderful journey told straight from the heart. If you haven’t look up the excellent work DgpLUG now does - they have their unofficial(?) annual meeting on the stairway at PyCon. I was sitting with him just minutes before he got started with the keynote, and he wanted me to look through his slides. As he started to walk me through them, I had to interrupt him - I was so touched by the first few slides that I selfishly told him that I wanted to just hear him live on stage. I’d like to think I made up for that by clicking him in this Moses pose, parting the upstream waters for aspiring contributors.

I’m sure Kiran’s keynote last year and Kushal’s this year will inspire several to think upstream. I’d love to see more such personal stories that weave in key themes that set the tone for the conference.

Dinner with the Speakers.

We did this smaller, intimate dinner with the speakers and volunteers on one of the evenings at Barbeque Junction in Koramangala. The food was passable, but the conversations were electric. I caught up with Sonal, Dhananjay and Vajrasky over dinner, and we had an enthralling discussion about work, travel, and culture.

Old Faces, New Faces.

I met a number of incredibly smart people, and I wish I could recall enough names to list them here. While some of the sessions were by veteran speakers, there were a couple of first time speakers. One of them that stood out was a session on Medusa, a Dart generator, that was presented by Rahul, a college student. I snuck out of the conference in between to go attend the Bangalore Literature Festival for a bit with Abhay, and apparently missed seeing a 9 year old present about his work with Arduino. It was also nice to meet familiar faces from previous PyCons and hang out on the stairway. I don’t know about more Audis, but the conference hall likely needs more stairways soon! Noufal. Anand. Kiran. Dhananjay. Sonal. Krace. Shrayas. Abhishek. Kushal. Anand. Sankarshan. Michael. Haris. Sandeep. Vajrasky. Abhay. And the many more whose names I cant remember now. Thanks for terrific conversations.

Panel - Flask vs Django vs Web.py

Ok, I’ll admit I’m biased since I came up with the idea for this panel and I also moderated the discussion. After my talk on Flask at last year’s PyCon, I got a number of questions about choosing the right framework. It’s often a nuanced choice, and there’s no one size fits all answer. I thought it would make for an engaging conversation in a debate style format to get the different tradeoffs involved directly from experienced practitioners. One of the things I didn’t want to do however was to script the panel discussion. I prepped the panelists so that a general sense of the structure of the discussion, and the high level themes were clear, but we avoided discussing specifics until we were on stage.

I was nervous an hour before the panel. There were just a ton of little things to juggle. I skipped lunch to get set up on stage and prep.

I had to walk the difficult line between maintaining structure and retaining spontaneity. I kept the Twitter #pyconindia stream open on one screen along with my moderator notes, and the slides projected on the other. I wasn’t sure how well conference Wi-Fi would hold out, but I was going to meld in questions that came in via the Twitter hash tag into the panel itself. My moderator notes had specific questions, timelines for reach round of discussion, and icebreakers.

It was also important to engage with the panelists to ensure they had sufficient talk time on each point, and countered each others points. To make things a bit harder, we were on just after a big hearty lunch, and some amount of levity was essential to avoid the audience going into mass coma.

I loved the energy of the debate, and I thought the three panelists - Anand, Kiran and Arun were outstanding. I think we are fortunate to have such experienced practitioners together on stage. Anand is a co-author and maintainer of Web.py and had collaborated with Aaron Swartz. Kiran has been using Flask at scale actively at HasGeek over the last few years. Arun is an acknowledged expert on Django and has a book coming out soon. I’m honored to have shared the stage with them that afternoon.

At one point, it amused me how Kiran who had initially been on the fence about taking a strong position with Flask started thumping the Alchemy bible whenever Anand dissed ORMs. That got the audience really going. Arun was Django unchained, and held his ground throughout pretty well.

I’d built a basic missed call voting system which we used at the end to poll the audience. 402 people voted via their phones in the space a minute. I was relieved that the system held up when it had to, although Wi-Fi dropped and we couldn’t project the live results. The clear winner was Django.

During planning as well as setup, I received great inputs and suggestions from Krace, Konark and Mukesh. Also, Abhishek helped pull together the awesome visualization of the voting on codepen.

Open Spaces!

We followed up the panel with a deep dive in the Open Space area upstairs at Nimhans. With a smaller group of 25-30 folks, it was a good opportunity to dig into the nuances a little more, talk about personal experiences, and also cover off frameworks like Pyramid and Twisted. The discussions could have been more interactive, but some of this will take time to evolve. I’ll likely spend more of my time in open spaces next year than in sessions.

Pure Volunteer Magic.

It’s incredible how much volunteer effort goes into the conference. Apparently there were over 1200+ delegates, which means a packaged house at the Nimhans venue. Volunteers worked round the clock the week of the conference to get the food, decorations, handouts, T-shirts, registration and sponsor booths, and a zillion little things right. With this being a volunteer driven event, there’s also a ton of chaos. Communication isn’t always great, a few people end up doing a sizeable chunk of the work, and a few things always fall through. But, it’s the self organizing nature of community events which makes them special and unique. The early bird price of the ticket for the event is INR 800 (USD 13), which is ridiculous value for the two days of great sessions, meeting smart people, eating scrumptious food, and getting a fun conference tee. In contrast, most other good tech events in Bangalore are often upwards of INR 3000 or more, and dont often include the swag.

Life with Py is good!

My Second PyCon was originally published by at Arvi Krishnaswamy on October 11, 2014.

Why People Buy Things From You

2014-06-06T00:00:00+00:00

Why People Buy Things

You can spend a ton of time making your site easier for your customers to understand what you do.

Or you can spend a ton of time understanding your customers. And then customers will buy things from you because you understand what they do.

Why People Buy Things From You was originally published by at Arvi Krishnaswamy on June 06, 2014.

Customer Development, Invalidation, Karma and WhatsApp

2014-05-29T00:00:00+00:00

This is an amazing story worth sharing again, and again. In May 2009, an entrepreneur shared this on an online forum that he was active on.

Wouldn’t it be cool if i just set a status for my iPhone, similar to how you can set a status on yahoo messenger or skype. So i spent a couple of months and developed a little tool - it can let you set a status like “On the flight to munich, send email instead of calling me”. I would like to hear your feedback and suggestions on the idea. Hit or miss?

It turns out, there was only one comment in response to his post.

It appears that this requires the other party to also have the app installed, right?

Bummer. The bubble just burst. But just a little bit later, in July `09, the entrepreneur is back with a new update.

Just wanted to mention that version for blackberry is available.

No response on the forum. They were all like whatever, dude. But then, fastforward a few years to Sep `13, and the entrepreneur is back with this post on the same old thread.

so i was looking on this forum for something else (trying to use my M&M miles) and remembered i posted this thread 4 years ago. i am thinking some of you might be using WhatsApp now

It turns out that Jan Koum had left Yahoo, and then taken time off to travel around South America. He then tried applying at Facebook, but got rejected. Later in Jan 2009, he came up on the app idea of Whatsapp, and started working on it. It didn’t click initially, but he hedged his bets and kept pushing along until the numbers started to grow. And the rest as they say, is history. Karma apparently works in mysterious ways, and Jan is back at Facebook.

Karma and Whatsapp

It’s worth pondering about what the MVP for Whatsapp would be. If you’d believe a random source below, the MVP costs $120,000, whatever that means.

Is this really what it takes to build a Whatsapp MVP?

There’s a few questions worth asking

What do you think the MVP in this case is?
If you followed a customer development approach and spoke to 20-30 people back in ‘09 about this like Jan did, it’s quite possible that most of them may have said they wouldn’t use it since it requires others to be on as well. If that had happened, what would your learning have been?
If building a community is a part of the MVP itself, how do you test that out as early as possible?
Why did Whatsapp succeed despite the existence of players like Google, Facebook, Skype and others with their messengers? Why were the telecom providers bleeding SMS revenue caught napping? What can we learn from it?

