Open Source Startup Lessons

Lessons and thoughts on software startups, and startups in general, for those that may be about to start one. A presentation for the NCSU Collegiate Entrepreneurship Organization.

1. Lessons Learned from Ansible Open Source Startups & Other Topics Presentation to NCSU Collegiate Entrepreneurship Organization, 3/2015 Michael DeHaan
2. What Company To Start?
3. Solve A Problem You Have and care about.
4. A 20% Better Mousetrap Is Sufficient
5. Build something people will pay for
6. Can you bootstrap? Be aware of time to prime markets and sales cycle time
7. Community Is Not A Buzzword, It’s Everything
8. Community is a Force Multiplier
9. Always be helping people.
10. Take Users Along For The Journey
11. Explain your thought process, decisions, and be human.
12. Get Your Product To Mostly Sell Itself
13. Product Design / Strategy
14. Good products are a balance of central design and crowd input
15. Listen to the crowd, not one user at a time.
16. Watch your competition, but don’t follow them.
17. Know your design (and implementation) aesthetic.
18. Avoid MVP. Have expertise and know (and talk to) your audience before you build something.
19. Anything Proof of Concept is Provable in 2 Weeks
20. YAGNI - build what matters most
21. Just the right amount of design and development. make shippable Prototypes (Python!)
22. Avoid Heavy Engineering Process (Scrum/too-many-meetings/interruptions/etc)
23. 15 minute timer for new user acquisition
24. Good Documentation & Authenticity is more powerful than Marketing
25. Company and Team Dynamics
26. You have to be able to talk about everything
27. Understand personal motives
28. Seek correctness over saving face / Use Blameless Post-Mortems / Etc
29. Be Able to Revisit Any Decision
30. Culture is not declared, it grows from what you do every day.
31. Hiring is really hard.
32. Venture Capital and The Market
33. Balancing Creating a Business vs The Desires of Venture Capital
34. Get Profitable vs Seeking More Rounds
35. IPOs are decreasing, have a better plan.
36. Business models: SaaS vs Product vs Services ?
37. Avoid Overhead
38. Understand Timing
39. Personal Things
40. Running a Startup is more possible - But Infinitely More Work - Than It Looks. Be Sure You Want It
41. Quote on starting my company from someone who started their own very successful company: “Congratulations! It’s horrible!”
42. Don’t Say “We Are Killing It” All The Time
43. We Are All Faking Knowing What We Are Doing.
44. Even if it’s not, it always feels like the wheels are coming off - to all of us. Find someone you can talk to and be sure to take some time off occasionally.
45. Remember to Enjoy the Ride.
46. ? info / questions @laserllama / michael.dehaan@gmail.com