In many ways, the startup has become a symbol of both the good and bad of modern business. If the brash, nimble and unpredictable nature of startups is their strength then those same traits of a ragtag, play-it-by-ear approach can sometimes doom them. Promising ideas can often be shortchanged by poor execution and inexperienced management.
To emphasize the best and minimize the worst of this dynamic, Lean Startup Machine is part bootcamp and part guidance counseling for current and would-be entrepreneurs. The event, taking place this weekend at the Burroughes Building (disclosure: the Toronto Standard is a sponsor), seeks to apply the principles of “Lean” thinking to entrepreneurship. The system, as the name suggests, emphasizes efficiency, and began with the idea of Lean manufacturing in Japan. It has grown beyond its industrial roots, however, and expanded to include fields like Lean Entrepreneurship, Lean Planning in advertising or, as in this event, Lean Startups.
The very creation of a thing called “Lean” itself speaks to this need for businesses and entrepreneurs to reflect on their own practice and refine, revise and rebuild. The event is thus structured as a space for teams to come together and build workable business ideas, punctuated with workshops, and listen to talks and get advice from mentors and speakers.
Chris Eben, who is a mentor at this week’s event and also runs Startup Weekend in Toronto, sees Lean Startup Machine as a productive kind of pressure cooker environment.
“You’re bringing a group of people together who are interested in some common themes around entrepreneurship,” he says “and then in a short amount of time, they work in an intensive environment to build something to test out theories.”
It’s that testing that really differentiates the weekend from other events, says Eben. There is an emphasis on real customer validation during the event itself, and as teams build out and iterate their product, they can also do things like test which Google AdWords get traffic or even do in-person interviews.
It’s an approach that raises an interesting conundrum, especially in light of Apple’s blistering results earlier this week. Apple rose to prominence by ignoring focus groups and instead using a narrow, laser-like vision to build what they thought to be the best product in each category. At the same time, many large companies like Microsoft and Sony have had some spectacular failures because they didn’t properly gauge what consumers wanted. How a startup balances its own concept and what consumers think they want is central to 21stcentury success.
The crowd of the event will likely lean (ahem) more towards business and strategy than the usual mix of developers and designers at such get-togethers. It also speaks to the more experimental nature of the event, which sees it as a training ground for would-be entrepreneurs looking to learn solid principles for building business models and solving actual customer problems.
It’s a model that the city’s business community is hungry for. Lean Coffee TO, a meeting of people looking to discuss lean strategies, has ballooned from 12 to over 600 people in the last year alone. What will be fascinating to watch, as Lean Startup Machine unfolds over the next few days, is how people absorb and react to those principles, and then use them to create something truly exciting.
Navneet Alang is Toronto Standard’s tech critic. You can follow him on Twitter @navalang.
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