Customer Development, Invalidation, Karma and WhatsApp was originally published by at Arvi Krishnaswamy on May 29, 2014.

The Evolution of the PMO Site - Vajpayee to Modi

2014-05-27T00:00:00+00:00

Here’s a colorful look back at the PMO India site over the years, with archives from the Wayback Machine.

Vajpayee PMO site in May 2000. Not terrible for a site from the `90s, but still all over the place. Note the prominent poll on match fixing!

Vajpayee PMO site in June 2003. Polls on cricket continue. His poems are still prominently featured.

Manmohan PMO site in Mar 2005. Just the profile picture and name were switched.

Manmohan PMO site in Jul 2007. Highlights prominently the one thing he was never known for - his speeches.

Manmohan PMO site in Jul 2011. Six years in office and barely any changes.

Manmohan PMO site in Jan 2014. A pre-election site rev to make his *cough* speeches more prominent.

Narendra Modi PMO site in May 2014. A snappy new site that went live at the time of the swearing in. Promises transparency and an channel for direct communication with the people.

Note: The PMO website policy section indicates that external sites must get their permission before linking in to it. I’ve sent in a request for permission, but I hope this policy is just a relic of the old website that never did get updated. In case you are from NIC or PMO and would like the link removed, please contact me.

The Evolution of the PMO Site - Vajpayee to Modi was originally published by at Arvi Krishnaswamy on May 27, 2014.

Why Large Companies Should Consider A Lean Startup Approach

2014-05-22T00:00:00+00:00

Recently, Adam Penenberg made a great post about large companies and why the MVP matters to them. There’s several things that I strongly agree with, but one stands out in particular.

Large companies are still largely stepped in a culture that’s risk averse. They have large teams dedicated to building out and fine tuning processes within the organization for strategic planning and execution. As Adam says, the traditional mindset is biased towards more upfront planning, in the hope that more planning will translate into better results.

That is, the more planning we do, the more apt we are to hit the nail on the head. The more thought we put in upfront around designing the next product, the more apt we are to hit the mark.

This is far from the truth. Companies that build a business model or a large product based on a long cycle of planning, deliberation and analysis are only increasing their risk. While there are exceptions, they are far from the norm, and the reason why large companies today find it easier to acqui-hire than to innovate internally. The sooner we get ourselves in front of real users, talking to them, and getting data or feedback, the better placed we are to test out high risk assumptions.

Infosys, which has seen a slew of top-level exits recently, saw attrition rise to 18.1%

Wonder why Indian IT giants like Infosys, Cognizant, Wipro and TCS have made no headway whatsoever with their attempts at what they call non-linear growth models? The writing is very much on the wall.

The great recession of `08 pretty much hammered in the last nails on large enterprise software and unwarranted custom development. While they’ve created teams focused on building solution frameworks and reusable software, they’ve not experimented with radical changes to their models. With most bright grads now moving to startups, you wonder how they can influence internal change any more.

Unfortunately, our IT industry and education systems churn out graduates who are exceptionally good at solving well defined problems. We’re also good at mapping undefined problems to certain known patterns and approaching them. However, we lack adeptness with lateral thinking and dealing with complete ambiguity in an open, exploratory mode.

Cultivate a learning mindset.

In most of our ivory towers, there’s a great deal of emphasis on strategic thinking and the ability to execute, but an insufficient understanding of the importance of a learning mindset. In contrast, graduates with an ability to cultivate and retain a learning mindset are most likely to be enterpreneurs. Their natural tendency to run along with an open mind, be filling to adapt to the unknown, and leverage their intuition while there’s limited data at hand sets them apart.

I’d love to see a few of the majors come forward and create venture funds, support the startup ecosystem, and encourage some of their intrapreneurs to take wing. With a quarterly net profit of $463 million, I’d imagine it wouldnt break the bank for Infosys to create a $100 million fund.

They’d have to start by opening their minds.

Why Large Companies Should Consider A Lean Startup Approach was originally published by at Arvi Krishnaswamy on May 22, 2014.

A 10 Minute Good Reads Challenge

2014-05-20T00:00:00+00:00

So, my colleague and good friend Raj prodded me towards this post. He asked us to come up with a list few memorable blog posts that we’d all liked. What constitutes a blog post was left fairly open, and could include opinion pieces from all types of media.

The List

I spent all of 10 minutes pulling this together. (And then longer finding the right links online.)

“Super Successful Companies”¹ by Sam Altman
“The debilitating myth of musical chairs”² by Seth Godin
“Be Good”³ by Paul Graham
“Python And The Principle Of Least Astonishment”⁴ by Armin Ronacher
“Narendra Modi: Man of the Masses”⁵ by William Dalrymple
“Licensing In A Post Copyright World”⁶ by Armin Ronacher
“But What If I Fail”⁷ by Seth Godin
“The Powerlessness Of Positive Thinking”⁸ by Adam Alter
“The Most Beautiful Game”⁹ by Geoff Dyer
“The End of Imagination”¹⁰ by Arundhati Roy

The Futility

This list isn’t terrible, but it doesn’t capture some of the better reads I’ve come by. It’s mostly an incongruous cocktail of authors who have been in my mind lately. Sadly, my searches through Readability and Pocket to find memorable posts within those 10 minutes proved to be futile. It’s a reminder of how in this world where a barrage of information passes us by, we quickly get consumed by the deluge. Maybe it’s time to get back to bookmarking. Or, going back and re-reading old posts that we love. ~~And scribbling notes on the side.~~ Oh wait, can’t do that anymore.

The Unscience

What did Raj hope to achieve out of this? Well, he’s been researching what he calls the unscience behind blog posts - a science that’s not really a science. There’s a bit of a fad today where writers who appear to have no research or scientific background craft posts with a variant of science in the title.

The Science of Yada Yada
What Science Tells Us About Yada Yada
The Scientific Reasons Why You Should Do Yada Yada

The posts toss together a ton of what’s often pseudo science, but are aggregrated well and presented in a credible way. And these posts are quickly lapped up masses who don’t have the patience to dig into the details themselves. Ergo, the pseudo science becomes a science that’s believed in. Intrigued or puzzled? Read Raj’s post - Unscience of Blogging.

And if you’d like to take up the 10 minute good read challenge, make your list and link back here in the comments.

References

A 10 Minute Good Reads Challenge was originally published by at Arvi Krishnaswamy on May 20, 2014.

Why I'm a Mentor at Lean Startup Machine Bangalore

2014-05-19T00:00:00+00:00

The Lean Startup Movement
Practicing Lean
LSM Bangalore Mentors
How LSM works
- Hackathons
- Validation Board
What takeaways can you expect?
- Say Hello
- Slides

UPDATE: This post has been updated to include my slides further down at the end.

Lean Startup Machine is coming to Bangalore, India. LSM has held 150 workshops in 50 cities, across six continents, for over 25,000 aspiring entrepreneurs around the world.

The Lean Startup Movement

Unless you’ve been living in a cave, you’ve likely noticed that the Lean Startup movement has been gaining momentum worldwide. Since Eric Ries wrote about continous innovation, several startups have embraced a new way of building sustainable businesses. One of the misnomers associated with lean, especially amongst the uninitiated, is thinking that lean represents just a capital efficient way of running a company. Instead, it’s a radical shift in how we think.

Practitioners go through a methodical set of steps. They start outlining their bright new idea and identifying their target customers. Next, they put down the high risk elements of their idea, and go about validating them with a series of iterations that involve direct customer feedback. They progress forward only after having gotten validation at each step.

While the lean approach does not guarantee success, it provides a systematic foundation for real learning and improvement.

Practicing Lean

I’ve blogged recently about what I’ve learnt about customer development, applying lean to mobile app development, and learnings from an MVP that we abandoned. A lot of it is plain common sense, and likely includes many things you already apply. I’ve found it valuable to have a structure around my thinking as well as a shared vocabulary since it helps me communicate my thought process and intuition better. I’ll continue to update my blog as I learn more.

