5 tips to the week before Startup Pirates
Blogpost by: Inês Santos Silva - Co-Founder of Startup Pirates
You were selected to be part of a Startup Pirates program and now you want to get ready for the program. There are a few things you should do, to make sure you can make the most of the 8 days of the program. Here are a few tips:
1. Watch Alex Barrera’s talk on “The startup story. From shit to great.”
Alex is founder and chief executive of Press42.com, an Agile/Lean trainer & evangelist, co-founder and curator of Tetuan Valley, an international startup incubator based in Madrid and more recently a co-founder & editor at Tech_EU. In this presentation, Alex talks about what is really like to build a startup, the ups and downs and the mistakes you need to avoid.
2. Read Paul Graham’s essay on “ Why to Not Not Start a Startup”.
Paul Graham is a programmer, writer, and investor. In 1995, he and Robert Morris started Viaweb, the first software as a service company. Viaweb was acquired by Yahoo in 1998, where it became Yahoo Store. In 2005 he and Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, and Trevor Blackwell started Y Combinator, the first of a new type of startup incubator. Since 2005 Y Combinator has funded over 450 startups, including Dropbox, Airbnb, Stripe, and Reddit. Paul Graham’s essays are the best piece of advice you can find on the internet. Make sure you don’t get addicted to them.
3. Take a look at Steve Blank’s course on Udacity on “How to Build a Startup”.
Learn the key tools and steps to build a successful startup (or at least reduce the risk of failure). An introduction to the basics of Steve Blank's famous Customer Development process, where entrepreneurs "get out of the building" to gather massive amounts of customer and marketplace feedback, and then use that feedback to continuously iterate and evolve their startup business models, improving the chances of success at every step.
4. Watch Rob Fitzpatrick talk on Getting Customer Development right.
Rob is a tech entrepreneur based in London. He has successfully bankrupted 3 companies, is a YCombinator alum (summer 07), has built products used globally by brands like MTV & Sony and has raised funding in the US & UK. Without any doubts, he is one of the biggest experts outthere on Customer Development and Customer Interviews.
5. Finally, read Ramli John article on “My Buffer MVP – Idea to Paying Customer In 1 Day Without A Landing Page”
Ramli is a software developer turned lean startup advocate, startup generalist, speaker and startup mentor. This is a great article to understand how to build and validate an MVP without writing a single line of code and spend any money.
After all this, you will be ready to kick ass at Startup Pirates. Good luck!
Blogpost by: Inês Santos Silva - Co-Founder of Startup Pirates
