Stephen McCurryWantrepreneur + Producteer

Stop looking for a technical cofounder and just do it

Engineer Project Manager B. School Product

Manager Wantrepreneur

Stephen McCurry- Career Synopsis

EXECUTION is everything!

Ideas are cheap

1. The plan

Timeline

Killer Idea Meet cofounder Funding Build

ProductBuild

Business

Roadblock

• Building a startup is a non linear process

• Focus on short term milestones

• Constantly reevaluate priorities and roadblocks

The plan

Focus• Be selective over what meetings, conferences

and calls you take

• Constantly reevaluate priorities with respect to the next milestone

• Say no

2. Where to start

Where to start

• Product market fit• Validation• Understanding customer needs

Product market fit

• Being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.

• Requires iteration and likely to result in divergence from original plan – plan C, D etc.

• What assumptions are you making?

• What evidence do you have to support your assumptions?

Validation

Understanding customer needs

• Communicate

• Listen

• Empathize

Talking

No Business plan survives first contact with customersSteve Blank

Prototype

Iteration

Tools

Validation board

Tools for early stage validation

• Validation baordValidation

• Proto.ioPrototyping

• Launch Rock• Rocket StartLanding pages

• 99 designsCompany logos

• Google adwords• Facebook adsAd trials

3. Building

Introspection

Build options

• Outsource• Timeshare• DIY

Break it Down

Making Technology Decisions

1. Analyze options based on requirements2. Justify decision3. Experiment and adjust if necessary

Outsourcing / Nearshoring / Offshoring Development

e.g. Elance, Odesk

Tips:• Clearly define the requirements both functional and non functional

system requirement• Provide visual designs designs or mocks• Run a small project first as a trial• Have regular checkins and milestones, e.g. daily, weekly• You usually get what you pay for• Try to find a personal recommendation versus blind referral• At first it will sound great but chances of success are relatively low• Collboration tools – Bitbucket, Asana, Pivotal Tracker

Outsourcing

Project doesn’t end when final product is delivered.

Timeshare

• Get blocks of hours from developers you know

• Use people you know as technical advisors

Getting good at sales

• Define your business in 1 sentence

• Define the key features, benefits and needs you are solving in a 60 second pitch

• Practice your pitch

Product Definition• Use cases

• Acceptance criteria

• Wireframes

• Visual Design

Use cases

Example:

A Doctor logs onto the system to check their schedule for today

Acceptance criteria

• Doctor enters their user name and password then clicks login.

• The system loads the home screen for the logged in user.

• The users name and profile photo appear in the top right of the screen.

Wireframes

Visual Designs

Tools for defining the product

• Jira• Pivotal trackerRequirements

• Balsamiq• Proto.ioWireframing

• Photoshop (Creative Cloud)Visual design

DIY - Learning to code

After Just Four Weeks, The Homeless Man Learning To Code Has Almost Finished His First App

My day and most nights

Learning Resources

• GithubOpen source

• Udemy• Code AcademyOnline Learning

• General AssemblyOffline courses

• RailscastsBlogs

• Stackoverflow• Air PairCommunity

Standing on the shoulders of giants

• Nitrous.ioDevelopment environment

• ParseMobile Backend

• Urban airship• TwilioMobile messaging

• Socialize• KinveySocial platforms

• FirebaseCloud based backend

• ShopifyeCommerce

Building a landing page

www.workabout.me

Anatomy of a landing pageOption1 Option2

Hosting Heroku Linode – LAMP on Ubuntu

Technology HTML / Ruby on Rails

HTML / PHP

Domain GoDaddy GoDaddy

DNS DNSimple GoDaddy

Lead capture Database Mailchimp

Source code Github na

Splash image Shutterstock Shutterstock

Creativity takes courage (Henri Matisse)

Good luck!

smccurry.mba2008@london.eduhttp://www.linkedin.com/in/smccurry/

@StephenMcCurry