LSM Bangalore Mentors

I was recently invited to volunteer as a mentor for young, upcoming entrepreneurs that are going through a 3-day workshop at Lean Startup Machine. LSM has held 150 workshops on lean methodology in 50 cities, across six continents, for over 25,000 aspiring entrepreneurs around the world. All the mentors volunteer their time, and pay it forward towards the community.

Lean Startup Machine Bangalore Startup Mentors

It’s an excellent line up. There’s several leading lean practitioners like @mtrajan, @mohamax and @natwar86, who are all doing a wonderful job educating and supporting the local community. There’s successful enterpreneurs like @phani1881 and @pratyushp as well as VCs like @seedfund and @s_brij_verma. I’m chuffed to be in such good company.

How LSM works

The excerpt above is from the Lean Startup Machine About page

Melissa Peri on her Lean Startup Machine experience.

Hackathons

It’s worthwhile noting that the LSM workshop is not a hackathon. It’s less about coding, and more about teaching entrepreneurs and innovators about how to build products.

Validation Board

Validation boards are tools to help enterprenurs apply lean methodologies. They provide a sheet which helps you structure your thinking with slots for your USP, target segment, revenue model, hypothesis, and learnings. A few popular boards include the Lean Canvas and Javelin Experiment Board. Javelin, the organization that runs LSM worldwide recently raised $1.5 million, and part of the agenda in the LSM workshops will be to orient you with their own tools. Related, but slightly different tools for managing your KanBan include Lean Startup Kanban and LeanKit.

What takeaways can you expect?

Network with several aspiring entrepreneurs in a small cohesive environment, far away from the noise of the startup conference dance.
Learn how to adopt a systematic way of testing out your ideas to see if they solve real problems.
Understand how getting out of your cubicle and talking to real users can help you seek validation about your ideas early, and help refine your MVP.
Practical examples of how other lean practitioners have benefited from the methodology, and insights you can benefit from.

LSM tickets are $299 in the US, but are priced by the organizers, Nascomm 10000 Startups at Rs.3,500 (~$60) for the 3-day workshop. It’s a small fraction of the international costs for a potentially life changing experience for a young entrepreneur. If you want to contact the organizers, reach out to @rohith_v and @nitprashant for questions.

A Lean State Of Mind

Say Hello

If you are attending LSM this month, give me a shout @twitortat and say hi. It’d be great to get a few conversations started ahead of the event.

Slides

Why I'm a Mentor at Lean Startup Machine Bangalore was originally published by at Arvi Krishnaswamy on May 19, 2014.

Kicking off Levitum Knot Hangouts On Air

2014-05-15 18:12:52 +0530T00:00:00-00:00

I’d blogged recently about how we’ve adopted a new approach to how we’re running meetings at Levitum.

A simpler, clear schedule for our meetings

If you’d like to know more about how why we’d scheduled our meetings this way, I’d encourage you to read the original post.

We’ve begun to host the Knot on Thursday mornings at 9AM IST | 8:30PM PDT. One of the things that has always amazed me about the Levitum team is the amount of talent and knowledge everyone has on a wide range of subjects. Often enough, the day to day routine of our work doesn’t let us explore this as much as we’d like. And what better way to bring a team together than just share your knowledge and passion with each other.

And what better way to bring a team together than just share your knowledge and passion with each other.

We’re hoping to cover off a wide range of topics - technology, business, social media, sports, photography, music and more. The goal of these sessions is to keep things informal, and not need a lot of prep. The topics are also not related directly to our business or products.

The First Knot Edition: A Primer on Photography by Vishnu

The first Knot this morning was hosted by Vishnu, who did an amazing job of priming us on photography. In a little over a half hour, he provided an introduction to the key concepts behind aperture, shutter speed, and ISO. He also covered depth of field, framing/composition, and a number of simple tips that apply to camera phones as well. I’m inspired enough to go out and pick up a DSLR!

In the interest of sharing this with everyone else who are interested, we plan open this out to the public. So, if you don’t mind ad-hoc learning without a set agenda or formal structure, join us on our weekly Knot Hangout on-air. Or, just come hang out and say hello!

Knots happen every Thursday, at 9AM IST | 8:30PM PDT. We’ll post updates on upcoming Knots on our Google Plus page and on our Twitter handle.

Guest Speakers - The Friendship Knot

One of the things we’d love to do once we’ve started to get a little bit of structure (read: less screw ups) around how we’re running the on air sessions is invite friends at other startups to join us for guest sessions. We’re open to most topic ideas - we’d just like to keep it informative, informal and useful. We think this might be a nice way to brings birds of a feather together, and find others who share common hobbies and passions. If you’d like to be a guest speaker write to hello@levitum.com or ping @twitortat.

Kicking off Levitum Knot Hangouts On Air was originally published by at Arvi Krishnaswamy on May 15, 2014.

Running Effective Meetings At Your Startup

2014-05-04 12:41:59 +0530T00:00:00-00:00

The Grease
What makes an effective meeting
- Establish the purpose
Invite less people
- Use the best tools
- Keep conversations effective
How We Run Meetings Through The Week
- Our Schedule
Monday - The Sunny Beginning
Tuesday - The Compass
Wednesday - The Caliper
Thursday - The Knot
Friday - The Truth

At Levitum, we are currently experimenting with a clean, new approach to how we’re running meetings during the week. This post shares the thought process behind the changes we’ve made as we’re growing and balancing new priorities. We’re hoping this will help us be more efficient, promote collaboration, and ensure we are looking out for the right things.

A simpler, clear schedule for our meetings

The Grease

While often viewed as a necessary evil in most startups, meetings provide connective communication grease.

Meetings. While often viewed as a necessary evil in most startups, they provide connective communication grease. Grease that helps information flow, camaradarie to grow, and keeps your startup running like a well oiled machine. But invariably, too much meetings can be a bad thing. Developers get particularly restless when they end up spending too much time in status meetings. Strategy meetings can often spin into endless self aggrandizing discussions. How do you know when you’ve got the right mix and balance of meetings?

What makes an effective meeting

Running effective meetings really boils down to three things¹:

They achieve the meeting’s objective.
They take up a minimum amount of time.
They leave participants feeling that a sensible process has been followed.

Establish the purpose

It’s also important to decide upon what the key purposes² your meetings are for:

Communication – share new initiatives, company victories and upcoming challenges
Consolidation – unite the team around a common sense of purpose and formally onboard new team members
Confirmation – highlight employee accomplishments which reinforce the company’s values and culture
Motivation – excite employees and describe how the company will win, without ignoring reality or attempting to delude them

Invite less people

Invite less people. Or at least as few people as you really need to.

The honest truth about this is, we invite too many people all the time. And we attend several meetings where don’t add much value. If you’ve got people who sit through your meetings without offering any new perspective or ideas, their attendance was likely optional in the first place.

If you’ve got people who sit through your meetings without offering any new perspective or ideas, their attendance was likely optional in the first place.

I don’t doubt that they may have required the context and thought process behind the discussion. But, that may have been better served by providing them a separate 10 minute summary instead of having them sit through an hour long meeting. And this is not about who is smart or who is not - everyone’s got a role to play and a job to get done at the end of the day.

Use the best tools

In the context of meetings, it’s important to also cover off collaboration tools. I’ve written about collaboration tools every startup should consider³, but I’ll call out some of the newer ones that are arrived since then.

While you may be able to get by with with Skype or other similar general consumer chat apps, most startups I know are using either Campfire, Hipchat or Slack. In our case, we’ve made Slack the primary. I’ve literally gone through weeks without having had to have exchanged emails with my colleagues.

These tools are particularly effective for distributed teams (we’re in 3 different cities), and help keep everyone on the same page. A quick live conversation is just a click away.

Keep conversations effective

And here’s a few tips from Sean Blanda⁴ on keeping the conversations as useful as possible.

