– Being lean is about doing things that make sense and about being efficient, not necessarily about following every step of the ‘methodology’ to a T.

The lean startup movement/philosophy/methodology has lots to teach businesses and entrepreneurs of all shapes and sizes, but it’s not a live-or-die guide to building a successful company. In building Pinyadda we’ve done some things a little backwards and maybe a few others a little out of order, but for us it’s become clear that being lean is about lightweight, fast product iteration and hands-on customer development. The exact methods we use to achieve these goals have changed and will continue to change and evolve along with us.

Did we smoke test hundreds of landing pages? No. Did we build a product with the absolute minimum feature set? No. Have we learned and improved by integrating customers early and continuously iterating based on their feedback? Yes. The main point here is that it’s a good idea to read and absorb as much as you can, but don’t drive yourself crazy trying to implement the latest and greatest trends. Every business will have different customers and different products that demand different tactics and different solutions. Do what’s best for you.

– Measurement takes many forms.

With most Web 2.0 – style products, what you’re building is not so much a ‘product’ in the traditional sense as an experience. In this vein, while it’s really important to measure things like clicks and actions and pageviews that can be quantified, it’s also important to realize that actions are often dictated by psychological and emotional reactions which cannot be easily quantified.

A careful reading of most lean materials will reveal that qualitative data (surveys, interviews, observations) can often be as useful or more useful than all the numbers in the world. There are certainly instances where the reverse is also true, but the main point is not to throw feedback out the window because it’s not numeric in nature. Some of the most important feedback we’ve ever received about Pinyadda has come in casual conversation over a few beers.

– There’s no magic button.

At first glance, it can seem like the lean startup approach makes for clean periods of structured action, where one piece fits nicely into the next. The truth is that it’s nearly impossible to suddenly declare yourself “done” with one stage and simply transition cleanly to the next step. Often (especially in the early stages) things are muddled and it’s very difficult to tell exactly where you are in the life-cycle of the company (this isn’t made any easier by the fact that most entrepreneurs are, by nature, somewhat delusional). And even if you can get a good sense for where you are, trying to plot a course into the next phase can be daunting.

Going back to the first point – there’s no formula for this stuff. We have a general idea about where Pinyadda stands with our customers and we’ve defined some tangible goals for ourselves that should manifest over the foreseeable term (for us, about 3-6 weeks at a time). But we don’t sit around wondering if we’re in Phase 1.3 or 1.4. Set a goal, use your core philosophies as a guide, and then do everything necessary to achieve it.

Here’s the video of the presentation. Thanks to Matthew Mamet of EditMe for the recording. Matt’s original post on the meetup is worth a read as well.

Boston Lean Startup Circle – Pinyadda from Matthew Mamet on Vimeo.

The business opportunity Pinyadda has recognized is the need for an information system that leverages an individual’s unique social graph to filter the firehose of news articles and blog posts published each day and deliver only the ones that would be most valuable. The Pinyadda team has built a base product that addresses this opportunity and which we believe solves several problems.

However, one of the first questions out of my mouth when I joined the team after using it almost every day for the 3 months prior was where the product fell on a spectrum from a tool (e.g. a better RSS reader) to a social network (e.g. a platform to see what others are reading and to recommend what I’m reading). Everyone seemed to have a similar answer: “We’re not entirely sure yet.” At first this made me a little anxious (“wait, we don’t know what we’re building?”). Then my wonderful colleagues introduced me to the lean startup—specifically the customer discovery and development aspect—and it all began coming together.

While admittedly new to these methodologies, it strikes me that there aren’t more discussions about the value of tracking customer use over time. I’m not totally convinced that you can ask a potential customer if they can or can’t live without a product after seeing a demo or using it just a couple of times. I think this is particularly the case for consumer-facing products and probably even more so for social products where the value to the individual grows as more and more people join.

After using Facebook for the first few times, for example, I would have never said “I can’t live without this.” Nor for Twitter. It took me a good month to “get” the networking value. When I was originally introduced to Pinyadda, the solution the platform offered that I initially locked onto was the ability to easily see/scan a feed of breaking news across a bunch of topics that interested me – no more going site by site to be the first to email news to my colleagues, no more newsletters, etc. After a couple weeks, though, I became totally addicted to using Pinyadda to see and discuss what other people were reading and to recommend the articles I found interesting. I can’t live without that aspect, but can without a feed of headlines.

The first impression is important but relatively unmeasurable unless compared to developed use. Why didn’t I recognize the value in Pinyadda that eventually made me a sticky user upon first visiting the site? And how can we ensure as we develop Pinyadda going forward that a given user “gets” on first impression the value that is going to make them sticky?

We’d like to explore this more so we’ve taken the core pillars of customer discovery and development and designed our own customer discovery initiative. We’re calling it the Visionary Members program and the end-goal is the same as outlined in lean startup; how we’re going about it, though, will layer on comparisons in first impressions about the product to developed use. If there are differences, we should understand why: because certain customer archetypes are inherently averse to changing their behavior, because a particular feature is more prominent, because of how the product flows, etc. The program will look like this:

(1) Intimately explore customer problems
(2) Study product use over an extended period of time (~30 days)
(3) Analyze results across archetypes
(4) Iterate on product accordingly

If we can understand the value Pinyadda offers after users have been using it at length, and understand why on first impression they perhaps used it/planned to use it differently, that’s great customer discovery and validation.

I’ll be working on a follow-up post that goes into the details of how we’re thinking about designing the Visionary Members program. For now, I’m wondering what you think about the value of comparing user first impressions to their developed use, and across customer archetypes, in order to discover and validate your customer. An obvious point of debate is that lean startup is fundamentally about being agile and moving quickly – a study over 3 or 4 weeks certainly isn’t continuous iteration. What about differences in importance of first impressions with social products vs. other products?