Fail fast, fail early: five lean startup principles for social good
Dedicated to the late Nelson Mandela, whose legacy of tenacity for positive social change shall endure long after his untimely death, and changemakers worldwide keeping his spirit alive.
More often than not, transformational change is not the result of any directed, high-budget campaign, but rather consistently striving to make every next day better no matter how much or how little can be accomplished. This spirit of ´continuous improvement´ is one of many characteristics of the ´lean impact´ movement to encourage lean startup principles for social good. At the inaugural Lean for Social Good Summit in New York, 18 social enterprises and non-profits showcased how they use lean startup principles towards their respective causes. Consider how you, whether an entrepreneur or non-profiteer starting new companies or an intrapreneur or civic innovator creating change from within established private and public entities, can act on the following key takeaways from presenters.
Listen to your stakeholders, always. No matter how wealthy or poor they are, it never hurts to listen more, as demonstrated by Grameen Foundation in their financial inclusion programmes. Ajaita Shah, founder of Frontier Markets, learned that the barrier to adoption of solar power by rural villagers in India (many of whom grapple with indoor air pollution from kerosene, along with concomitant fuel expenses) stems less from product specifications and more from the lack of after-sales technical support. Therefore, her team opted to develop a platform enabling delivery of after-sales services. If you cannot ´get out of the building´, bring your customers in, as Angélique Mannella did in developing games for Decode Global, leveraging the power of gaming for social change. Do not overlook other stakeholders in your ecosystem either; while developing the personal safety app Safe Night with his team at Caravan Studios, Marnie Webb learned how service providers are critical to ensuring the apps they build actually get in the hands of customers.
Take a human-centred approach to problem-solving. When serving the disadvantaged, meeting basic needs and fulfilling livelihoods should be at front and centre of your strategy -- even better if you can serve multiple needs with minimal additional overhead costs. Through chocolate created from beans directly sourced from cacao farmers at premium prices, Sarah Endline and her team at Sweetriot coupled together the farmers´ need to maintain livelihoods and consumers´ desire for minimally-processed food that they enjoy eating. In the cleantech space, Eden Full and her team at Sun Saluter developed a low-cost means of addressing two basic needs at once: water for drinking, cooking, and washing and electricity for lighting.
Maintain a mission-first approach to scaling. While "all money is green" (in words of as venture capitalist Ray Rothrock), the source matters more than how much you receive. While ramping up Pencils of Promise, Megan O´Connor Mershon proudly proclaimed for herself the ´Captain No´ title for rejecting sources of funding that did not align with her team´s mission. To maintain focus on your mission, rather than aiming for the biggest budget possible, think about what you can accomplish on smaller budgets. For example, if you are just starting out with an idea, consider what you could do to turn that idea into action with 1000 USD from Awesome Foundation (a lean model for philanthropy).
Focus on how your products enables services. You may be creating products, but your customers really want services enabled via ´product-as-a-platform´. Awareness that your products are really the ´packaging´ for services enable a wider range of what can be done with limited resources. For example, in regions where financial constraints preclude construction of physical libraries but low-cost mobile devices are readily available, delivering books as apps becomes a viable solution, hence why Library for All set up a pilot e-books project in their effort to promote literacy in Haiti.
Use data actionably. Through experimenting with variations on a product concept, data-driven decision-making enabled Do Something and Power Poetry to reach and build deep relationships with a diverse audience of youth around the world. For The Daily Muse, the same data-driven ethos applied to the inner workings of the product enables any user to find careers fitting with one´s life purpose. Take time to test your assumptions and establish a viable business model before you scale; Wello Water spent nine months testing different minimum viable products before discovering one that worked most effectively to provide access to clean water. That said, be not afraid to test ideas that might end up failing, much like how Susmita De, who co-founded Nonprofit-share promoting sharing knowledge, skills, and best practices among non-profits, learned to get over the perfectionism barrier in launching early product releases for user testing.
Above all, be nimble; treat change as opportunity. Especially if you are a first-mover and need to develop a new market or product category, roll with the flow instead of fighting it. Because equity-based crowdfunding was illegal in the US (until recently), Sang Lee and his team at Return on Change, a platform matching high-potential social entrepreneurs with impact investors, did nearly nothing for a full year and then iterated five times before their public launch. Use the fact that you are beyond ´business-as-usual´ to motivate receptiveness and adaptability to change, as Paula Brantner exemplified while scaling her non-profit Workplace Fairness to empower workers with awareness of their labour rights. Come the moment your ´product´ turns into a ´movement´, as the anti-street harassment #HOLLAMovement champion Emily May can attest, embrace your ´virality´ and seize the day.
These themes are by no means any exhaustive checklist, but rather a handful of a plethora of ways you can turn lean startup principles into practice. Here is a plain-language refresher if you need one.
For an impression of lean impact principles in practice (short of taking concrete action yourself of course), take a look at what entrepreneurs, technologists, and designers in New York accomplished in one day to help bring technology education to women in underserved rural communities in the US (and eventually worldwide): Bella Minds + The Design Gym. Also follow the Lean Impact community on Twitter and tune in to the #LeanImpact Chat series (most Wednesdays at 1400 in New York/1100 in San Francisco).
Image courtesy of Tatiana Figueiredo, who is turning lean impact principles into practice through bridging design, technology, and social innovation among New York´s entrepreneurs.
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