There is no judging in brainstorming. Focus on capturing ideas before filtering and critiquing them.
Bring solutions, not problems. Solutioning in the middle of a meeting wastes precious communication time. If you can’t bring proposed solutions to the table, save it for next time or bring it up in private conversations.
Review “homework” from the last meeting. Not only does it remind participants what happened last week, it holds attendees accountable.

How We Run Meetings Through The Week

Earlier, we used to mostly operate off a daily standup at 9AM. This used to mostly work ok - we’d just follow up and set up breakout meetings as and when needed. But increasingly, the meetings used to stretch out for an hour or so, often meandering through updates and discussions that weren’t always relevant. Plus, there were certain topics that we ought to have been covering off that simply weren’t surfacing.

We’re trying out a new meeting structure for the week. Every day, the meetings start at 9AM over Google Hangout, and run for half hour to an hour. There are also other meetings not listed here for breakout discussions on technical or marketing activities.

Our Schedule

Monday - The Sunny Beginning

Discuss how last week went (brief)
Discuss plan for the week

The objective of this meeting is to lay out the plan for the week ahead. We’ve been using LeanKit extensively, and use it to track everything. We try to get LeanKit up to date coming in to the meeting so that the rough plan is in place and we need to sync up just to ensure we have a shared context.

Tuesday - The Compass

Are we headed in the right direction?

This is a slightly broader discussion about whether we are on track towards the original goal. While we could have considered moving this to a fortnightly or monthly discussion, it’s important enough since we’re learning a lot rapidly. This gives us a weekly checkpoint to consider whether we need to pivot based on our learnings, or whether we are on course.

Wednesday - The Caliper

What are some of the things we are doing well
What are things we could be doing better
Are there things we aren’t doing that we should be?

We’re focused on just 2-3 metrics at this point. They are around acquisition, activation, and retention. In certain areas such as customer development, we currently just track the number of conversations we’ve had.

Thursday - The Knot

Learn a new thing from each other

One of the things that has always amazed me about the Levitum team is the amount of talent and knowledge everyone has on a wide range of subjects. Often enough, the day to day routine of our work doesn’t let us explore this as much as we’d like. And what better way to bring a team together than just share your knowledge and passion with each other.

And what better way to bring a team together than just share your knowledge and passion with each other.

We’re hoping to cover off a wide range of topics - technology, business, social media, sports, photography, music and more. The goal of these sessions is to keep things informal, and not need a lot of prep.

Friday - The Truth

What we accomplished this week
What have we learnt
Demo/Show/Tell

The last day of the week is a show and tell, focused on a quick update on what got accomplished during the period and what our learnings were. This would typically include product demos, code walkthroughs, and general show & tell sessions.

If you are at a startup, how do you structure your meetings? I’d love to hear what you do, and see if we can learn from your experiences. Chime in via the comments, or drop me a note on Twitter

Running Effective Meetings At Your Startup was originally published by at Arvi Krishnaswamy on May 14, 2014.

Unending Love, Audrey Hepburn's Favorite Poem by Rabindranath Tagore

2014-05-04T00:00:00+00:00

Audrey Hepburn’s Favorite Poem
The Full Poem

Tagore wrote Audrey Hepburn's favorite poem

Audrey Hepburn’s Favorite Poem

As Google celebrates Audrey Hepburn’s¹ birthday with this lovely doodle², it’s worth re-reading one of her favorite poems by Rabindranath Tagore ³, Unending Love.

It’s a lovely little piece where Tagore subtly immerses the reader in experiences of love.

Clad in the light of a pole-star piercing the darkness of time: You become an image of what is remembered forever.

We are taken back and forth across time, which if you ask me, makes the piece feel even more ethereal.

Today it is heaped at your feet, it has found its end in you The love of all man’s days both past and forever:

The Full Poem

Here’s the full poem, translated from the original Bengali by William Radice⁴. William was an English poet who spent decades with Tagore, developing a deep understanding of his work, and honed techniques for translation into English which retained the power of the original prose.

Unending Love

I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times…
In life after life, in age after age, forever.
My spellbound heart has made and remade the necklace of songs,
That you take as a gift, wear round your neck in your many forms,
In life after life, in age after age, forever.

Whenever I hear old chronicles of love, its age-old pain,
Its ancient tale of being apart or together.
As I stare on and on into the past, in the end you emerge,
Clad in the light of a pole-star piercing the darkness of time:
You become an image of what is remembered forever.

You and I have floated here on the stream that brings from the fount.
At the heart of time, love of one for another.
We have played along side millions of lovers, shared in the same
Shy sweetness of meeting, the same distressful tears of farewell-
Old love but in shapes that renew and renew forever.

Today it is heaped at your feet, it has found its end in you
The love of all man’s days both past and forever:
Universal joy, universal sorrow, universal life.
The memories of all loves merging with this one love of ours –
And the songs of every poet past and forever.

- Rabindranath Tagore

Gregory Peck reads Unending Love

After Audrey's death, Gregory Peck reads out her favorite poems.

Audrey the Humanitarian

“As you grow older, you will discover that you have two hands, one for helping yourself, the other for helping others.”

Audrey Hepburn

Ma Belle

On a more personal note, I’ll always remember this day since it’s also my dog, my constant companion, Ma Belle’s birthday. She turns six today! And in so many ways, she is Hepburn-eque, with all the grace, poise, and regal bearing that that Audrey was much loved for.

Unending Love, Audrey Hepburn's Favorite Poem by Rabindranath Tagore was originally published by at Arvi Krishnaswamy on May 04, 2014.

A Checklist of Lean Startup Customer Development Interview Questions

2014-04-29T00:00:00+00:00

Personas and Segmentation
Open Discovery
- Probe
- Quantify
Jumping Into Validation
Closure
Pitfalls & Tips
- Using Turk
- Disruption

UPDATE
Read the follow on post on Why Lean Startup Is Hard In Practice, that’s part of an ongoing series on this blog.

In a recent post, I covered off learnings from an MVP we built out for charades online¹. The post was quite popular, and made it to page one of Hacker News and Reddit, bringing in over 25,000 hits in a week. I learnt tons from comments and feedback from people, and also got to know a number of amazing people around the world like @skmurphy, @trikro and @spikelabs who are applying lean to their ventures. Closer to home, I had great conversations with @mtrajan and others that are a part of the local lean startup circle.

I realized that there were certain things that came naturally to me, but are areas which some people tend to get stuck at. I’m going to expand on the original post to dive into a few of them in the interest of sharing and continuing to learn from each other.

There was one question a number of people asked me via Hacker News, LinkedIn and Disqus.

How do you go about interviewing people?

There’s multiple dimensions to that question, and I’ll attempt to answer only part in this post. And that is,

What are some of the typical questions you ask during a customer interview?

I’ve put together a list of common questions that I’ve been asking people I interview. Note that

These questions are mostly targeted towards an enterprise/SaaS B2B or B2B2C type of discovery.
Also, I’m not laying out a complete script for you to follow - these are just the important questions that you may want to cover off.
I’m not discussing how you may acquire these users, although I’ll share some tips further down in the article.

Personas and Segmentation

The objective here is to get a general introduction to the person and see if they matches up against the personas or customer segments that we’ve identified. Note that personas and segmentations are not the same², and you’ll likely care more about personas at this stage. Personas are more representative of behavioral patterns³, and provides deeper insight into why someone may need your product. You would want to ensure you’ve identified these before you jump into talking to people.

Here’s a possible set of open questions to break the ice and get a conversation started.

What’s a day in your life like?
Tell me about what life is like doing activity (or working at company)?
How would you describe yourself? (in a few minutes)?

Open Discovery

This is an open ended discussion to discover the persons problems and let them explain it using their own words.

What’s the part of your day that you hate the most?
What are the current tools that you use? What are some of the things that you wish they did?

Probe

Why?
Why?
Why?

There’s really only one question⁴ here that you need to keep asking. Attempt to get to the root of why there is an underlying problem.

I’ll be honest in saying that this was hard, especially since the conversation can get a bit uncomfortable. I’m trying not to shy away from asking these hard questions, since they ensure I’m not double thinking on behalf of the user.

