Last month I mentored the second Lean Startup event is Israel. After 3 intense days of working with 10-12 groups, I saw patterns of what caused their experiments to fail. These are 6 recurring mistakes I saw in those 3 days and how to fix them. To learn more about growth hacks and lean startup visit: http://roy.roypovarchik.com

2. Last month, I mentored the second Lean Startup Machine
event in Israel (and even wrote a post about it).

3. Lean Startup Machine (LSM) is a three-day workshop on building a
successful business.
Participants come into the workshops with ideas for products and
in 3 days they validate or pivot from their original ideas, based on
the tests and experiments they run.
You can read more about it here
If you’re not familiar with the Lean Startup Machine…

4. Mentoring 10-12 teams trying to validate their ideas for 3 intense days
can give you some powerful insights into the process they go through
and the mistakes they make.

5. Probably mistakes we all make when validating our ideas.
In a startup or in real life.

7. Assumptions are stories we tell ourselves.
We believe certain people will act in a certain way in a certain
situation.
The problem is that we sometimes persuade ourselves into believing
in our assumption so much, that even when it doesn’t validate we
make excuses instead of learning from it.
1. Falling in love with your assumptions:

8. 2. Interview with intention, not an opinion
Interviews are an important part of validating your ideas. If done
right.
Make sure you are asking the right question to learn what you want
to learn and not asking questions to hear what you want to hear.
Ask questions about their needs and past experiences regarding
that need, not your product and how much they will love it.

9. 3. Don’t judge, iterate
Being wrong more than once a day isn’t fun. Failure , despite
its significance, it isn’t fun. Progressing and evolving feels
great.
Always remind yourself that validating ideas is a process and
your are not failing but evolving. Embrace a positive approach
about your learning process. Don’t judge your ideas, test them
and iterate them.

10. 4. Don’t settle. Interview your real target a audience
A great product serves a specific target audience. Anyone else you
talk to about it for feedback is far from validating your idea, it just
creates more noise that will lead to bad decisions .
If you interview the wrong people about your idea, you won’t be
validating anything and will simply be miss-informed.

11. 5. Always be honest with your team
If you don’t think the assumption or idea your team is testing is
good, if you don’t believe in the method you’re testing, say it.
Don’t be grumpy or passive aggressive throughout the
process it won’t get you anywhere.
If you’re not really into the idea you might be trying as hard to
“de-validate” an idea as much as your team mates are trying
to validate it. Even if you sometimes don’t even know that’s
what you’re doing.

12. Henry Ford once said: “If I had asked people what they
wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
The one thing you can take from Ford’s quote in terms of
validation, is that in both cases people wanted to get
places faster.
He validated the “why”, not the “how”.
You should too.
6. At first, validate an assumption, not a product

13. To summarize:

14. Don’t fall in-love with your assumptions
Interview to test ideas not opinions
Iterate on your ideas
Interview only your real target audience
Validate an assumption, not a product

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