Toronto’s Lean Startup Machine weekend kicks off again tonight. Entrepreneurs and innovators will go through an intensive three-day workshop to turn a fresh idea into a lean, aka efficient, business model in a matter of the weekend. Teams will build their ideas with help from notable mentors that include Katherine Hague, co-founder of startup ShopLocket, Jon Spencely, community manager at Sprouter, and Venk Chandran from Rypple Salesforce. No one is actually creating anything (ie: no coding or hacking), instead establishing their ‘Minimum Viable Product,’ another trendy term popularized by Eric Ries for web applications. It’s basically a stripped down prototype of your idea that you can deploy and test quickly.
It’s complex and trying, but the event provides an opportunity for participants to think about things in new ways. It’s likely that they’ll pivot, aka change their strategy, not their idea, at least once or twice. I wrote before about Eric Ries’s god-like hold over entrepreneurial thinking before. These weekends prove his ideas and methods are not only needed, but also advantageous for those who adopt them.
Each team will be judged on the validity of their product or service — Will if benefit customers (and do customers want or need this)? Has the team demonstrated what they’ve learned? How well do they present their idea? On Sunday, all teams will present their ideas to a panel of judges (including yours truly). We’ll decide who best executed their weekend lessons and reward the top ideas.
In January, startup Hire Shark took the cake. Still in beta mode, this service helps match small businesses with prospective employees by filtering and ranking submitted resumes. Second place went to Inkless, a tattoo parlour management system. I don’t see anything online for this startup just yet. Read Navneet Alang’s review of that event here on Toronto Standard: Ten Lessons from Lean Startup Machine Toronto.
The event takes place in the renowned Burroughes Building, home also to Toronto Standard, one of the event’s sponsors. We’ll let you know how the event goes next week.
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Sheena Lyonnais writes about tech for Toronto Standard. You can follow her on Twitter at @SheenaLyonnais.
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