Quantify

Get a sense of how deep the problem is, and size the opportunity ⁵.

How much of a problem is that?

Look for areas where they express pain, and note the words that they use. It’s particularly useful to use these later in follow on conversations so that you are speaking their language.

Jumping Into Validation

In case a problem set that you are particularly interested in didn’t come up in the conversation, you may want to consider just putting it out there and seeing how they respond.

One example where this approach may be useful is if your product’s unique proposition is based on the experience it offers. These can be hard to approach from a problem/solution fit Q&A if the user is unable to visualize how things could be different.

For instance, if your idea was a Flipboard style app, it would be hard to explain the unique experience to a Google Reader user. In this case, a mockup (or even a working prototype) may be needed to assist with your interview.

What do you think about this product “insert the value proposition”?
Would you be ready to use this immediately?
Would you be ready to pay $x per month for this product?
If we didn’t build this product (or it didn’t exist), how disappointed would you be? Ask the respondee to choose between
- Very Disappointed
- Somewhat Disappointed
- Slightly Disappointed
- Don’t Care.

Closure

Focus on summarizing the key points that you have noted, and give them time to correct things that you may not have heard right. Seek referrals of others who have the same problem that you can talk to.

Would you mind referring me to others in your network who may have the same problem?

One idea that I have but haven’t explored yet, is to see if I can get some of the early adopters to publicly endorse your idea someplace where this can help you around when you launch. For instance, a scheduled tweet or post at launch time to help you build momentum. This might be more relevant for mobile apps where a big bang launch still pays off with app store rankings.

Pitfalls & Tips

One of the challenges I’ve faced so far has been that it’s not easy when there are certain barriers to reaching your target users. I’ve made the mistake of talking to what we thought were reasonable approximations (users of the same age group, but in a different part of the world). They were not representative.
- There’s the story of Jason Cohen of WPEngine. During their early days, Jason got onto LinkedIn and wrote a number of bloggers directly. To show that he really valued their time, he offered to pay for their time during the interviews. He spoke to several people until he found 30 that were willing to pay $49/mo for a hosted wordpress service. If you are comfortable side stepping any personal reservations and reaching out to people, you may find that doors open.
Also, no amount of secondary research online can compensate since you are ultimately extrapolating based on what you’ve infered from someone elses high level summary. Earlier on, I’ve spent hours looking at well laid out reports aggregating data from sites online since I would hesitate to reach out and talk to users. Don’t ever assume you can substitute one for the other - both are valuable in their own ways.
There are periods when you may feel like you are learning nothing from the conversations you are having. Persist, and take time later to go back and listen to your recordings or review your notes. The dots will start to line up.

Using Turk

So, I was asked recently if we’d considered using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk for B2C interviews. Well, we hadn’t. One part of the challenge was that I don’t think my thought process on the interview structure had matured enough to whittle it down to a list I could easily pass on to someone to follow. The other part to be honest was that I felt that I’d want to probe more to really explore and discover, and that would be hard to pass on via Turk. In many ways, this was so core to my understanding of the users that it wouldnt be something I would outsource away. I suspect that in the future, I might use Turk after I’ve spoken to a sizeable sampling of people as a means of validating that my initial sampling size wasnt too small.

Disruption

There’s one other question I’ve gotten.

What if I have a great disruptive idea, but it’s not something users may be able to imagine at this point?

IMHO, if you’re attempting to do something truly disruptive, it’s quite likely that most people arent going to be able to understand what your vision is. It’s also quite likely that you may not be able to fully explain it either.

In that case, I’m not totally sure this customer development approach may help you with broader questions that you seek answers too. But then I also hope that you’ve got enough VC money to help you chase down a problem which isnt totally straightforward - you’re likely looking at a fairly longer term play.

We’re still learning and would love to hear how you go about this. What are the common questions you ask? Feel free to share your tips in the comments below, or send me a message @twitortat.

UPDATE
Also, you may want to read the follow on post on how we’re improving how we run our meetings effectively at our startup.

A Checklist of Lean Startup Customer Development Interview Questions was originally published by at Arvi Krishnaswamy on April 29, 2014.

How I Lost Ten Kilos In A Year

2014-04-15T00:00:00-00:00

Then and Now
Why you should read this
Ah, Food!
Getting Started
- My exercise routine.
Food Intake
The Hockey Stick Effect
Slowing Down
A Typical Day
Losing 10 Kilos
When Things Went Wrong
Happiness

Then and Now

About a decade back, when I lived in Menlo Park, California, I weighed 84 kg (185 pounds). That’s not as light as I’d ever been soon after my scrawny teenage years, but it’s as close to be being lean and fit as I can recall. Back then, I used to play tennis regularly, and frequently ran 10 and 20K road races. I used to bike to work in Redwood City and back daily (22 miles), and then down to Palo Alto for my classes (7 miles).

But about the same time last year, I tipped the scales at 95 kg (210 pounds). Now, that wouldn’t be so bad if I was a muscular giant, but I’m relatively lean. I’d accumulated the signs of prosperity (as a friend called it) over time, no thanks to a sedentary lifestyle, and a love for gluttony. At one point, one of our colleagues used to chide us that consuming large amounts of food was becoming one of our core competencies! Plus, my flexibility had gone down significantly, which was also making me more injury prone during recreational play. Twice, after playing a couple of hours of tennis, I ended up with plantar fasciitis. It’s a painful injury to the arch of the foot, and the only way to recover was to walk as little as possible. The added weight didn’t help.

Why you should read this

This post is the story of how I lost 10 kilos in a year. And I did this without following new fangled diets, hiring a fitness instructor, using apps or gadgets to help track things, or doing anything else unnatural. Along the way, I encountered a little setback which I wasn’t expecting. I’m sharing all of this in the hope this may inspire others to find their own journey.

My primary objective in losing weight is to get back to a level of fitness that I’ll be proud of. While I wasn’t proud of the pot belly I’d been carry around, physical appearance and how I’m perceived was not a factor. I consider myself fairly self motivated, and don’t believe I look for external validation to make me feel good. We’re all narcissistic at some level, and I’m not going to try to portray myself as being holier than thou. The point I’m making is, I feel this needs to be about your health and your well being.

Ah, Food!

You get the picture.

The other factor that made all of this challenging? I love food. Remember Remy¹ from Ratatouille, and those moments of explosions in his mind as he combines different flavors? Well, that’s me. I used to write a popular food blog a while back, and checking off new restaurants that had opened up in the city used to be a weekly routine. I still wanted to enjoy the good life, and eat all the things I love. And not have to starve myself or live on salads on boiled vegetables just in order to tilt the scales a bit.

Getting Started

So, the first part of the journey was a combination of discipline and routine coupled with experimentation. I tried to organize my week so that I’d get at least an hour daily. This meant an hour of either tennis or swimming every morning soon after I got up. On weekend, I’d push this a bit harder, and get about two hours in.

Sure, this sounds simple, the hard part was doing this daily.

My exercise routine.

Train insane. Or remain the same.

Monday through Friday

6:00 AM	An hour long game of tennis, or a 45 minute swim in the pool.
8:00 AM	An 1 km walk with the dog.

Weekends

6:30 AM	A two hour long game of tennis.
8:30 AM	Pull ups, stretches, core exercises at the gym.
9:00 AM	An 1 km walk with the dog.

Food Intake

The second part was food intake. I continued to eat the same things that I used to, but reduced the quantity I was consuming gradually. I stopped eating from a plate, and instead started to use a bowl. Psychologically, it helped me focus on capping my consumption instead of just loading up a plate or going back for another little helping. I spaced out my meals well, and started to have a larger breakfast and a smaller dinner. I continued to eat out, but I’d pass on greasy buffets and pick smaller a la carte plates.

