How to Experiment with Former IDEO-ers
Marcus Gosling and Jennifer Pattee talk to Project W about the importance of humility, honesty, and curiosity in founding a startup.
If you’re in the startup space in any capacity, you’ve probably heard of The Lean Startup. It’s a book written by IMVU Co-Founder Eric Ries famous for introducing a new methodology of product development that minimizes the risk of failure. Put (very) simply, Ries rejects the notion that you need an enormous amount of capital and resources to launch a successful startup. Instead, he proposes hypothesis-driven experimentation, iterative product testing, and fast failing as a means of achieving product validation and business success. If you’ve ever heard the term “MVP” (Minimum Viable Product), here’s where it was popularized.
In this talk, Marcus and Jennifer expand upon the principles outlined in the book by explaining the 3 core lean startup values that differentiate successful founding teams: humility, honesty, and curiosity. Here are our main takeaways.
About the Speakers
Marcus Gosling was Ries’ co-founder at IMVU and currently works with him as VP of Product at The Long-Term Stock Exchange. Marcus graduated from the Royal College of Art in London, and worked at IDEO San Francisco prior to founding IMVU. He also led User Experience at Rypple.com — acquired by Salesforce in 2011 and more recently, ran the Design practice at Highway1, a hardware startup accelerator.
Jennifer Pattee was a senior designer at Apple and IDEO before founding her own company, Public Recreation in 2017. Public Recreation is a new type of gym with the mission of making wellness wildly accessible. Their gyms are all outdoors, offering unlimited classes like strength training and yoga for $50/month. Public Recreation is fresh out of Y Combinator and growing fast, with multiple sites across San Francisco.
Mindset Matters
Marcus began the workshop by reminding us that:
“If you’re not motivated in a certain way, a process just becomes hoops you jump through.”
The Lean Startup methodology is not a series of steps that guarantees success. It is an incredible guide that can help you build a valuable product, but only if you have the right mindset. That’s why understanding how to approach the methodology is just as important as understanding the tenets of it. Step 1 is being humble.
Humility
The most humbling startup stat has to be that 95% of them fail. With the abundance of founder resources, low barrier to create, and immense talent available, why is this still the case? Marcus explains:
“Startups fail from a lack of customers, not from a failure of product development.”
For this reason, Marcus and Jennifer view that humbling statistic as a reminder to approach their ideas as a continuous experiment that they don’t have all the answers to. Experiments fail frequently. Humility comes into play when you’re able to accept that failure will be an inevitable part of the process. Remember that you’re not trying to build the best product, you’re trying to build the best product for your customers.
Reminder: Failure is only good if it informs your next iteration in some way.
Marcus and Jennifer recommend taking your experimentation day-by-day and then week-by-week and so on. For example, if you’re building curriculum for a course, you’re better off testing a day’s worth and then a week’s. Incremental goal-setting helps validate your ideas and ground your overall vision.
Honesty
As a founder, you’re primarily indebted to two groups: your investors and your employees. The first invests their capital and the latter invests their time. Both are extremely valuable and in return, you owe them complete honesty. How do you this? By being transparent with both parties about what you’re great at, good enough at, and where the biggest risks are at.
Own that risk by admitting that while you can’t guarantee success, you have a thorough strategy for how you plan to manage it. Your job isn’t to sell your idea to investors, it’s to have real dialogue about your vision and the risks involved in executing it. Transparency builds greater trust than comforting assurances ever will.
Tip: Avoid investors who ask for guarantees (the good ones never do).
Reminder: “I don’t know” is a valid answer when you don’t know.
With your employees, Marcus and Jennifer also stress the importance of demonstrating vulnerability and celebrating honesty. This is crucial to creating a culture of trust on your team.
Curiosity
Curiosity is about never getting comfortable. Jennifer explains:
“Having curiosity even when things are going well with your startup is black-belt curiosity. It seems counter-intuitive to be curious when you’re succeeding, but that’s the level you need to be at constantly.”
When things are going poorly, it’s relatively easy to locate where the problems lie but when things are going well, it’s hard to know exactly why. You’re free to come up with your own theories on why you’re succeeding when you are, which is why having “ninja-level curiosity” is important at all stages of your startup.
One way to stay curious is to escape your comfort zone. Walk away from your computer and fancy dashboard and into the arms of your customers. Don’t just ask them how they feel about your product, observe how they interact with it.
Most people are hypocrites; they say one thing and do another. For example, if you were to ask a room full of people if they cared about digital privacy, a majority would probably say yes. If you were to then ask how many people read the terms & conditions of social apps or share media on public profiles, you might get a different picture. This is why observing is so important. These kinds of insights about human psychology and nature are exactly what your competitors don’t have, so be vigilant about constantly gathering them.
Other Gems
Here’s other valuable advice Marcus & Jennifer have for early founders:
🙌 Find success metrics that aren’t profit-oriented. Hitting financial milestone after milestone doesn’t always mean growth.
🛠️ Don’t build the product. Sell the product before you build it. Jennifer got into Y-Combinator with no code because she had solid customer validation.
🤔 Be suspicious of good feedback. People contradict themselves all the time so test to see if their actions match their words.
🧪 Test your product or service by assessing if a customer will give up a scarce resource (money, time, etc.) to get access to your product. That’s when you know you have customer validation.
🚀 If you want your product to take off, people should be excited about it even at the MVP stage. A 5 or 6/10 isn’t enough. You need people at a 9 or 10.
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