Cheezburger Network’s Scott Porad had some great advice for startups at last week’s Lean Startup Seattle meetup. Here are few takeaways I found especially valuable:

The Three Most Important Startup Steps


A lot of efforts to distill the startup process to repeatable steps strike Scott as still overly complicated. He boils it down to three essential steps:

  1. Create a culture of learning
  2. Measure assumptions
  3. Then do the cool developer stuff

Too many techies go right to step 3 and wonder why they end up with an over-engineered mess, a team that doesn’t get along, and no clear target market.

Surfacing Assumptions

“All suffering is the result of differences in expectation.” When they start any project, they ask three key questions (those guys are really into threes):

  1. Is it a big change?
  2. Is it a complicated use case?
  3. Is this something that different people could have different
    assumptions about?

If it’s more than a trivial change, they require a project summary with these elements:

  • Problem
  • Hypotheses
  • Proposed solution
  • DEFINITION ON DONE
  • Requires split test?
  • Measure of success
  • Require external support
  • Dependencies

Simplest Possible Solutions

This is agile 101, but he offered a great case study. When they set out to build a platform to let anyone quickly set up a humor site on the Cheezburger Network, discussion naturally gravitated toward a flexible website templating and content management system. Then they hit on another approach: How about a starting every site with a free Gmail account and a $29 WordPress site? People would contribute photos to the site by sending them via email, and someone would manually download them from Gmail and add them to the site. This let them launch a lot of sites with minimal investment and discover empirically which were hits and which were flops. No need to build a platform until they had enough hits to swamp this manual workflow — the classic “good problem to have.”

And my favorite…

Limit WIP

“Multitasking is just screwing up many things simultaneously”

Nuff said.