The Hockey Stick Effect

The third part was getting into a rhythm. During the first few weeks, it was particularly important to steady the food intake. Initially, my weight loss was neutralized by the muscle I was adding, causing my weight to increase just a bit. I continued to persevere, and saw a marked hockey stick effect with my weight starting to drop soon after. I tried not to be too worried about a daily or weekly goal, but to be overall comfortable with a steady rate of weight loss. One other thing I did was to ensure I was supplementing with diet with a wholesome mix of fruits, veggies, pulses and dairy products.

Slowing Down

I was soon losing about a kilo a month, and this was a steady comfortable pace. I’d gotten my weight down to just below 90kg, and I was starting to feel I was cruising. I was wrong. There was one point where I tried to push it a bit too hard, and I remember when I realized it. I used to get quite tired by the end of the day, at times needing 8 full hours of sleep. There was one time I remember feeling just a little giddy one afternoon and having to stop at Maiya’s and get a snack. It was my body screaming at me to slow down. And I stopped, and just listened. I slightly increased my intake, even if that meant slower progress.

Once I’d gotten to 89 kg, progress was painfully slow. Every 100 grams on the scale was hard fought. My body was now lean, toned, and I was feeling more active and sprightly than before. I’d gotten into a daily rhythm of exercise. I was disciplined about food intake, and things were far more predictable.

A Typical Day

Here’s sort of what a typical day looked like.

6:00 AM	1 Tall glass of milk, and half an apple.
9:00 AM	2-3 slices of toast, a little cheese, and a kullad of black tea.
1:00 PM	A small bowl of brown rice, lots of dal, lots of veggies. Once a week, I’d have grilled or pan fried fish.
5:00 PM	A little snack. Chocolate. Biscuits. Ice cream. It didn’t matter what it was, but it had to be a small quantity.
8:00 PM	A small bowl of brown rice, lots of dal, lots of veggies.
10:30 PM	Half an apple.

I didn’t really research this online, or consult a dietician, although I’ll recommend that you consider doing so. I largely went with a mix of what well right, and I felt my body was responding well to. I never stopped occasionally eating other things I enjoyed - red meat, drinking wine or beer, and even greasy masala dosas.

One thing that didn’t help with the weight loss was little vacations in Goa and Kerala in between. It made no sense to not indulge in the generous of helpings of lobster, calamari, crab and sea fish that I love, and I came back about a kilo heavier each time. But I came back happier, with the weight of the past and the future discarded, living in the moment. And in the longer, bigger scheme of things, that’s really what matters, right?

Losing 10 Kilos

Once I was at 87kg, and I felt things were plateauing a bit, I started to add a quick daily run to the mix. I’ve always taken my dog for a daily 1 km walk in the mornings either before or after other workouts. But that’s always been a leisurely half hour stroll while Ma Belle takes her time doing her thing. Once I was done walking her, I started to get back out for a quick 1 km run. Gradually, I built up pace until I was doing sub 5 minute runs.

I did it! 95 to 85 in one year.

Soon, I hit 85. The magic number. I’d lost ten kilos in a year, and I’d made it with great determination and discipline. I didn’t realize it then, but my joy was short lived.

When Things Went Wrong

There was one weekend where I pushed too hard again. I played tennis one morning, then went for a swim, and then hit the courts again in the evening for another game. While we were still warming up, I felt pain in the lower knee, just below the knee cap. At first I sat down, hoping it was just cramps. But the pain didn’t ease out. A trip to Manipal Hospital the next day, several tests later, and after hours waiting at their ortho, I was told that the meniscus and cartilage in my knee were likely wearing out. The ortho also said that I would likely be unable to engage in rigourous exercise much again. I felt gutted. I’d always hoped to be able to continue playing tennis and swimming for as long as I could. And for that moment, I was reminded of the frailty of life, and how quickly things can change.

Fortunately, my neighbours referred to me to Dr Praveen Kumar, an ortho in Koramangala. Praveen advised me to take an MRI immediately, and then I went back that evening for the results. As I sat in the ortho’s waiting area, I pondered whether this would mean I’d finally need to stop making fun of my buddies who are golf regulars and start hitting the range. When I was called in, Praveen quietly went through all the scan results. He gave me a clean chit! There were no issues with the meniscus or cartilage, or anything cause of longer term concern. I’d torn soft tissue under the knee, but that should heal fully in a month. I was so relieved, I could have hugged him.

Happiness

“Obsession is a young man’s game. My only excuse is that I never grew old.”

Michael Caine

I started off on this little journey since I wasn’t happy with how things were. My weight might not stick around at 85. However, I’ll likely do my best to keep it around there with a continued balance of exercise and eating well.

I’m goal oriented and disciplined about how I go about trying to achieve it. But at times, it’s easy to obsess and go overboard. I did, and I got lucky that I didn’t cause any longer term damage to my knee. Nadal may have a battery of medics to help him get by, but you and I don’t.

I’ve sworn to go easy on high impact exercises in the future, and mix it up with a lot more of regular swimming. It’s easy to let your goals go out of hand and let you obsess more than you need to. And that in the end ends up being detrimental to your original goals. And thereby, in the way of happiness you initially craved.

So, stay true to your goals. But don’t let happiness get out of sight.

Image courtesy Disney/Pixar, from the motion picture Ratatouille. ↩

How I Lost Ten Kilos In A Year was originally published by at Arvi Krishnaswamy on April 15, 2014.

What We Learnt From A Failed MVP (Lean Startup)

2014-04-14T00:00:00-00:00

UPDATE
Read the follow on post on lean startup customer development interview questions, that’s part of an ongoing series on this blog.

Rovio tried 51 games before hitting upon Angry Birds. We tend to hear a lot more about the chart busting numbers of Angry Birds than the struggles of the previous 51 games. In my opinion, their success was the journey of the 52 experiments, and not just the final one.

We at Levitum recently had learnings from an MVP that we put out, and experiments that we ran. In the spirit of openly sharing how I’ve tried to apply Lean Startup principles to a new venture, I’m going to outline how we went about things, and what I’ve learnt.

Initial Vision

Here’s the initial vision, target audience, and problem statement that we started off with.

VISION	A fun place where people make new friends online.
TARGET	Teens, College kids, Yuppies, Casual gamers.
PROBLEM	Connecting people online through dumb charades.

As we thought about this, there were a number of questions.

Do people care at all about Charades? It turned out that Ellen’s charades game was wildly popular, and there was a lot of buzz around Heads Up Charades, but that was not indicative about whether people would want to play online.
Would charades be engaging enough that people would want to play regularly?
If we set up a real-time game to mimic the mechanics of the game we are used to, that would require friends being present at the same time, which may be hard to schedule.
If scheduling was hard, would people be comfortable playing with strangers in games rooms like poker online.
Wouldn’t people freak out just a bit about turning video online? Are there communities that are more open to video online?
If we built an async game with mobile apps so that people could play when they had time, that might work. But would it be practical for people to respond to a challenge by acting holding their smartphones in front of them?
And then, there was the question of whether we had an interest and competencies in gaming.

The Big IFs

We set out to break these down and tackle what we felt were the biggest ifs on our list.

If people are interested in playing charades online, and
if they are comfortable turning on video, and
if they like the concept enough to invite friends or join a public game room, and
if they enjoy the playing experience with others in the room, and
if they enjoy this enough to keep coming back, and
if they will invite other people, we had a shot at something.

Next, we attempted to structure experiments around the major leap of faith assumptions being made, in order to seek validation.

Hypothesis 1

Of a sampling set of people searching for Charades online, at least 25% will sign up to check out the game.

AUDIENCE	People looking to play charades online.
ACQUISITION	Google Ads.
VALIDATION	% of signups.
EXECUTION	1. Build signup page in a day.
	2. Identify keywords, run ads for a week
	3. Track signups
RESULT	We ran ads targeting users who searched for ‘charades online’, ‘charades games’, and ‘charades words’. Over 25% of the users signed up.
LEARNING	There’s a interest in playing charades online amongst those who google for it.

Initial signup wireframe.

Hypothesis 2

Of users in the target demographic who are shown mocked up up flows of the game concept, at least 70% of them would be very interested in the game.

