Leanstartup Hypotheses in Detroit!

Minimum Viable Blog posts! If you are seeing this - it probably means you were involved first hand in the workshop last week (September 2016) in Detroit. I use blogger as a place to collect my thoughts and share instructions in a public place... to hold myself (and you) accountable - I will publish the real blog later this week on MEDIUM with all the bells and whistles... and our friends at LSco will tweet it out to hundreds of thousands:)

Ok so I have collected over 100 hypotheses before. And I have managed to achieve the unthinkable and had teams creating hypotheses in under ten minutes. I have had multiple teams post live to the cloud in real time and displayed it in the room for those to follow along... and I have had people who were not quite comfortable sharing a hypothesis, share a hypothesis. What I had NEVER DONE BEFORE was combine all of these things at once.

My goal last week was 100 hypotheses created in real time and at least 20 shared publicly in real time. My new hypothesis is that 20 will post to this trello board by the end of this week starting with our featured hypothesis...

Cynthia Barnes [Sales Therapy] did an incredible job at the leanstartup summit in Detroit, articulating her hypothesis about helping women in sales.

"I, Cynthia Barnes from SalesTherapy, I believe female sales professionals who sell services in male-dominated industries will attend a webinar within 2 weeks!"

TL;dr A BIT MORE ABOUT WHAT WE DID IN DETROIT, WHY WE DID IT, WHAT WE LEARNED, WHAT IS NEXT...

WHY WE DID IT THIS WAY 

1. I teach people to get out of their comfort zones. I have to do the same. The reason for this is not a gimmick, it is simply where you expose yourself to the most learning. 
2. Trying to do it live on trello was the unknown part - I have done this privately with more time, and publicly with less people. I have also done it on TWITTER publicly with almost as many people and with almost the same amount of time. The reason we tried trello was two fold. It is a new tool that people thinking about lean and agile processes should be aware of. It is something we will be using next month at the main conference to build community and to continue to teach the importance of hypothesis driven development. The reason we do it live is because if you do not write it down and SHARE it, it basically does not exist. 
3. It is a great process to show the difference between what people say and what they do. I will get the tape soon, but I think at least 80 people raised their hands and promised to add a hypothesis to tbe board. Those great people are not liars, but after the workshop ends... life takes over. The people in the audience remain AMAZING :) It is a good lesson to see false positives first hand and to learn how not to over-invest in false positives. It is a good lesson as well to learn that competition is usually not the other startup or Facebook or google... it is usually human apathy or their ability to solve the problem you want to solve in some other way - or be comfortable not solving it at all. 
4. The  flip side of #3 is that as much as I knew that most people would fade off - THE TOPIC WAS RELEVANT and some people really would follow through... I knew I would have a chip on my shoulder since I committed to the whole room what I was trying to do. So the people who are still engaged with the board as of today are not just there because I tracked them down on twitter or linkedin, and they are not just doing it because they feel bad that I did't hit my numbers... they are posting because they find personal value in the act of posting the hypothesis itself, or with one of the benefits that come with posting it (exposure to the community, more mentorship, discounts to the next event, or again... the learning itself) 

LEARNINGS (what we will do differently next time) 

1. One featured hypothesis ready to test... we will highlight the actual experiment we run from this one -- CYNTHIA hypothesis 
2. ONE CORRECTED HYPOTHESIS IN TERMS OF INITIAL SAMPLE SIZE -- ZAC hypothesis (breaking it down from too big to just right) 
3. ONE CORRECTED HYPOTHESIS IN TERMS OF NO METRICS Aaron and Tinashe 

CALL TO ACTION RIGHT NOW 

1. Post your hypothesis directly to the board by clicking ADD A CARD to the second column https://trello.com/b/rLMuxqah/lsco-wip-draft-beta-mvp - if you need access to the board, tweet at me @adamberk
2. Include your name and do your best to follow the format from this talk... 
3.  If you end up in the third column - use this to help with formatting https://goo.gl/forms/sXkbaZG0h3Uo2qaP2
4. Once we have 5 hypothesis on the board and in the 4th column - we will post to MEDIUM... that way not only will we share our story with more folks but you in the 4th column will serve as mentors to your community (that is already starting to happen Cynthia:)

WHAT'S NEXT 

1. More hypothesis from the general public leading up to the flagship leanstartup conference 
2. Those who get to column 4 will get help running their experiment, they may be highlighted on LS blog, and they may get a free ticket to the conference including airfare (up to $500 - that part sponsored by adam - free ticket by the hosts)