RESULTS! The only metric that matters in early leanstartup experiments!

We've run a series of tests over the last year to see if...

1. teams will do customer interviews (they will)
2. teams will learn from customer interviews just by doing them (jury is out)
3. teams will submit testable hypotheses (they will)
4. teams will test testable hypotheses (half of them will) 
5. mentors will appreciate that we are testing the efficacy of teams applying this level of rigor in an "accelerator format" (they will)
6. teams will tell other teams about their experience (they will)
7. teams will SHARE THEIR LEARNINGS... (well done Mission Disrupt)

#7 on this list is one of the riskiest assumptions of our model (that and monetization - which we shall save for another post). 

As of September 2016, regardless how you enter the funnel... the only ACTIVE ROLE that the founders of the MILVALCHAL will take is reading the results of your first experiment and funding the second one. The COMMUNITY is in charge of everything else, even making funding decisions. 

Jonathan Bertfield and I have adapted a few of our most recent talks to one simple message... you have not even STARTED #leanstartup until you have completed one full loop of the BML. One full loop really means experiment #2 starts with the learnings of experiment #1 - but the learnings are the hardest part of that whole loop. 

I am proud to say that after 18 months of testing (this was probably way too slow) we have several teams reporting learnings this week IN PUBLIC. Here's the new format we are asking them for. The metric is that I will have 20 of these posts on Medium by August 25th.

POST THE FOLLOWING TO MEDIUM and share the link in the FB group! If your first experiment was just interviews only - do your best with this format we will update shortly. MAKE SURE YOU ALSO PUBLISH IT TO THIS "PUBLICATION" ON MEDIUM. 

1. PARAGRAPH 1 My name is {insert name here and feel free to link to your current landing page or personal brand}. The individuals who helped me run this experiment are {link to the mentors who helped you - link directly to their mentor card on trello OR their landing page for their experiment} The link to my specific hypothesis on trello is. 
2. PARAGRAPH 1.5 (Copy and paste the following = I am part of an experimental incubator that gives startups and entrepreneurs funding in exchange for testing and sharing leanstartup hypotheses). 
3. PARAGRAPH 2 This section will provide a quantifiable comparison of your prediction vs the results. This sections is mainly for mentors to get a snapshot.
4.  I THOUGHT that 5% of 1000 of this specific segment would do this - [this comes DIRECTLY FROM YOUR HYPOTHESIS word for word] 
5. ACTUALLY 3% of 500 people did this. In total, I have had conversations with THIS NUMBER OF PEOPLE who match the segment targeted in this experiment. [NO COMMENTARY HERE - this should be black and white which is why we ask for such specific predictions in the first place...]
6. PARAGRAPH 3 COMMENTARY - take the MOST SURPRISING or MOST WRONG metric - and explain why you BELIEVE this happened... this can be positive or negative. Maybe 90% of 1000 people did something, THAT'S GOOD... but really it's bad because of how far off you were. Before you try and scale, you need to know WHY. Maybe only 1% converted, maybe you only got 50 views... pick apart ONE SINGLE VARIABLE THAT WAS MOST WRONG. 
7. PARAGRAPH 4  BONUS COMMENTARY explain the rest of the variables... 
8. If your last experiment had negative results... restate your problem and customer statements here. 
9. PARAGRAPH 5 NEXT STEP... post it in the blog itself, and provide a LINK to the next experiment in trello.