AUDIENCE	Young Adults in India
ACQUISITION	Friends Network
VALIDATION	% of people who are very interested in the game.
EXECUTION	1. Build rough mockups using MockFlow in a day.
	2. Walk people through the mockups
	3. Collect feedback.
RESULT	Overall, there unanimous interest in the game concept. A few mentioned that they may be uncomfortable being on video online.
LEARNING	In general, charades is popular in India, and people are interested in trying out an online game.

Two screen from the initial wireframes.

Hypothesis 3

Of signed up Charades users invited to a game room, at least 25% will be willing to join a public room and turn video on.

AUDIENCE	Signed up users
ACQUISITION	N/A
VALIDATION	% of users who turn on video in a public room.
EXECUTION	1. Invite users to the public room
	2. Provide an explanation about what the game is about.
	3. Enable the user to turn video on and start the game.
	4. Track analytics.
RESULT	80% of the users visited the page, but < 5% turned video on.
LEARNING	This experiment invalidated our false hope that people in this era of Facetime and Hangouts wouldn’t hesitate to turn video on. We needed to dig deeper, and talk to users to understand what they felt.

Hypothesis 4

Users are more likely to be comfortable turning on video if they are playing with their friends, and 80% or more will turn video on.

AUDIENCE	Friends of Friends who are acquainted with each other, but don’t know each other well.
ACQUISITION	Friends Network
VALIDATION	% of users who turn on video on.
	% of users who like the game idea enough that they would be disappointed to not play.
EXECUTION	1. Invite users to the public room
	2. Provide an explanation about what the game is about.
	3. Enable the user to turn video on and start the game.
	4. Track analytics.
RESULT	100% of the users turned video on, and were excited and ready to engage in the game. They felt they would be very disappointed if they were unable to play.
LEARNING	Women in the group, when asked if they would play with people they didn’t know online, said they would hesitate. Men in the group unanimously said they would be willing to try.

Hypothesis 5

Users from online communities that use video a lot with strangers are likely to be comfortable playing with each other, and at least 25% will turn video on.

AUDIENCE	Chatroulette and Chatrandom communities.
ACQUISITION	Google Ads
VALIDATION	% of users who turn on video on.
EXECUTION	1. Run Google Ads for ‘chatroulette’ and ‘chatrandom’, offering video based charades online, and an opportunity to meet new people.
	2. Invite users to the public room
	3. Provide an explanation about what the game is about.
	4. Enable the user to turn video on and start the game.
	5. Track analytics.
	6. Added a Qualroo style prompt to find out why they don’t turn video on.
RESULT	50% of the users visited the page, but < 10% turned video on. 5% answered the prompt indicating they didn’t want to turn video on, would try later, or weren’t sure how to turn it on.
LEARNING	Given the anonymity of these communities, it was hard to reach out directly and get feedback. The sampling size of the responders to the prompt was too small to infer enough.

The Conundrum

We also spoke to a group of users and collated feedback. So, at this point, we were faced with this conundrum from our learnings.

There’s a certain level of interest in charades, but it’s mostly seen as a family & friends game.
For those who see their friends & family often enough, playing charades online wasn’t appealing. (Playing live with them during Thanksgiving or Christmas was still appealing).
The average users isn’t comfortable playing with random strangers online.
Even communities that are comfortable dealing with nudity online, and have no reservations didn’t find the idea appealing.
Improvements in the visual design and explanatory information offered did not increase conversions.
A game like this requires a fairly engaged community, and it didn’t appear that charades would sustain that level of engagement.
There’s a community of people in the subcontinent that loves dumb charades, but the version that’s played is fairly technical and geeky, and would not scale out.

What we did well

Capture our thought process and assumptions, laying out things that had to be true for us to succeed
Identified small batches that could be proven (or disproven) with minimum cost, rapidly built and iterated through the batches.
Stayed honest and objective, tracked metrics and cohorts well.

What we could have done better

Most early feedback was from subcontinent users, since reaching out the an international audience was not easy. However, these were not fully representative of the target audience.
We built more than we should have before we understood the gaps in our understanding of the customer and their behavior.
Included more inline surveys early on enough to have better insights.

Was this a ‘failed’ MVP?

An MVP is an experiment or a tool to help answer a high risk question. From that perspective, we would have have failed if we had learnt nothing from our experiments. I’d like to think that we succeeded in learning a lot, and that made this MVP successful.

However, one thing I noticed after I moved back to India from the Valley was that we often hesitate to talk about failures, and what we learnt from them. People are much more interested in learning from a success story. However, if you ask me, I’m more interested in the 51 attempts of Rovio than just the one that made it big. It’s the failure to learn that’s a failure.

The Decision

While we still believe in the original vision, and it’s possible that persevering and keep this going out there in the wild may yield something, we’ve decided to put this on hold. Although this is neither a hardcore game or a heavy social game, it requires gaming chops that we don’t have. Our competencies lie in mobile + social and we’re sticking to those. However, the learnings have been useful, and have helped up develop more structure around how we approach customer development, gain early feedback, and rapidly iterate to test out key assumptions. It’s more important that we develop a method that will help us get predictable around how we solve customer problems than getting lucky. I’m sure these will help us as we move on to the next stepping stones.

FEEDBACK
Are there things that you think we could have done differently? Chime in via the comments. This article made it to the first page on Hacker News.

UPDATE
Also, you may want to read the follow on post on lean startup customer development interview questions.

What We Learnt From A Failed MVP (Lean Startup) was originally published by at Arvi Krishnaswamy on April 11, 2014.

Five Most Popular Amul Ads Of 2013

2014-04-09T00:00:00+00:00

Wonder what the most popular Amul Ads of 2013 were? Well, here’s a quick round up of the top 5.

Record number of users of the Amul App in 2013

These stats were collated from users of the Amul Cartoon Ads Mobile App, which can be downloaded for iOS here. If you’d like to contribute towards building the Android app, give me a shout in the comments.

Quiz Time! Guess what each ads is about in the comments. Answers will be updated shortly.

5. “Sir… aankhon par!”

4. “Aa Balle Mujhe Maar!”

3. “Patekar Says Na-Na to Baba!”

2. “4 x Ten dulkar!”

1. “Gayle Khel Mein!”

Quiz Time! Guess what each ads is about in the comments. Answers will be updated shortly.

Five Most Popular Amul Ads Of 2013 was originally published by at Arvi Krishnaswamy on April 09, 2014.

Applying Lean Startup Principles To Mobile App Development

2014-04-05T00:00:00-00:00

I attended DroidSync, an event organized in Mumbai by my friend Prajyot Mainkar of Androcid for app developers and entrepreneurs. I presented a session in the Business Track about applying Lean Startup principles to Mobile App Development.

Read on for a quick abstract, and my slides futher below.

Your New App Idea is One in a Million

You’ve got this great new idea, but your idea literally is one in a million. There’s a million other apps on the iTunes and Play Store, and over a billion downloads. 99% of the apps are downloaded < 1000 times, and are launched just once.

Put another way, those numbers no longer have any meaning. It’s a massive junk pile of apps that solve problems no one has, or ever will.

In the last three years that I’ve been the Program Chair for Droidcon, I’ve noticed this pattern repeat itself with a number of app developers. We’d rather spend hours polishing our app icon than talking to real users to ensure that we are really addressing a problem they have. There’s certainly exceptions, and there are a few outstanding app entrepreneurs around. But lets be honest - they are a minority.

Avoid the Junk Pile

What can you do to avoid your app ending up in the same trash can? Well, there’s no silver bullet for sure, but my learning has been that applying Lean Startup principles to Mobile App Development can help. These principles provide a structured approach to experimentation, customer development, and learning. They will help you ensure that what you are building is what someone out there really wants.

Be a Lean Mobile Startup

My slides also cover off a few tips to work around common objections to applying lean to mobile app dev such as longer dev cycles, the need for a big bang app launch to get higher rankings and wider distribution, and a lack of A/B testing and cohorts analysis tools.

