Just when I was wondering whether the world of atoms had eclipsed the world of bits when it comes to lean startups, I run into a great example of customer development ideas at West Michigan Startup Weekend.
Adam DeLong pitched his idea (Boom or Bust) Friday night for a site that would let you vote up or down based on things like sport teams, trends, products, and personalities. He made the cut to be one of ten ideas that would be worked on over the weekend. As it happens Adam was good at attracting a team of people and Matt Fletcher and Mike Marsiglia decided to work on his project.
By noon of Saturday they had pivoted twice, taking Adam’s original idea into an interesting twist on interactive ads for websites. Mike and Matt were working on a smoke-and-mirrors hack using Greasemonkey that would show the team’s idea running in an existing website. It certainly wasn’t production code, in fact it was barely a prototype, but it sure told the story and let you play with it enough to “get” the idea. It could probably be used for either a funding pitch or maybe even for some user research or actual customer development.
As of this writing the team’s still at work. I can’t wait to see where they end up for the demo tomorrow.
2 Trackbacks
[...] Object's Blog On Software Design & Development « Pivoting and hacking at West Michigan Startup Weekend Booming and busting at Startup Weekend » Time to demo at Startup Weekend: and the winner [...]
[...] start, finish and retrospect was also documented by bloggers at Atomic Object. We thank them for their [...]