„Do you know how many games the ‘Angry Bird’ founder has developed before he launched this ‘one Billion hit’?”

Now that I have described that starting a startup is rather like running a marathon than enjoying life, I have explained the 4 main pillars of making your business a success and I have shared some sayings and best practices, I want to get straighter to the point and bring up some more facts about the last lecture. This time the topic was “Building Great Products (talking to users and growing)”

We started with a guest lecture by Stefan Baxter, the founder of “Activity Stream” - an Icelandic startup. He made clear that ideas are worthless if there will be no execution. Therefore, an idea has to come always with the power of execution by the entrepreneur.  If a founder has a history of successful executions that will be even better for finding investors. 

The relationship between idea, execution and business success is explained in the info graphic below. For instance, having a brilliant idea might bring 20 points but multiplied by weak execution will never lead to the 10.000.000$ success you hoped for in the beginning.

We also talked about two categories of people: the ones who love winning and the other ones who hate losing. Sounds quiet similar, but there is a psychological viewpoint behind it. So what I asked myself, is it more likely to always win or never lose… I mean of course I like winning but I know that there will always be people who are doing better than I do. However, if we talk about startups there are usually just the winners and the rest, so make sure you pick the right perspective.

In the second part Bala talked about “The Lean Startup” and referred to a really interesting article from the Google Venture Team. Basically it was about “How to launch your product in 4 days”! At first glance it sounds unbelievable, but if GV is using this method, it apparently works.

So what we are now planning for our startup is the exact same thing. We reconsidered the idea about our “betting application” last week and came up with some new ideas during the weekend. The objective for this week is to choose one of the ideas and define what problem we are going to solve with it – basically what are the market needs and how we can address them. Afterwards, we want to build a prototype and find the first approximate 5 customers who are able to give constructive feedback. This allows us to validate the problem statement made in the beginning and reassure that our product meets the customer needs. As a result, we can refine our product before launch and, thus be more confident about the solution we built.

Overall, we hope to find a shorter way by using the “lean sprint model” of GV to create our product and that the feedback will help us to rock the pitch in the end - maybe like Kenny Brooks ;-) 

Btw, the answer of the quote is: 51 games!