Got feedback or other ideas about how you’ve applied lean to your app development? Chime in in the comments below. Or, Follow me on Twitter for more updates and discussions.

My thanks for inputs & ideas that have contributed to these slides go to: @ashmaurya, @mtrajan, my team at Levitum and various members of the @droidconIN, @pncamp and @blrdroid communities.

Also a big shout out to the other awesome speakers Amrit, Ravi, Prateek, Garima, Boaz, and Santosh. The highlight of the day for me was the time we spent having an open chat with the audience from the stage. And thanks once again for Androcid for pulling off a great event, and wonderful hospitality. They also organized NitroDroid in Goa, and doing a great job broadening and enabling the ecosystem.

Applying Lean Startup Principles To Mobile App Development was originally published by at Arvi Krishnaswamy on April 05, 2014.

Three Tennis Serve Tips I Wish I Had Known Earlier

2014-01-10T00:00:00+00:00

When I watch Roger Federer serve, his fluid brilliance is incredibly captivating. Balanced and relaxed start position. Check. Graceful rocking motion. Check. Rapid arm pronation. Check. Explosion at contact. Check. It’s poetry in motion.

If you’d watch me serve a year back, my inconsistency was jarring. My toss would floats up to a different place every time, as if carried by a sudden gust of wind. I would move my right foot as if I’m kick starting a motorbike. As my serve would start to falter, I’d start to toss the ball higher and try hitting it harder, as if that would magically start to work some magic.

And that’s when I discovered set of marvellous YouTube videos that helped me tune my technique.

My serve isn’t terrific yet, but there’s a marked improvement. I’m more fluid and relaxed. The toss is more consistent. I’m able to consistently get a mix of flat, top spin and slice serves in and mix up the placement for some variety.

There’s a few things that I learnt along the way that may help you. I’ve consolidated the videos around these learnings to make this a lot easier for you to follow along.

#1. Don’t Toss the Ball

Counter intuitive as it may seem, one of the main challenges I’d had all along was that I was tossing the ball in the air. Inadvertently, I was using my wrist or elbow which ended up making the ball move around.

Roger in full fluid motion.

The key lessons to learn here are:

Don’t bend the elbow on the toss
Keep your wrist relaxed
Remember that when you release the ball you must not impart any additional momentum to it - the ball release is just an extension of the upward movement of your arm.

Here's another one on the toss position for different types of serves.

One great tip that helped me was to switch how I held the ball. Earlier, I used to hold the ball with my finger tips. I struggled with this, since I invariably imparted some momentum or spin with my fingers or wrist. Instead, I switched to a new toss grip which locked my wrist. I started to hold the ball the way I’d hold an ice cream cone.

#1-b. The Ice Cream Cone Release

The idea is simple. Relax your wrist, and hold the ball between your curled forefinger and thumb, just like you’d hold an ice cream cone. As your arm extends upwards, the release is a natural extension of the moment. The cone grip avoids adding momentum across the forward/backward axis since your wrist is locked. For an example, watch the video below of Roger Federer tossing the ball.

Pop the cone.

#2. Relax Your Wrist

Most of the other strokes - the forehand, backhand and volleys require that our wrist be firm. And it turns out, there’s a perfectly logical explanation for this. In those cases, the ball is already in motion, and keeping our wrist loose makes it harder for us to control the racquet face at the point of contact. The serve is the one stroke where the player has total control (well, once you’ve got a handle on the toss) over the ball position at the point of contact.

Relaxing your wrist causes the racquet head to gain additional rotation momentum as it heads towards the point of contact. This rotational momentum is what helps generate slight top spin, which keeps a flat serve inside the court.

Relax your wrist, and unlock the potential of your serve.

Wait, did I just say a flat serve involves top spin? Yes, I did. The fact is, a tennis player needs to be 7-8 feet tall to hit a flat serve into the court. All flat serves involve a bit of spin to keep them in.

Ever heard someone ask you to ‘hit down on the ball’? Well, now you know the physics behind what they were asking you to do. They are right in that this is different from a top spin serve (more on that later), but there’s a certain amount of spin needed to work the magic.

And that, my friend, is one of the little implicit secrets of the serve.

#3. Don’t Hit Through The Ball - Throw Your Racquet At It

I’d heard this several times before, but I just found it really hard to execute. For the longest time, I’d swing at the ball the same way I would with my forehand or backhand. The racquet face would be open so that I could ensure that I middled the ball in the sweet spot.

There’s a hard learning for many of us to accept. It’s that we tend to over think many of these things. So I’ll need you to just suspect any analysis in your mind and just hear out what I’ll advice on next.

Quit trying to hit through the ball.
Throw your racquet at the ball, just like you are throwing a hammer for someone to catch.
Keep your wrist relaxed throughout and do not consciously rotate the racquet face.
- This is really important, and but it’s hard to get right initially.
- You may hit a few balls over the fence, but don’t let that dissuade you.
- Keep in mind that you are likely trying to unlearn what you’ve been doing for a while.
The natural pronation of your wrist will take care of rotating the racquet face in time to meet the ball with the racquet face facing the court.
Initially, just focus on the biomechanics and rhythm of the movement, and ignore where the ball actually lands. You can work on that easily later once you’ve got the mechanics going.

Explanation of tennis serve pronation.

What you’ll soon notice is that you’ll start to see much better racquet head speed on your serves, and movement will be more effortless. In fact, if you observe the videos of Sampras serving closely enough, you’ll see how his wrist drops all the way pronated outwards after his ‘snap’.

The Sampras serve and pronation in action.

Hope these are useful to you. Please chime in via the comments, or let me know on Twitter

Three Tennis Serve Tips I Wish I Had Known Earlier was originally published by at Arvi Krishnaswamy on January 10, 2014.

Arvi Krishnaswamy

How Scott Cook coaches innovation teams

Great Coaches

Scott’s approach

Listen

Help where help is asked

Get to the real issue

Summary

Chicken and Egg problems with Platform Experiments

Lean Startup and Platform Experiments

Chicken and Egg Problems

Two sides of a Platform

Challenges with experimentation

The insight from Brant

The side that matters

The Velvet Rope

Quibb

Tinder

Summary

Why Lean Startup Is Hard In Practice

Experiment design is hard for beginners.

Sampling sizes need to be large enough to hold significance.

Managing control variables across experiment batches requires rigor and persistence.

Risk of missing big opportunities.

Effectuation and Lean Startup

Slope of Enlightenment?

Himalayas Trek: Triund, Mt Dhauladhar Base Camp

TLDR? Read this first

Why is this so amazing?

Preparation for the Trek

Starting Point

Galu Devi

Magic View Point

Chai Shop 1

Chai Shop 2

Chai Shop on Top

Heading down

Travels & Guides

My Second PyCon

Python is Everywhere.

Collaborating with an amazing Program Committee.

Rough Approach.

Original Work.

Conferences are fun.

Kushal’s Keynote.

Dinner with the Speakers.

Old Faces, New Faces.

Panel - Flask vs Django vs Web.py

Open Spaces!

Pure Volunteer Magic.

Why People Buy Things From You

Customer Development, Invalidation, Karma and WhatsApp

The Evolution of the PMO Site - Vajpayee to Modi

Why Large Companies Should Consider A Lean Startup Approach

A 10 Minute Good Reads Challenge

The List

The Futility

The Unscience

References

Why I'm a Mentor at Lean Startup Machine Bangalore

The Lean Startup Movement

Practicing Lean

LSM Bangalore Mentors

How LSM works

Hackathons

Validation Board

What takeaways can you expect?

Say Hello

Slides

Kicking off Levitum Knot Hangouts On Air

Open Knowledge Sharing - The Knot

Guest Speakers - The Friendship Knot

Running Effective Meetings At Your Startup

The Grease

What makes an effective meeting

Establish the purpose

Invite less people

Use the best tools

Keep conversations effective

How We Run Meetings Through The Week